Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Sheldon Richmond, my partner at the Libertarian Institute.
Hey, man, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Scott, great to talk to you.
Very happy to have you here.
Sheldon, of course, wrote the book on the IRS, on homeschooling, on the welfare state, on guns, and 10 million articles.
And we're going to be putting out a compilation or two or three of some of the things he's written in book form at the Institute later this year.
Working hard on Will Grigg right now, and my own book, and then another book of mine, a thing and project.
Anyway, so, but yeah, and Sheldon is the executive editor at the Libertarian Institute.
And every Friday he writes an article, TGIF, The Goal is Freedom.
And this one is called America's War Culture.
Well, you don't say, you're criticizing our culture now, Sheldon?
Yeah, I guess that makes me a culture warrior.
Yes.
No, I mean, you start off, you're picking on the powerful with access to major media here.
Well, that's right.
You know, what hit me was an interview, and I linked to it and discussed it toward the end of the article, an interview that Jake Tapper did with Rand Paul, after Rand Paul endorsed Trump's announcement that he was going to pull the troops out of Syria.
And, of course, as we know, the mainstream media and the intelligentsia and so many politicians just went bananas.
Oh, how could he do this?
This is reckless.
This threatens national security.
It was done, you know, erratically, suddenly.
He didn't listen to his generals.
He didn't listen to the allies.
You know, they had 100 things that we were supposed to get alarmed about, except this is something he'd been talking about, talked about it throughout his presidential campaign.
And so Tapper brings on Rand Paul, who was one of the few politicians to applaud the decision.
We'll see whether Trump actually follows through on it.
It's a little unclear.
You probably know more about that than I do.
But Tapper, after asking about that, finally said, let me ask you a question.
I don't mean to be rude, he says, but can you name a war you favored in the last 20 years?
And I just thought that question hit me.
That question just really hit me as very odd.
Like, the default is you're supposed to be in favor of war.
So if you're against a war or if you're getting out of a war, you know, somehow that needs a special justification, which advocating a war never requires.
So it's the default.
War is the default.
And you're the oddball if you're not just a trader or an agent of a foreign government if you don't want to get into a war or if you want to end one of these endless wars.
Very peculiar.
And it made me think the culture, at least among the intelligentsia, the people who try to form opinion, mold opinion, are just pro-war.
War is the natural thing.
And so you're unnatural if you don't like war.
Right.
That strikes me as very peculiar and toxic for a country that claims that it's free and humane.
Well, and I want to pick on Tapper for a second, but not at the expense of the narrative because it isn't just him at all.
The reality is it's this whole larger phenomenon.
But I remember in 2013 on CNN, the way he framed the entire argument about Syria to, I guess, congressmen he's interviewing was, you know, plaintively, what can Obama do to convince the American people that we have to do this?
And just in a way where it was honest of him, right, like he was laying it all out there.
That was just how he felt.
And it didn't occur to him how biased that sounded.
And I remember I tweeted him at the time and said, hey, man, not trolling, but just an honest question.
Why not phrase it the other way around that the American people don't want to do this?
And what did they have to do to get Congress to listen to them?
That would be unheard of, to put it that way.
Wouldn't that be the natural way to frame the question if you're not committed to Zionism, frankly?
Well, and remember in April of 2017 when Trump launched those missiles after an alleged chemical attack by Assad, which even a lot of people in government doubt Assad was responsible for, the panels on CNN, which included lots of Democrats, you know, and people like Van Jones, were saying tonight Trump became president.
In other words, it took missile launching to be presidential.
Up until then, they wouldn't even recognize him as having been elected.
Of course, they were blaming Russia for that.
But now that he's dropped some bombs or launched some missiles at a country, now he's, you know, he's crossed that important threshold and now he is president.
So bombing is what makes you presidential.
There's something really screwed up here.
Well, and that really is traditional, too.
Glenn Greenwald had cited, I remember back years ago, R.W. Apple in the New York Times writing about George Bush, Sr., that I guess Panama wasn't enough, but it was the first Iraq war and the leading of blood there, that that was kind of the ceremony of his induction into real presidential leadership, that you have to kill people.
That was the way they put it outright.
That is our ritual here.
That's how you know.
And you know what?
George W. Bush was in power, I think, maybe it was two weeks.
I think it was just one week before he launched a major assault on Iraq under the no-fly zone.
Obama was in power just three days before he sent the CIA to bomb and kill innocent people in Afghanistan.
That's really a thing.
Well, I think, look, presidents, I think, see that incentive system.
I guess I've written about this before, because I think I did talk about this perverse incentive to bomb, because then important people will recognize you as truly presidential.
And when they do these surveys of historians or who are the greatest presidents, war presidents always dominate the top whatever, top ten or whatever.
Boring presidents who didn't get into any wars and maybe didn't do much of anything, which these days is the most we can hope for, they always rank at the bottom.
They're like, they were boring, so we can't call them great.
And it's only people that went to war that get rated great presidents.
That's a bad incentive for any president coming to office.
If he's in some trouble and needs to get some positive talk going on the media, hey, drop a bomb somewhere.
