09/29/08 – Jeff Huber – The Scott Horton Show

Alright my friends, welcome back to Chaos Radio 92.7, well you've been listening to that.
Welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 92.7, we're streaming live as well at chaosradioaustin.org and antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest today is Jeff Huber, he's a former E-2C Hawkeye squadron commander, and blogs all over the place at Pen and Sword, over at Larissa Alexandrovna's blog at Largely.
He's got a new novel out called Bathtub Admirals, which sounds like it should be fun.
Welcome to the show Jeff.
Hey thanks for having me, now listen, I've been listening to you for about the last half hour and I took some notes, I want to make sure I get everything right now.
Yeah, but that's a pretty hardcore introduction to this show, if the last segment was what you heard first.
Okay, but Republicans are bad, so I think I got that, and Bill Kristol is bad, and I just want to say I'm on board with both of those things.
Yeah well, those are pretty much established facts I guess, what are you going to do?
Those are your opening positions.
And speaking of Bill Kristol and his genius, how are the land wars in Asia doing lately, for your best estimation there Jeff?
Land wars in Asia, well let's see, we've been asked to leave Iraq, and the bull feather merchants in the Pentagon and elsewhere try to keep saying, well Maliki, he doesn't really mean that, he was snorting coke the night before, or he's trying to impress some hookery man online or something, he just doesn't sound tough, but he keeps saying it over and over and he really wants us to leave, which is fascinating to me that that is sort of being left out of the Iraq debate.
But what you really have in Iraq right now is a situation where the David Petraeus standard operating procedure is walk in, hand out guns to everybody, and then bribe everybody not to use them, and then turn around and say, well you know, I really have to stay here to keep handing out the bribes so they're going to use them.
Well you know, I guess you could actually say that Sarah Palin is on to something when she says that we have achieved victory in Iraq, I mean, if you can use the measure we succeeded in installing a government that feels like it no longer needs us, then well I guess we got away with a regime change and leaving the Iraqi state behind, right?
We can go ahead and go.
Victory in Iraq was staying in Iraq.
Anybody, I have an article from way back when called the PNAC paper trail that unfortunately when the PNAC shut down their site, I think the rumor has it that they shut down their website by just they quit paying the rent on the space.
Yeah, probably.
They shut down the site and all those links went away, but essentially if you read their stuff that the whole idea of going to Iraq was a permanent occupation.
So then in that sense, the surge and the entire war up until this point is a complete failure by the standards of the war party who started it.
Well, it's a complete failure if in fact we're told to leave and we just can't spin ourselves in the way of saying, well, you know, they don't really want us to leave.
Look at the conditions on the ground.
I think it's interesting.
I watched this now, I posted it, Pen and Sword is the latest tales of victory in Iraq.
This is going to pick up and it's to the point now where you really don't know what's going on there.
The Iraqis want us to leave after what, five years of occupation.
Now, speaking of our Asian wars, now over there in Pakistan, they want to kick us out too, but we haven't occupied them yet and we have yet to see what's going to happen there.
They already want to kick us out.
We're just doing cross border raids now, just getting started.
Just getting started, which are, there are a number of things about that.
I will say, people have different opinions about this.
I will tell you, there's no getting around the fact that what we're doing in Afghanistan is legal because of the Congress approved it, I think, in the original AUMF that was passed a week to the day after 9-11.
The AUMF for Iraq, Congress said, despite what Hillary Clinton will tell you, she did in fact say, yeah, he can use military force to do whatever he wants with Iraq.
But this business of going into Pakistan, I don't see Congress approving that and you'll hear a lot of people in the MSM talk about, well, it's a question of whether or not Pakistan wants us in there.
It's like, excuse me, we did not put troops in battle because the foreign government says we can't.
That really didn't have a whole lot to do with it.
It's supposed to be whether or not Congress approves it.
And Congress is just sitting and watching, doing nothing.
By the way, we're also chewing up towns in Somalia with C-130 gunships and I don't know what's going on on the ground.
I'm sure we have some soft guys there, but there's no mandate whatsoever from Congress to be conducting combat operations in that country and yet we're doing it.
