Jim Bovard, author of many great books, most recently Attention Deficit Democracy, discusses America’s abandonment of law and rising police state, many people’s need to identify with a savior, the benefits of the Ron Paul candidacy, the story behind the Republicans failure to remove Bill Clinton from power in 1998, the continuing failure of the corporate media and the hope for a more humble foreign policy with Obama.
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All right everybody, it's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 92.7 in Austin.
We're streaming from chaosradioaustin.org and antiwar.com slash radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks for tuning in.
By one demand, my good friend Jim Bovard returns to the show.
Hi Jim.
Hey Scott, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, man.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I've been cold sober as of this point today.
All right.
Check this out, man.
That's good to know, by the way.
I appreciate you putting that off for me.
All right.
I can do this off the top of my head.
The farm fiasco, the fair trade fraud, feeling your pain, freedom in chains, shit, I'm forgetting another.
Oh, you were doing so well.
I did it.
It was a great first laugh you had.
I did it.
It was a great first laugh.
You know, that damn shakedown, how government screws you.
Oh, the shakedown.
Yeah.
That's what gets you every time.
Yeah.
Shakedown throws me off, man.
Well, of course, there's the Terrorism and Tyranny, the Bush Betrayal, and my favorite.
This book is so good.
It's Attention Deficit Democracy, and it might as well be brand new, and everybody ought to go run out and buy it right now because it's still that good.
Well, thanks.
That's very kind.
Thanks, Scott.
Well, good.
I'm glad you think so.
Hey, everybody.
You can check out Jim's blog and his website and links to all his books and all his stuff at jimbovard.com.
And, well, you know, I think, Jim, you're the most accomplished libertarian journalist, if I can call you that.
You're not the journalist part.
You're obviously a journalist.
I don't know how well you like the label libertarian, but anyway, you've got a very anti-state bent.
But what you do, you don't write about libertarianism.
You write about government.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm comfortable with libertarian as a label, a small L. I mean, I'm libertarian on the vast majority of issues, you know, except for those wool subsidies.
I'm opposed to almost everything the government does.
But you like the wool subsidies, though.
No.
That's just a West Virginia joke.
All right.
All right.
Yeah.
Oh, this is like actual Virginia picking on West Virginia.
Is that what that is?
Well, you know, I was raised about 30 miles from the West Virginia border and I've never recovered.
Oh, there you go.
All right.
Hey, let me ask you this, man.
Is it the end of even sort of the theory of having a rule of law at this point?
Well, I think that, you know, Bush's executive order back in November 2001, where he announced in a military order that he had the power to label anybody in the world as an enemy combatant and strip them of all their rights and lock them away based on secret evidence that by itself was one of the most direct attacks on the rule of law.
And a lot of the other stuff has come out of shock people.
But Bush laid out his fundamental principle very clearly two months after 9-11.
And there were only a small number of folks who really focused on that as a profound sea change in American life.
I mean, I was just sharing with the good people in the audience here something from James Bamford's new book, The Shadow Factory, about the National Security Agency.
And he quotes Frank Church, who chaired the Senate committee hearings that outed all the wrongdoing.
Yeah.
The 1976 hearings.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
And so but so the quote is something to the effect of, wow, the and this is from, you know, the late 1970s to, you know, 30 years ago.
And he says, America's government's intelligence capability, if it were ever turned on the American people, they could turn this place into an absolute, unescapable nightmare police state basically overnight.
They have the signals intelligence capability alone to know who all of us are, what we're all doing and what we're all thinking at this point.
They got the software to draw up your psychological profile and they know virtually everything about you.
They're vacuuming up every search word recording and saving every phone call.
And they've got us, you know, it seems like they have us where all they got to do is flip the switch and we're done for.
Well, yeah.
You know, but it's important to keep in mind that the government is us and if people don't want that, the government will do it.
No, that's that's good.
I haven't seen Bamford's new book, but he's done a lot of great stuff.
I'm glad you're glad you had him on the air and glad he's got another bombshell of a book out there.