Well, and unfortunately, as you point out here, Senator Paul said that, well, no, I supported the war in Afghanistan in his defense there against alleged pacifism and weakness and femininity or whatever the charges by Jake Tapper there.
He says, no, I supported the one good war when he could have certainly belabored that point and said the Taliban were willing to negotiate, the Americans were not.
And their conditions became extremely minimal very quickly.
Any honest research, you don't have to read Fool's Errand to know that.
I mean, that's right there in the newspaper.
That's what I cite in my book to make that case.
And he could just as well have said that.
And he could have just as well have said, hey, man, has there been a war in your lifetime that you did not support Jake Tapper?
Because you seem so reasonable up there.
But you know what?
Most people agree now that every action you've supported in the 21st century in Iraq, in Libya, in Yemen, in Syria, that that was all wrong.
And we never should have done any of that.
That's the one thing people like about Donald Trump is when he says George Bush never should have got us in there at all.
It didn't have to be this way in the first place.
Right, right.
Rand Paul could have made much more of that, unfortunately.
Well, you know, he can't change the fact that that he supported he wasn't in the Senate at the time in 2001, but he did support.
I guess he made some statements or at least he was being honest and said, I did support going in there in 2001.
However, he did quickly add to his credit that he was opposed to what it became, the mission creep, the nation building.
He said, I would have just declared victory a long time ago and gotten out.
So let's give him credit for that.
But it's true.
He could have done so much more with that question.
Like every war which I presume you supported, Jake Tapper, has been a disaster.
And more and more people are realizing it, beginning, you know, just in recent history, beginning with George W. Bush's invasion.
We can go back to his father's invasion in 1991.
Yeah, he could have put Tapper right so much on the defensive.
But I guess his feeling was he asked the question, I answered them.
So he didn't ask Tapper a question in turn.
But I think we need to be aware of this and publicize this and just talk about it.
We've got to talk about it, at least bring people's attention to the fact that official opinion-making in the country is pro-war.
And the burden of proof is on the one who opposes war, not on the one who's in favor of war.
You know, their view is, OK, we should intervene in country X or we should remain in country X.
And the burden of proof is on you to tell me why we should get out or should not get into the new war.
That's crazy.
The burden of proof ought to be on the one who wants to continue a war or start a new one, not the other way around.
Peace should be the presumption and the default position.
But it's not right now.
Which, by the way, I don't know if you saw this, but Richard Haass, he's still the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, right?
Or one of these things.
He was.
Last I heard, he's always on Morning Joe, which I don't watch.
Yeah, I think he still is, you know, is in George W. Bush's first administration there.
And so he has a tweet here that somebody it's an article that he wrote for Project Syndicate dot org.
And it's a tweet about it.
And this is what the tweet says.
It says neither winning the war nor negotiating a lasting peace is a real option in Afghanistan.
Just leaving, though, as we are about to do in Syria, would be a mistake.
What we need is an open ended, affordable strategy for not losing.
That's a real quote.
I couldn't have made that up for you, but there it is.
Right.
Good.
The more honest those people are, the better for us.
Lay it all out there.
I mean, really, doesn't that sound like something going on in the background in a scene in that movie Brazil?
I mean, this is just getting crazy now.
Just keep it going.
Right.
Keep it going.
It's in a way it's Nixonian or Kissingerian because, you know, Kissinger was always very concerned about U.S. credibility.
So, you know, he once said we have to be ready to intervene anywhere and to actually intervene because American credibility is always on the line.
If we don't rise to some challenge somewhere, however insignificant, that's going to create doubts about American credibility and commitment.
It's such a tragedy, though, that right now in this case, there's an opportunity for real negotiations with the Taliban where they're saying they won't really negotiate anything, but they're willing to meet and talk.
And their condition is you got to pull your troops out.
And the Americans, on one hand, the president's trying to negotiate an exit.
He sent Khalilzad supposedly because he's capable enough, I guess, to negotiate a way out of there.
And yet the military just won't give up the Bagram Air Base.
And, you know, the rest of the U.S. government is, you know, anyone involved in this part of it, in State Department or what have you, that their interest is, but they got to stay no matter what.
Even if the rest of Afghanistan goes to hell tearing itself apart in the next phase of the civil war, they got to keep the Bagram Air Base.
And so they won't negotiate anything short of that, which, of course, is absolute no-go for the Taliban, who have held out all this time and have less reason than ever to give in to the demands of the Americans on the issue.
And so here we still are in 2019 between a rock and a hard place on that.
Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest.
As our friend Gareth Porter likes to point out, this suits the military and the contractors, you know, just fine because it's permanent war.
You don't need to win.
You just don't need to obviously lose or get out.
And that keeps the money and the power flowing and the prestige of the military.
So they're just fine with that.
I mean, there are people that favor the status quo, as bad as it is.
I'm thinking of Bill Kristol in terms of Israel-Palestine, where he said, why do we have to choose between one state, one free state, one liberal state where everybody has the same rights, and two states?
What's wrong with the status quo?
I mean, I heard Kristol say that on TV.
We can have the status quo.
I'm fine with that.
Yeah, I'm fine with that.
People believe that.
I know.