You know, in the context of Somalia and the few places that that's even come up, at least in my mind, the question of Congress and where the hell does George Bush get the authority to do something like this?
But you know, it's funny that in terms of Pakistan, that's not even really in question.
You may be the first person in North America to raise the question of where's the authority for the government to do any of this.
There isn't any.
There's some talk here and I'm summarizing an awful lot of things I've written about in the last few weeks.
You will hear people talk about, well, they crossed the border in hot pursuit.
First of all, hot pursuit is a bogus term.
Hot pursuit is what Jackie Gleason does when Burt Reynolds drives too fast, okay?
What they are doing is called pursuit of hostile forces and according to our standing rules of engagement, our forces can cross borders and do things like that to deal with enemy forces or hostile forces that are still showing hostile act, hostile intent, i.e. we're still in danger.
The kinds of things we're doing now have nothing to do with that.
These are set operations.
They're offensive operations to go after people.
Now, I will say that from an operational point of view, when I say operation, I mean actual fighting the war, you know, combat something more than just the combat, the tactical part of actually firing weapons.
But if you're talking about troops engaged and things like that, yes, operationally it's a little bit crazy to let them go and just hide across the border, okay?
But strategically and so forth, you're starting an illegal war by going over there.
All right, now let's pretend for a second, Jeff, that Congress went ahead and said, you know, hey, Bush, you're the emperor.
You can stay in office.
You can start whatever where you want, whatever like that.
In other words, continue to give him all the carte blanche that he's requested just like always Republican or Democrat, then, you know, what is the right policy to do there?
Because basically, at least the story goes, there are Arab-Afghan friends of Osama and perhaps even including him in Zawahiri are holed up in Waziristan.
The government of Pakistan doesn't really control it.
The carte blanche from the American people to our government to continue waging war in Afghanistan is never going to go away until these two guys are dead and, you know, someone can safely say that, yeah, the Arabs have been rooted out of Waziristan, seems like to me, or, you know, if we have a, you know, roof of the Saigon Embassy moment, that's something different.
But, you know, what's to be done here?
We got Iraq in three different hard places in all directions, it seems like there.
Well, first of all, here's what I'd like to see happen, and I don't think it will.
That September 18th AUMF, and again, that stands for Authorization for Use of Military Force, I'm going to backtrack a little and explain about what that is.
Rule one allows, only grants Congress the power to declare war.
That's been perverted and really, really went, it actually happened really back in the 18th century when presidents first started doing things.
We have, what was it, the Closet War with France and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Truman committing troops to Korea without a declaration of war was probably the first real walk on the wild side, I'd say, at least, certainly in the 20th century one.
Then came Vietnam, and Congress decided, well, we got to get control of this back because essentially in Richard Nixon, we had the anti-constitution president, the first one of the century.
And they passed the War Powers Act of 1973.
And I'm, this is a real, real summarization of that, but essentially, it gives the, it tells the president, well, yeah, you've got troops overseas, he can commit them to combat for a maximum of 90 days, that's 60 days and 30 days to get them out, without some kind of approval from the Congress.
Congress either has to give him, they have to give him a war declaration, which I don't think you're ever going to see again, or a specific statutory authorization, which for all practical purposes is a declaration of war.
Well, I'm glad that you bring that up, specifically the War Powers Act, because it seems like really the failure of the Bricker Amendment and all that to stop Truman and that sort of thing.
The precedent had been set, and then the War Powers Act, I believe, was sold and perhaps was even authored with the intent of being an instrument to limit the power of the president, that he already, the president had already taken so much authority along these lines that that War Powers Act, which codifies the president's unconstitutional authority to start wars, was actually viewed as some sort of restraint at the time.
Yes, it was.
And this is, there's the interesting thing, funny you should mention that.
I think that that law is unconstitutional.
Dick Cheney says it's unconstitutional, too.
Dick Cheney thinks it's unconstitutional because it restricts the president.
I think it's unconstitutional because it gives the president too much authority.
You're right.
He's a liar.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Well, that's, again, this is okay.