It's you know, it's a heck of a thing.
I was going back.
I read, read, read a lot of the Cohen, the reports of the church committee from nineteen seventy six.
I was working on terrorism and tyranny.
Those folks did a beautiful job of laying out the nature of government gone bad.
But almost nobody wants to hear about that.
Almost everybody wants to hear that.
Well, the only thing we have to do is change presidents or change parties and then government will be our friend again.
But that's nonsense.
Yeah, that's really the problem.
You know, you have half the people, generally speaking, half the people are for whoever's in power and half against and then they just switch off every four or eight years.
And I guess there are a few of us like on the margins who hate them all or whatever, but pretty much everybody else seems to fall for this thing.
Well, it's frustrating to see how many people fell for Bush's cons for so long.
But then I had a similar frustration during the Clinton era because there were it seemed, you know, one of the most fascinating juxtapositions of the Clinton era.
It was in the late nineteen ninety eight, early nineteen ninety nine that that people thought Clinton was so dishonest.
He was impeached.
He had a trial in the Senate.
He wasn't thrown out of office, but he was recognized as a lying son of a gun.
And then a few weeks later, Clinton, you know, launches a war against Serbia based on his own, basically on his own say.
He didn't have hard evidence.
He made a lot of false claims about genocide.
There were there were no smoking guns like he claimed.
And yet, even though Clinton had been recognized as dishonest for the impeachment trial, people thought he was honest enough to launch an attack on this European nation that had done no harm to America.
Yeah, you're right.
And it was just weeks after the end of the Senate trial.
Yeah.
But most people seem to have forgot that.
And unfortunately, a lot of the Obama supporters seem to think of the U.S. war on Serbia as a good war, almost like a lot of the older Americans think of World War Two as a good war.
Yeah.
Well, I want to go back to it because I want to talk about these evil politicians in particular a little bit.
I want to go back to the whole, you know, total information awareness, as combined with the theory of the plenary powers of the president and that kind of thing.
The comment that I meant to emphasize or at least get to, I forgot if I did or not in that Frank Church quote was about how our old law is the only thing protecting us from this now, basically.
And so then now we have this theory of the unlimited presidency who can override all law because the world is a battlefield and all these crazy things.
And so I just I just wonder, like, how much danger you really think we're in about Church's warning that the the full power of the American intelligence state could be turned against us?
Well, Church had a great deal of courage in holding those hearings and issuing those final reports.
A lot of people have forgotten that the next time he came up for reelection, conservatives targeted him and defeated him in 1980.
Yeah.
And that was partly because of the courage and revelations that his committee had done.
I think we're in a whole heap of danger here because the government has been caught lying to us so many times about what they're already doing, surveillance.
They have been caught, you know, trampling the Constitution almost every time that some congressman goes to the bathroom.
And it's like and it's frustrating that the warning bells, you know, there's a small percentage of Americans who have heard the warning bells, but most of them have simply rolled over and check the latest sports scores or the latest TV updates.
And they don't seem to realize that the government has become far more dangerous in the last seven years.
And it was plenty dangerous even before that.
Yeah.
A lot of the most well-meaning and caring ones get caught up in something like the Barack Obama for president movement.
And, you know, you wrote something interesting on your blog that I read where you said that or maybe it was you were being quoted in an L.A.
Times article or something that was on your blog where you talked about how the amount of devotion being laid down for Barack Obama on the one side and for Sarah Palin on the other.
Now, obviously, the vast majority of the population seems to reject her.
But there's a certain part of the population who just absolutely love her.
I think you call her Joan of Arc or something.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
It's a measure of how desperate people are, a measure of how out of power they know they are.
And they want so badly to identify themselves with someone who has a chance at actually being in charge of things.
Well, that's part of it.
And there's just such a deep hunger for a savior.
It's almost theological at a point, because I think that's a lot of the response that Obama has generated among leftists and even some middle of the road Americans.
And it was fascinating to see within basically 72 hours, Sarah Palin became the great hope for conservatives and for a lot of libertarians, I was surprised, because she stood there and she read her lines pretty well at the GOP convention.
And all of a sudden, it's like she's just there were all these virtues that were heaped upon her head.
And you sit there and think, well, you know, what in her life history justified that or what in her performance after she was nominated justified that?
And there was almost nothing there.
And yet it's a sign of how gullible even folks who are supposedly skeptical about politicians can be.
Well, I think you're defining the term libertarian pretty broadly there.
I agree.
But what's a better definition, Scott?
Well, nobody from AEI could possibly be a libertarian, could they?
Well, I mean, a beltway libertarian.
Yeah, I guess so.
I don't know.
I mean, yeah, it's I tend to go with Anthony Gregory's definition, which is none of y'all are libertarians unless I say you are.
Well, that saves him the paperwork.
Yeah.
Let's see.
That saves him the vetting cost.
Oh, man.
All right.
So did you see this in The Washington Post?
You read you live near there, right?
You read The Washington Post in the morning or what?
You know, it certainly brightens up my breakfast table.
So I am grapefruit juice.
All right.
So what's my impression of you at the breakfast table this morning?
And oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, because you must have saw this article on Al Qaeda website joy over U.S. crisis support for John McCain.
Well, I mean, you know, yeah, I was I probably grinned over that one.
Actually, I think I saw that one late last night before I went to bed.
Oh, no.
That kind of takes the fun out of it, I guess.
Well, that's true.
I was kind of surly then.
This would be a good one with orange juice and toast and things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's too early in the morning for a cigar or two.
So it's never too early for a cigar.
Never.
OK.
Well, that's that's a good philosophy.
I like that.
Well, I'm always cigarettes.
And that's the very first thing I do, like right after, you know, waking up, you know, other parts.
Hey, this this article here, it says that the Al Qaeda dudes are laughing because the American government has been doing everything they want all these years.
And their best hope is that John McCain will get elected and continue these policies.
Well, that just goes to show that you can't trust terrorists.
It's you know, there's there's some irony there, I mean, because certainly the as far as stirring up hostility towards America and the Muslim nations, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has done that more than practically anything else the U.S. could have done.
And the ongoing abuses in Afghanistan, the the bombing attacks that result in killing innocent people on a regular basis.
And then the U.S. military comes out and spins and says, well, it was self-defense because there were bad guys in the same country.
I mean, that doesn't that doesn't pass muster in foreign countries when people hear that.
No, it's it's.
But, you know, a lot of this was foreseen by people.
There were a lot of people in 2002 who warned that the U.S. would simply generate far more animosity by going into Iraq.
Memory serves.
Ron Paul made that point.
He was dead on as far as his comments before the Iraq war.
Yeah, in fact, if anybody goes to antiwar dot com slash Paul and look at the archives, they go back to, I forget, 2000, maybe early 2002.
And he's got nothing but wisdom to say about why not to invade Iraq that whole time.
One of them was thirty five questions that won't be asked or should have been called won't be answered.
He was asking him.
Yeah, he was he was very forthright.
He was courageous and he was right.
I think that was a major part of the reason why so many people had such great hopes for his presidential campaign.
Yeah, boy, I got to tell you, I wish the stock market crash had been a year ago and that campaign had been run with him explaining booms and busts this whole time.
It would have been great.
Well, or if he was still in the race now, he would be.
I think his stock would be a whole lot higher at the same time.
The Dow is a lot lower.
But, you know, next year, Jerusalem.
Well, anyway, I admit, Jim, I have my disappointments with the way that the Paul campaign was run.
But I'm determined to simply look at the glasses, you know, three quarters full because the number of people who were exposed to a real message of individual liberty, you know, sound money and peace by him in the last year and by that movement is more than I could have ever dreamed.
So I'm just going to take it at that.
Yeah, that's a good way to look at it.
All right.
So let me see here.
Oh, back to the whole, you know, switching off from this savior to that savior.
And here's what scares me.