Let's go back to the opening position.
Republicans bad.
Bill Kristol bad.
Dick Cheney, liar.
So that's the big three.
Yeah, absolutely.
But the, I come back to saying, okay, what I'd like to see most of all, first of all, is to say, what do we do for triage?
What I'd like to see, and again, I'm talking about my opening position, is let's take that AUMF of September 18th, 2001, and let's get rid of that.
Okay.
There's just too much wiggle room in there for any time, any place that he decides that maybe kind of sort of had something to do with Al Qaeda.
And you may have noticed that, you know, anybody who he decides he wants to whack sort of becomes Al Qaeda or Qaeda or Al Qaeda somewhere.
You know, it's like the, you know, the, my crack about Al Qaeda and Mesopotamia has about as much to do with the real Al Qaeda as Eric Estrada has to do with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
It's, it's, it's just not the same thing, but it's, as long as we keep bringing that name up, at some point when somebody comes around and says, hey, what are we doing in Somalia?
Hey, what are we doing in Pakistan?
That's the backup.
Well, yeah, you said I could basically go to war whenever I wanted to.
If I come back and say, if that's the way you're looking at it, you basically had Congress through a simple act of legislation, delegate one of his constitutional powers to the president, and you can't do that.
That, that requires a constitutional amendment, but that's.
Well, and from the very beginning, they've conflated Al Qaeda with every other group.
In Somalia, it's Al Shabaab, and then in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Al Qaeda is supposed to be synonymous with the Taliban.
And then, I guess, by the transitive property of war propaganda, the Taliban means any posh toon who dares resist us.
And it seems like that's the real war that's being fought now.
Well, I'm waiting for my website to be declared Al Qaeda in Virginia, so.
Yeah, well, it probably won't be too long.
Keep it up the way you're writing now.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, I just actually, along those lines, and let's go ahead and get into the terrible domestic police state legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration, I just read something the other day where Jane Mayer, the author of the new book, The Dark Side, was saying, if there's another major terrorist attack in this country, go ahead and forget about it.
Basically, it's already in stone at this point that the republic will be thrown out the window, that Patriot Act II will be 10,000 pages long, that pen and sword will be a crime.
It seems like.
Yeah, well, we'll see what happens when that happens.
I'm actually writing, my next novel is about that eventuality, so I don't know, I'll probably have it done sometime in the next year.
I'm kind of waiting to see who wins the election.
I think at some point, somewhere along the line, you mentioned something about Bush legacy.
We've basically got, you know, the war that we can't leave in Iraq, which essentially we've lost.
We've got the war in the Bananastans, which is, if you're going to stick around in Afghanistan, you're going to have to get involved in Pakistan.
You get involved in Pakistan, you're never going to get out of there, either.
Okay, that's the traditional graveyard of Western powers, that part of the world.
Always has been.
And, you know, don't the Chinese know that?
They're sitting there watching us, saying, oh, goody, goody.
I think you were talking about how much money we're spending on quote-unquote defense.
The official figure is, what, about $620 billion the last time I looked?
Yeah, that was just last week.
Wait, I have it here from my Ron Paul interview.
It was $612 billion last week.
And I believe most of that was for the war, although I'm not sure the percentage is accurate.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Not $612 billion wasn't for the war.
No, that sounds more like the, oh, shoot, these sort of things change.
I think the $612 billion is just the nut for keeping the force going.
Oh, yeah, the, I forget the name for it, too, the stop-gap measure.
We were already, before the war, we were already upwards of half a trillion a year just to keep the force together.
Yeah, well, you know, they said it was going to be, what, 10 percent of that was going to be the cost of the war in total, right, at the beginning?
Yeah, but I don't think, I don't think it really matters to these guys.
It's like Dick Cheney saying that Reagan proved that death and spending doesn't matter.
Who knows what Cheney meant at the time?
Cheney himself probably didn't know.
But I would say, I can't, this is one quote I couldn't find before it came on the air.