It doesn't scare me.
It annoys me in advance.
When Obama wins this thing, they say he's going to win this thing.
I don't mean to assume too much about the future and whatever.
But assuming Obama wins this thing, all these right wingers are going to come and pretend that they agree with us again and pretend they're anti-government again.
Yeah, I mean, you know, people are.
Someone asked recently what I saw is what I would miss about the Bush administration.
And we had honest conservatives.
I mean, in many ways, the conservatives were a lot more honest than they've been for a long time because you had so many conservatives out there saying bluntly that the people that distrusted or criticized the president were acting like traitors.
You had so many conservatives saying the government should be on a pedestal.
You had so many governments that you had so many conservatives cheering at the idea of torching the Bill of Rights.
And assuming that the Democrat wins two weeks from now, all of a sudden, a lot of these people are going to be selling saying that government is a big threat to our rights and liberties.
They'll be singing the same song that they sang during the Bill Clinton administration.
And some people are going to believe him and donate.
That's unfortunate.
Yeah, it is.
Because you know what this really means?
This means that from now on, like beginning in two weeks, I guess, which all I'm going to have to do all day is denounce Barack Obama for everything he's wrong about.
But I'm going to have to preface it every time with I hate you right-wingers.
Stay away from me.
You love torture.
You're not anti-government at all.
You love it.
You love it more than the worst liberal Democrat.
You love it.
Well, that's a long preface, Scott.
I know.
I'm going to have to say that every single time before I start denouncing Barack Obama.
It's going to be a real pain in the butt.
Well, you know, maybe if you're able to come up with an acronym for that, you know, and have it explained in bold print on the top of your website, the stress blog, that the acronym stands for denouncing the critical right-wingers on torture, dictatorship, et cetera.
Yeah, maybe that's a good idea.
It'll be like ditto rush.
It'll save a lot of air time.
Yeah, yeah.
It'll be like ditto rush.
Oh, God.
Okay.
You know, I wasn't thinking about that.
That's kind of chilling.
No.
Yeah.
Wouldn't that be terrible if I became some big, fat, blowhard asshole?
Well, you know, it's good.
The liberals are bad because the liberals don't want to kill Arabs enough.
Well, you know, but I think that Scott Horton ditto head, you know, I was around you a bit there that a few times.
Well, that's very nice of you to say.
Actually, my proudest moment was when that one lady was going, wow, you're Scott Horton.
And then I looked over and you were beaming.
It reminded me of my unc whenever he's proud of me.
He's got this beaming look on his face.
And I thought, wow, I made Jim Bovard proud of me, dude.
Look.
Well, you know, from what you said to me, there were a number of people who reacted like that.
And it's really great.
It's great that you travel across the country and you run into a whole bunch of your fans that you never knew you had.
Yeah.
It's sort of like I get emails sometimes that say, hey, I saw your bumper sticker on a car in Cincinnati.
Oh, that's great.
I love those, too.
Yeah, that's what I need to do, man.
Travel around the country and meet people more.
Well, you know, have a Scott Horton tour, maybe.
Yeah, there you go.
All I need is, I don't know, the Koch brothers to pay my way or something.
The Koch brothers.
Well, yeah, I will try and pull some strings on that for you.
Oh, good.
I appreciate that.
You can get me in with the bad guys.
Well, you know, don't know.
Anyhow.
Oh, James Bovard found a controversial subject.
He did not want to get into.
Hey, Jim, did you know why it is?
This is my little trivia thing for you.
I don't know if you ever read Greg Pallast, but check this out.
Did you ever hear the story of why it is that Bill Clinton was only impeached for lying in front of the grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky rather than from taking millions and millions of dollars from the Chinese government in order to pay for his TV ads in the reelection campaign of 1996 and then hiring John Wong, James Roddy's right hand man, to work in the Commerce Department in charge of licensing dual-use missile technology transfer stuff?
Well, it turns out that Bob Barr, as you may well know, asked for impeachment articles, submitted impeachment articles before anybody ever heard of Lewinsky.
And it was about that.
And so here's the great anecdote that you may or may not have heard, which is that Tom Daschle and Trent Lott, the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S.
Senate at the time, made a backroom deal where they said, you promise, the Daschle Democrats said, you promise to only impeach Bill for the Lewinsky stuff and not for the missile technology transfers.
And we'll promise not to indict all the congressmen and the Koch brothers for all their criminal corruption and violating of the campaign finance laws and funding the Republican Revolution of 1994.
And Trent Lott said, you got a deal.
And that's why Bill Clinton was not removed from office.
Well, that's interesting.
I had not heard that rationale for the very narrow thing.
It was my impression was that the House impeachment leaders, with very few exceptions, were basically very timid and somewhat cowardly.
Bob Barr was not.
Barr was in the forefront there.
Two, three months before the Lewinsky scandal broke, Barr proposed articles of impeachment in the House.
Ron Paul was one of the handful of congressmen who co-sponsored that with him, or who joined him in that measure.
But that's an interesting theory.
I didn't know that there was...
Greg Palast has some fascinating stuff, and I should read more about that.
Yeah, that one's in...
In fact, I interviewed him about it once.
I'll try to find the link and send it to you.
It's in his book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, toward the back of the book there.
But I remember hearing Bob Barr on the radio in 1998 being asked by a typical pro-impeachment Republican radio show host type, how come we're not...
In fact, it might have been on Ronald Reagan's son's show, now that I think about it.
And he was saying, why aren't they going after John Wong in the Commerce Department?
What's going on here?
And Bob Barr was literally exasperated.
This is one of the things that really made me want to respect that guy.
He was exasperated and said, listen, this is what I'm saying.
And he also, I believe, answered, I don't know why they won't let us go ahead with the real stuff.
Something's going on.
But there's some real impeachable stuff going on here that's being covered up, and instead we're going with the intern.
Well, yeah.
It was a tragedy, because there were so many elements of so many crimes the Clinton administration had committed.
And most of those crimes were covered up.
And when George W. came into power in 2001, his people seemed to have little or no interest in exposing the crimes and abuses of the Clinton administration.
And I hope that if Obama wins, he doesn't follow the same precedent that George W. made with Clinton, because there was a great chance for Americans to learn about the nature of government from watching a full-scale impeachment hearing.
But if you think back to 1973-74, what Congress did in the lead-up to Nixon's resignation, there were great hearings by courageous congressmen who were willing to keep pushing and who did a good job of focusing and squeezing people and getting the facts out, whereas most of the congressional hearings in the last 15 years have been utter jokes, because the congressmen themselves don't seem to be paying attention, and they simply sit there and ask the questions that their aides wrote out for them, and the congressmen seem, most of them seem incapable of an intelligent follow-up question for a witness.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, I can see it now.
Barack Obama will probably even, you know, give a statement to the cameras and say, no, no, no, we're not going to do, you know, torture trials and war crimes tribunals or anything even remotely along those lines.
We're going to let bygones be bygones and move forward in a bipartisan way.
It's already a done deal.
Well, I don't, I'm not quite that pessimistic.
Oh, come on.
But I was very disappointed to see Obama flip-flop on giving immunity to the telecom companies that had broken federal law by helping the Fed spy on American citizens, and as well as giving immunity to all the federal officials that broke the law.
I mean, this is, this is smoking gun crime, and Obama joined a handful of other Democrats and most Republicans in saying, you know, rule of law doesn't count.
I mean, it's important for people not to know what the government has done.
Right.
And after he vowed to filibuster any law that had any sort of immunity for the telecoms in it.
Yep.
That was a warning sign, as they say.
So, but it's nice that there are Democrats like Glenn Greenwald who've done a great job of holding Obama to the heat, to the fire on this.
But most of the Democrats seem to say, well, you know, all that matters is that a Democrat capture the presidency.
Yeah.
Well, and I got to tell you, man, how much I agree with that.