If we're admitting to a, you know, hard nut bottom line of $612, you throw the wars on top of that, and then you put in all of the stuff that is sort of defense cost that doesn't show up in the DOD budget, all the other departments, and I don't mean just Homeland Security, it was State Department, all the rest of it, and then, you know, mercenary slush fund, I would guess we're actually probably spending twice that.
Yeah, you know, Robert Higgs puts the number at a trillion dollars a year.
Yeah, I've read, I think closer to 1.2, but I mean, it's in that magnitude.
Now, where we're at is, where we're at is, and this is part of the legacy, we've just been heading this way a long time.
We start off the post-Soviet, we start off the new American century, we have the only full-time up-and-ready professional military that can operate anywhere in the world.
We're essentially, we have Muhammad Ali at the height of his powers, and there's nobody for him to fight.
So we're going into these third-world countries and socking them around and doing the essence of sending Muhammad Ali out just to shake down school kids for their milk money, okay?
And for that, we're paying him about a trillion dollars a year, and if we win, we get the kids' milk money.
And if we don't get the kids' milk money...
And eventually those kids, those kids grow up, and they're going to jump us in a dark alley one day.
Well, yeah, but I mean, the kids can beat us pretty easy, because, you know, now we're into asymmetrical warfare.
It's like, well, Muhammad Ali can only beat the kids up so many times.
And the kids say, well, you know, I don't want them to have my milk money, I'm just going to take them to school.
Or they just quit going to school.
You know, I mean, there's always a way to defeat that.
When you are that big and that powerful, what you do, it doesn't accomplish your political objectives anymore, unless your political objective, and this is something that Gareth Porter talks about quite a bit, and I've more and more come to believe it, what you're trying to establish is America as the militaristic oligarchy that the, you know, greater neocon family is at the top of that.
You know, you've got theocratic undertones and so on and so forth, so you've got the confluence of, you know, big money, big information, big war, big Jesus, all under the hat of Big Brother, but we have to be at war with somebody to keep that going.
So if your idea is to keep a constant state of conflict that's more or less manageable going to maintain the kind of power structure you want, then in that light I would say that the powers that be have done the exact right thing.
And oh, by the way, those guys are, they're on John McCain's team.
Oh, yeah, the neoconservatives.
Yeah.
And, you know, I'm usually one who likes to maintain that there is not a bit of difference between these groups, but when you look, in my eyes, as much as, and I can frankly say, and sorry to editorialize all over your interview, I guess I do this more and more these days, I can't stand Barack Obama.
I think he's wrong about every single thing that he thinks, as far as I can tell, and yet I think that John McCain is the kind of guy who will just wake up angry in the morning and start a war just because of what a jerk he is on a particular level.
And also, as you point out, he will bring the neoconservatives with him.
We'll have, you know, another Doug Feith as the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy over there to start this thing off.
It'll be like Bush's first term again.
Oh, sure.
And if you think that there are any checks on the Ministry of Truth that resides within the Department of Defense now, they'll be gone.
And let me mention something, because I've been waiting, the last couple of weeks I've been thinking about just writing this, I may as well say this here.
Here's the deal with John McCain.
He shows symptoms of a syndrome that I have concluded, I've seen this in a lot of angry Vietnam vets, and what he wants to do is he's still trying to win the Vietnam War.
And a lot of people feel the way he does who are going to follow him.
Yeah, see, and you know, I've actually heard people say out loud that about Iraq, about Gulf War I and about Gulf War II, this is payback for Vietnam.
These poor people in Iraq, you know, like Tom Friedman said, you know, al-Qaeda, a bunch of guys from Egypt and Saudi Arabia attack us, well, we need to kick in doors from Baghdad to Basra and say, suck it, and show these guys how tough we are.
It doesn't matter who gets killed over there.
They're all just cartoon characters over on the other side of the ocean, I guess.
Yeah, that's what I call, that's all below-the-waist thinking.
It's frightening and disgusting and sad at the same time.
It's also pursuing a type of power, let's go back to the Muhammad Ali thing, there's nobody for him to beat up, nobody's going to fight him.
So you continue to rely on a form of power that basically got you where you were.
I mean, the 20th century is pretty much about the U.S. throwing in on the big wars in Europe.