I'm so glad that Glenn Greenwald is around and is going to be around because he's not just going to hold Obama to the proper standards.
He's going to hold the rest of the liberal blogger community to those standards as well.
And I know he's not going to sell out the Bill of Rights just because the Democrat says to.
Unlike, I'm certain already I've seen, I try not to look, I try to avert my eyes, but sometimes I look at the Daily Kos and some of the excuses that I see for bad things that haven't even happened yet, but are going to under Obama.
Man, I get depressed.
Well, yeah, it, you know, it was the same thing, the same pattern that we saw in the late Clinton administration, because there were so many conservatives who were making sometimes even halfway eloquent statements on the danger of tyranny and dictatorship and violations of law.
And January 20th, 2001, all of a sudden, it was like you had all these pundits on one side of the barricade.
On one day, they suddenly walked over on the other side of the barricade.
That's how the game is played in D.C.
Yeah, well, that's the way it's supposed to be.
You know, Bill Clinton's mentor, in fact, John Basil Utley's professor at Georgetown, Carol Quigley, he wrote back in 1996, pardon me, 1966, that this is the way it should be, that the American people, he says, the only reason we ought to have two parties, one to represent the liberals and one the conservatives, supposedly, is so that the American people can, in like his little ironic quotes, not mine, throw those rascals out every eight or even four years if necessary, without ever leading to any substantial shifts in policy, but will have a fresh-faced new team of go-getters to get in there with a clean slate to continue doing the exact same thing to everybody that they've been doing.
Yeah, that's a great quote.
And that pretty well captures the likely boar-hogging of the American people after the 2008 election.
But I could be wrong.
I've been wrong before.
Yeah, well, not about this you haven't been.
I don't think you're going to be either.
Although, like you said, the Glenn Greenwalds of the world really, I don't know, inspire a lot of hope in me that things could actually not be quite so bad.
The Internet has changed a lot, even just in the last eight years, hasn't it?
It has.
Part of the frustration I have is that it's easier and cheaper now than ever before to figure out where to find other alternative news sources like antiwar.com or to check some of the foreign newspapers that have been a lot more reliable in the Middle East.
And yet, most Americans aren't making that effort.
And it's interesting to think of how much power Bush would have if Iraq had not gone to hell in a handbasket.
That was the thing which basically drained his political capital.
And if it had not been for that, it's hard to imagine how much additional power he would have seized.
And we still have little or no idea how much power he's actually seized and used over the last six, seven years.
Right.
Yeah, see, that's the real point, too, about the telecom immunity is that this is the only way that people are going to be able to really find out was through the legal process of discovery and their lawsuits.
That's what Obama shut down.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, it was Congress agreeing with the president to give a pardon, even before we had any or little or no idea who was spied on.
Because I would bet that there's probably a number of people who visit antiwar.com who might have been, that may have raised their chances of being looked at by the feds.
Because there's all sorts of websites, which are triggers, I think, for heightened interest by the feds.
Yeah, well, and we know that they labeled peace activists up there near you.
I forget if it was in Maryland or New Hampshire.
Well, you know, it was Maryland.
And there was one peace activist group here in Montgomery County, Maryland, which I'd gone to a couple of their meetings.
I was at a demonstration they were at, but I wasn't with them.
But this is one of the groups that the state police say that they didn't sneak people into.
But you really can't believe the state police at this point.
But just the fact that state police would put the names of antiwar protesters on a map in the terrorist watch list.
And, you know, we have no idea how many other places in this country this has already happened.
Yeah, well, and, you know, I've learned now from reading Bamford's new book that when they closed down total information awareness, they just simply moved it to the NSA, and that these guys are literally harvesting virtually every electronic signal on earth, and they've got the software to sift it now.
I mean, they're really getting all of our keywords, not just people who look at antiwar.com, but everybody.
Yeah, I mean, of course, it's the same problem they've had before, that they're choking on too much information.
That's not the same thing as having brains.
But, no, it's far easier for the feds to shred privacy than ever before.