And World War II basically said, okay, well, we won that, and we came out of that, we pulled ourselves out of a depression that, you know, people argue back and forth, say if it weren't for World War II, we might never have come out of it, I don't know.
But we came out of that as the leader of the free world, and we came out of the Cold War as the first truly global hegemon in the history of humanity.
It's kind of sad to me to see what we've done with it.
I'll go back, before I forget something, something you said about Obama.
One of the speeches he gave, and Canary Chris on MSNBC, oh gosh, I've just never seen anything, I've never seen a crowd respond like that, I've never seen anything like that, and he said, Chris, yes you have, they're an old black and white newsreel from the 30s.
And you know, that's the kind of thing where I go, okay, I just hope that the guy has enough possession of himself that he doesn't buy his own bunk.
If he is, you know, I go back to, you know, Lord Acton did not tell us that power tends to corrupt Republicans, power tends to corrupt everyone.
So I don't know.
I think actually that may be the most dangerous thing about him, is that he will inspire people to love the state again as they personalize it again, you know?
You know, one of my favorite films, I'm not that crazy about Joe Klein, one of my favorite parts of a political film, Primary Colors, whatever else you thought about that, that scene where Larry Hagman goes to the convention and tells everybody, just calm down.
We don't need any more of this.
We don't need any more parades, we don't need any more shouting.
We just need to calm down, and we need to think about what we're doing.
I just wish that people would replay that like every day on every TV station, every radio station, would just play that once an hour.
Well, and I think that most of us grow up in this country just believing, I think most people go to work in the morning believing that those are the kinds of discussions that take place in the halls of power, and yet I'm beginning to realize that, and in fact I think this is in Jane Mayer's book as well, that they just never even had these discussions in the White House.
They never sat down and said, okay, now look, if we really want to have a war against Al Qaeda terrorism and protect the American people from this threat, what is really the smartest policy in order to get that done?
Now apparently Wolfowitz was able to chime in and won the argument and said, it's our bases in Saudi Arabia that anger them more than anything else, we need to move our troops out of Saudi Arabia up north into Iraq, that'll be a big improvement.
But other than that, apparently they never even really sat down and said, well what do you think might be the best way to go about this at all?
It wasn't even a topic.
Well, who's the smartest guy in the room, Bush?
Him or Cheney, I guess.
Yeah, I don't know.
Bush supposedly has an IQ of 120.
I'm willing to believe that whoever took the test for him has an IQ of 120.
Well there was Paul O'Neill, but they got rid of him quick.
Yeah, yeah, they did.
I was, in the course of my government career, I've been in on enough meetings to sort of sit in the corner and go, these guys are mad as hatters.
They're just mad as hatters.
It's funny how stuff that I remember reading as a kid, thinking, well that's really blown out of proportion, that's crazy, that's kind of a hint for what is to look out for.
Since being a novelist who aspired to write the Catch-22 of his generation, which frankly I think I did, I read Catch-22 now and just go, you know, and now that I know a lot more about writing, I know how Heller wrote.
He wasn't exaggerating a whole lot, very thinly disguised.
The amount of exaggerating he was doing was not much.
Wow, you know, that's funny because I think I remember reading him saying somewhere, oh no, it wasn't really that bad at all, it's just a silly book or whatever.
But I think I remember when I read Catch-22 thinking that, yeah, this is the way it works all right.
And you know, a lot of that book, because I've always really been a libertarian too, and a lot of that book about the way the officers operate and so forth, the characters and that, it's all about the incentive structure that they operate on, which always means kicking down to whoever's below them, no matter what.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, it's really, when you think of Catch-22, it's really easy to get the movie and the book confused.
But I think it was in both of them where Colonel Cathcart is pleading with Yossarian to play ball and he's saying, don't you want to win more unit citations?
And it's like, this is life and death, Yossarian's sitting there looking at, he's already beaten the odds and it's like, he's probably going to die on his next mission.
And here's this colonel who wants to get another unit citation so the colonel can make general.
And he's using that to appeal to Yossarian, it's like, are you nuts?
This is what you're using to motivate this guy?
And yet, that motivation actually, apparently, worked on other people.
Incredible, yeah.
And so wait, so it's Bathtub Admirals, that's the Catch-22 of this generation, is that what you're saying?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, huh?
Oh, yeah.
If you haven't read it, you're a catch-up.
Oh, well, I guess I'll have to, man, no time for fiction, it better be great.
Oh, trust me.
If you like my stuff, if you like my essay stuff, you'll like Bathtub Admirals.
I do like the essay stuff.
The thing I'll say about Bathtub Admirals, one problem with Heller's book is, in today's terms it's pretty hard to read, Bathtub Admirals is, people generally tell me they read it in a day.
Oh, that's good.
It's an easy reading, it's real funny, and the sad parts are real sad, but they're over with real quick.
Right on.
Yeah, well, maybe I will get a hold of that, and then I can interview you about that, too.
You know, it's not a comedy show.
Hey, let me see if I can get you to address this.
I think this is the most important part of Bush's legacy, is that, well, that lack of intelligent discussion about what to do here resulted, I think, in perhaps what was meant to be, or perhaps it's unintentional, whatever you'd like to say your view is, is fine, what they call a clash of civilizations, and the idea has been embedded deeply, I think, into the minds of millions of Americans, and must certainly be millions of Muslims around the world, that this is a conflict between white Christians and brown Muslims, and that it's a fight to the finish, and that, you know, September 11th, rather than being some kind of Hail Mary pass in an attempt to lure us into the Middle East, was in fact the cutting edge of this vanguard, Islamofascist, caliphate, Soviet thing that's going to take over the whole world if we don't stop them.
And on the other side, that the Americans are hell-bent on conquering all Muslim lands and so forth.
Is this already too late to fix, do you think?
No, I just refuse to believe that anything's too late to fix, partly because I think in the course of history, craziness, hatred, and those things like that have a certain amount of inertia.
You really have to keep fanning those flames to keep them alive.
And after a certain amount of time, even the most ardent followers just lose energy.
The danger is always, well, just how much damage can they do?
And let's talk about Republicans, and let's specifically talk about, you know, what I now think of as the Rowellians.
It's always a matter of, let's see how far we can push it to the extreme.
And then everybody else has to work back.
So, it's like the next time they work it back, they won't work it back as far to, I don't even use the term sinner anymore, I use the term sane.
The thing that I wish people would remember, there are a couple of memes, mantras, whatever you want to call them out there, that typically scare people.
We're going to be fighting them on the streets of Miami, you know, we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here.
They can't get here from there.
The oceans still do protect us.
Nobody can invade and occupy this country and force us to throw away our Bibles and make us all get abortions and marry gay people or, you know, bow to the East or, you know, do whatever it is that we're afraid people can do to us.
Can't happen.
Nobody, even if somebody could, even if somebody wanted to do that, even if somebody could get that organized, nobody has a Navy or an Air Force big enough to get all those people across the ocean and they just can't weave that many flying carpets.
It just can't happen.
The dribs and drabs kinds of things that happen at 9-11, let's see, I'm trying to think, what is the Homeland Security budget?
It's not the trillion dollars we think it is for defense, but it's, oh my goodness, it's way too much.
We can keep that from happening.
I mean, you know, 9-11, how many agencies were asleep at the switch when that happened?
DAD, SAA, CIA, FBI, that's for starters.
DIA, NSA, a bunch, what, 10 or 15 I've never heard of before.
Yeah.
And these were all things that could have happened.
We didn't need Patriot Act, we didn't need, we didn't need a spot, we didn't need to do anything that wasn't already there except people being awake and doing their job and not out doing y'all hooligan nonsense against things that really weren't important.
Other theories about what really went on with 9-11, like the, oh, I don't know, Scott, how much of this you've followed.
It's like, how on earth did hitting those buildings with airplanes up in the upper third of them make them collapse all the way to the ground?
I don't know.
Gravity.
Here come, now here come 10 million comments announcing me for being a Jew who's in on the cover up and everything else.
Thanks a lot.
No, I'm just kidding.