But most Americans don't seem to give a tootie about that.
Yeah, well, and you know what's funny, too, is, well, like you say, you know, all this data doesn't amount to knowledge.
At the same time, the responsibility kind of gets shifted from the people to the computers themselves.
Like, I'm sorry you can't get on the airplane.
Well, why can't I get on the airplane?
Because the computer says you can't get on the airplane.
And it's nobody's fault anymore.
It's like we hire a computer to do our fishing expeditions for us and persecute people for us, but then it's nobody's fault.
Well, yeah, I mean, I'm sure that there have been a lot of dictatorships through history that would use a similar method of avoiding any individual responsibility.
But it's sad that people accept that, because it's obvious that the systems were set up with the intent to go after a large number of people based on little or no evidence of their individual wrongdoing.
Which, you know, back to the whole law thing, in America the way it's supposed to be is that crimes are investigated, not people, right?
And that you don't do fishing expeditions.
It used to be, right, that if a judge said this is a fishing expedition, it was at the same time he was, you know, protecting somebody from it and swinging his gavel around and, you know, stopping it, right?
Well, that's kind of archaic, but from what I've read in the history books, things did work that way at one point in this country.
Yeah, it seems like, you know, people talk about the frog in the pot and it slowly gets warmer, and it doesn't seem that slow to me.
It seems like, you know, we're moving pretty rapidly into this thing and people are still as dumb as a frog about it.
Well, some are, some aren't.
I mean, it's frustrating that so few Americans have caught on to what the government's doing.
And it's not just the individual facts what the government's doing, it's a question of tendencies, where the government's going with this stuff.
And, you know, just to see how the torturer scandal has played out, to see how many years it took for any kind of vigorous backlash, and to deal with editors who are so afraid of mentioning the T word in print, it was like some kind of ethnic slur in the government.
It made no sense.
Yeah.
Well, and even when they tried to call the warrantless wiretapping the terrorist surveillance program, that came straight from the White House, and virtually the entire media adopted it.
Even though that was blatantly not true.
If you only read James Risen's original story, it was not just a terrorist surveillance program by any stretch.
And yet the press just adopted it as though that was the literal definition of it, rather than the sales pitch on the part of the state.
Well, and it was frustrating.
There was such a profound failure of courage by the media on Bush's surveillance programs, his warrantless surveillance programs of Americans.
I mean, it's hard to imagine the media would have been that cowardly during the Nixon administration.
But since then, I don't know what exactly has happened to the media's spine on that.
There were some exceptions that were very impressive.
James Risen, Eric Lichtblau, some others at the New York Times, and a lot of other individuals.
The folks at Wired.com, great work.
But the mainstream media, I mean, is still getting its talking points from the White House, even after those talking points were exposed to be lies.
Yeah, and even after the disaster in Iraq and Katrina and all the things that finally stripped Bush of his credibility.
Yep, yep.
It made no sense at all.
But, you know, this is part of the reason why I'm not that optimistic of a big change after Obama comes in, because we're going to have the same pundits.
We're going to have the same media.
And these are the folks who helped George Bush put the knife into the Bill of Rights.
These are the folks who were cheering him for being courageous and tough at the same time that they should have condemned him for violating his oath of office.
Yep.
Well, so what do you think the future's going to look like?
Is there a chance that, well, you know, the Ron Paul-type message of liberty that's been getting spread around lately could, you know, really take hold and make a difference anytime soon?
Or do you think we're headed toward more war and more police and more debt and eventual major crisis here kind of thing?
What do you think it looks like?
Well, I think we're heading for more debt and major crisis.
I'm not sure we're heading for more wars.
It's hard to really know what Obama thinks, because he's been kind of slippery on a lot of issues.
Hopefully his core values are not like Hillary Clinton or a lot of the other warmongers in Washington.
And as far as having, you know, it's hard to know how much courage the Democrats are going to show.
But there are Democrats like Russ Feingold who have spoken out very courageously on a lot of issues.