I'm the guy who brought it up.
I'm just saying.
I don't know.
If we, if we discount any other, you know, you just say, go ahead and discount any of that.
The bottom line is that people were asleep at the wheel and I've, NORAD is the one that I just love.
NORAD now sits there and brags about how important a job they have in the war on terror.
I was like, well, where were you, what were you guys doing when it started?
Were you resting up to track Santa Claus on New Year's Eve?
Because that was your job, guys.
Yeah, and in fact, you know, if you read the Vanity Fair, the transcripts where the director of flight 93 got the, well, what are purportedly the transcripts of the Northeastern Aerospace Defense System or whatever needs, I think they call it, the subset of NORAD in charge that day.
It's just incredible to see the screw ups there and, and chasing a flight 11 that had already crashed and, and, you know, complete idiocy at best.
But here's the thing too, because it is brought up, like I'll go ahead and say, I think anybody who thinks that Dick Cheney wouldn't do something like that is crazy.
I just don't think he did and I'm sorry that I don't agree with everybody who thinks so because they don't tolerate disagreement.
You know, you, you either see it their way or, you know, like bombs in the buildings and that kind of thing, or you're being dishonest in their eyes and I'm not being dishonest.
I'd think that they exploited it as though they might as well have done it.
What's the difference at that point, you know?
Well, you know, my thing with Dick Cheney is, you know, he's, his next job is going to be, he's going to fleet up the second in command of hell.
So the bottom line is he's, he's evil even if you don't even take any of that.
Just what we know for a fact about Dick Cheney.
They already got a room picked out for him in the McNamara suite of the LBJ Hilton in hell.
If we can't get him on anything in this world, oh, he's going to get it next time.
So yeah, he's got to somewhere now.
And I think the most important point here too, that you brought up is what you call, you say you call them the Orwellians, that they're, the Orwellians lived in a world where there was actually a balance of power between three powers.
There is no balance of power right now, although we are all this business that you hear with the economy right now.
That's what it sounds like when your country is losing the kind of war that takes place in the brave new world order that we created because we are the hegemon.
There's only one way to get us and this is how it is, which is to sucker us into getting into these stupid wars with school kids and pouring national treasure down sand dunes and mountains, and then getting into this furor of the, what was the term you used?
We're talking about the McKinney act, the McKinney, you know, the, well, we can't lose this thing.
We have to go win.
We, we have to, we just have to keep going no matter what.
And it's like, dude, there is nothing to win.
You know, we're, you're fighting for milk money here.
Right.
And you know, also with the thing is about drawing the line and pushing it, it seems like on so many issues where it wasn't even necessary, they try to draw the line and push it like, like putting a, you know, soldiers under the Northern command, the American theater of operations for the military, these things, you know, I'm not one who's that paranoid that I think they're about to start using troops to round us up or that kind of thing, but they drew the line and then they crossed it and then they drew the line and they crossed it again.
And that's their mo here is to just apparently destroy the rule of law forever and just make this an executive dictatorship.
This is something where three years ago I just sat there and said, no, don't be too paranoid this.
But what we're, we're looking at is the boiling frog syndrome, which is, you know, the whole thing about the frog is still breathing, but it's actually, it's already dead.
Yeah.
It doesn't, you know, it's already scalded alive.
It's just, you know, a question of time before the whole body realizes that, oh, you're dead stop.
Yeah.
I saw a movie the other day actually where a guy gets his head chopped off, but then he's still on his hands and knees kind of walking around for a couple of seconds.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're all out of time.
Thank you very much for yours today, Jeff.
Oh, thank you for having me.
All right, everybody.
That's Jeff Huber.
Uh, he writes at pen and sword and over at Larissa Alexandra on this blog at largely, and I'm sorry, Jeffrey's still there.
Where else do you write?
I read it largely.
You'll see me at, uh, at anti-war.com from on occasion, uh, military.com, uh, E pluribus.
Don't have a list in front of me.
Oh my God.
Oh, and a bathtub admiral's is available at all fine, uh, electronic bookstores, uh, from Kanati books.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
We're out.
See y'all tomorrow.