But I don't know if they're going to have any impact or role in the Barack Obama presidency.
Well, I mean, I guess we can at least say that, you know, he's not going to name a bunch of neoconservatives from AEI to be the deputy secretary of killing people over there at the Pentagon like what happened under McCain administration.
Right.
There was just, I mean, if you look at Bush's, a lot of Bush's State Department and Pentagon appointees early on, they were just like, you know, it was like a bunch of Darth Vader reruns.
And it was like the, it was almost as if they were trying to find the most bellicose people that they could.
Kind of a macho strutting that a lot of neoconservatives have.
And, you know, a lot of these guys are members of the 45 pound bench press club.
So, yeah, I mean, and that's true virtually for every single neoconservative, that they are all a bunch of fat neck, soft handed wimps to the man.
Well, there might be one or two exceptions.
But, I mean, it's kind of funny to see a bunch of guys who are not that macho in person, shall we say, and yet so gung ho in having American soldiers go out and kill foreigners based on their own theories or their ideas or their vision for America.
Yeah, well, you know, it really bums me out to have to prefer the kind of so-called realists that surround Barack Obama.
I think Lou Rockwell one time discussing a fight between the neocons and the realists said it's a heck of a note to have to root for the Rockefellers.
That's the way I feel about it.
Like, oh, great, it's only lunatics like Joe Biden and Zbigniew Brzezinski and a bunch of horrible insane maniac killers like that instead of, you know, the Richard Pearls and Frank Gaffneys of the world.
Not Gaffney, but you know.
Well, I mean, yeah, as soon as you put a face on Joe Biden, it gets really depressing.
Man, yeah, I don't know what to do with that guy, man.
This guy, you know, if there's one way that McCain can pull it off, it's going to be that they let him keep talking.
Joe Biden?
Yeah.
But people aren't paying that much attention to him, are they?
Oh, well, I hope that that's the case at this point.
Okay.
I mean, he gave a whole speech the other day about how Barack Obama is weak and untested and everybody in the world is going to try to gang up on us and we're going to really need a lot of help and all this crap.
Like, dude, was he really trying to get McCain elected or what, you know?
Well, you know.
Or he's just that stupid, Joe Biden.
Well, you know, he was good enough for Delaware.
Did you have, like, a personal thing against Delaware being for Maryland or whatever?
Is that it?
You know, it's not a bad state.
Maybe it has more chicken than people at this point, I'm not sure.
But it's a nice state for bicycling, so I will give it credit where credit's due.
All right.
Well, you're ridiculous.
Hey, tell me real quick about your new book.
What's it going to be called?
When's it going to be coming out?
What's in it?
What are the chapter titles?
Okay.
The title I'm thinking of right now is Principles and Paradigms of How Politicians Con Citizens into Submission.
Wow.
And as far as when it's out, I haven't got a deal signed yet, but hopefully mid-2009.
I'm finishing it up right now.
I had a bit of a delay over the summer, but that's another story.
But it's basically trying to find a way to help people realize some of the fundamental truth about politics, because I think a lot of folks have gotten misled by the rhetoric and sometimes misled by some of the facts that are not really facts.
So just trying to help people, just trying to find a way to better explain some of the things I've wrestled with over the last 15 years.
And I think if I explain it better, then perhaps people will understand the issues.
Well, don't know, but that's my aspiration.
Well, you're the man to do it.
You're a great writer.
I'm going to say again, because just like I said at the top of the show, that this Attention Deficit Democracy is absolutely awesome.
And if your new book is anything like this, it'll be good enough.
You'll certainly educate thousands or millions of people with it, man.
Keep up the good work, Jim.
I love this stuff.
It's really great writing.
Attention Deficit Democracy.
Run out and get it right now, everybody.
James Bovard.
It's jimbovard.com.
Hey, thanks a lot for coming on the show, man.
Hey, thanks for having me on, Scott.
Good luck to you there.
All right, talk to you soon.
All right, bye.
All right, folks, that's Antiwar Radio.
See y'all tomorrow.