It's hard to fathom that somebody would actually say that, continuing violence and oppression and death and devastation and wrecking of children.
Hey, I'm just saying what we're all thinking, right, guys?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Man.
Sorry, hold on just one second.
Hey, you guys, check out Kesslin Runs.
It's a great new dystopian novel about the very near future by our friend Charles Featherstone.
I think you'll really like it.
Check it out.
It's on Amazon.com right now.
Kesslin Runs.
Hey, listen, so another big facet of this, and you mentioned this, and I'm glad you linked to it, too, because I was happy to read it.
This Greenwald piece where he reminds everybody that, you know, this always happens where they say you're pro-Saddam Hussein.
The framing of any, you know, as Tapper would have it, any anti-war sentiment is automatic, you know, worse than a Quaker level, religious commitment, pacifism.
In other words, unreasonableness when all good and decent men know that we have to believe what the government says and support the war that they want to have.
And so you're some kind of kook if you don't.
And then it always goes further to why are you, Sheldon Richman, toeing the line for Hamas, telling the world about Vladimir Putin's point of view, telling everybody how much you love Saddam Hussein and Iraq's bath party.
And the Ayatollah, too.
Why don't you make up your mind?
And then it just goes on and on and on, even though, you know, in my case, I'm from Texas.
I don't know where you're from originally, but I know you live in the American South now.
And I'm not sure why you would be a partisan for any foreign state since you're, of course, an individualist, anarchist, libertarian type.
But, of course, it goes for you and it goes for everybody.
And that's the way it's always framed.
And that continues to have currency.
I mean, people buy into that kind of thing to this day.
And even when they're flipping and flopping, which side they're on, too.
Even when somebody already falsely accused them of the same thing a few years ago.
Makes sense to them now when it applies to somebody else.
Right.
That's right.
I mean, it's really reminiscent of the early Cold War McCarthyism.
Because if back then you said something like, why is the government blocking trade between, you know, American companies and the countries in the Red Block?
I remember.
I remember writing a paper in school about this.
If you favor trade between the U.S. companies and the Communist Bloc, you were regarded not just as mistaken or foolish.
You know, you want to argue that, you know, OK, argue that.
But rather that you were an agent.
You were an agent of the Kremlin.
The Berg Society in those days used to accuse, you know, people being card-carrying members of the Communist Party if they favored détente or, you know, not something other than war with the Soviet Union.
And now we're seeing it again today, of course, with Russiagate and Trump.
I mean, look at that story, which has been debunked by lots of people, including Ray McGovern, about, you know, how the FBI opened up an investigation of Trump to see if he was a witting agent of Russia after the Comey firing.
And Greenwald's written about this, too.
So, in other words, if you take a policy position, that can get you investigated by the FBI as a traitor.
That's the FBI injecting itself into politics, which is an old J. Edgar Hoover trick or move.
And so all these Democrats and people who style themselves as progressives and liberals are now embracing McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover.
Are they going to wake up and say, what the hell were we thinking?
You know, my favorite part of this so far, I guess, is hearing Democrat members of Congress just invoke kind of the charm, the 25th Amendment, as though somehow from, I don't know, pressure from MSNBC and Congress.
They're going to get Trump's cabinet that he could fire at any time to vote to overthrow him based on mental or other incapacity to discharge the duties of his office.
And if you read the thing, that's what it says, but the way they invoke it, in other words, to them it's just a loophole.
That in America under the Constitution, you can do a coup d'etat if you want.
And you can just cancel the election and have it your way instead of the way it worked out.
And they really think that they could do that.
And I have no idea if they're even asking themselves a question of what's going to happen the day after that or what's supposed to be the result of this or, you know, I don't know.
It sounds to me completely insane.
But now impeachment and removal, I'm for impeaching all presidents.
I don't care about that.
Donald Trump is clearly guilty of crimes against humanity in Yemen for one.
We could just start there.
So I'm not worried about that.
But I sure do not like to see this putsch from within the national security state trying to cure themselves of the results of the last election, which is what we're talking about here.
It's really a whole different subject that casts a whole different light on any of this.
It's not like they're charging him with the Yemen war or anything.
No, that's right.
That's why the whole thing's been a big distraction because we're not really talking about the stuff we ought to be talking about because the worst things about Trump is something that Democrats support because Obama and Hillary Clinton were doing, you know, similar things.
So they can't be too hard on Trump for those things.
So they have to go after really irrelevant non-issues.
And also, Stephen Cohen has pointed out that we have, in order to get at Trump, I mean, so much of this is motivated by just demonizing Trump because he beat Hillary.
As a result, we're seeing the rise, we've already seen the rise of a cult of the military and the intelligence apparatus.
So look how these, and we see this with Tapper and the mainstream interviewers and anchor people.
The military and the intelligence people are not to be questioned.
That's really bizarre.
This is supposed to be a civilian government, for one thing.
And yet, if a president defies his generals and wants to get out of a war, you know, this is considered a very gravely serious thing that maybe even goes to the man's sanity, like you were saying.
Maybe even an indication that he's crazy.
Firing the director of the FBI is obstruction of justice.
How dare he?
As though, and you know, I hate to give, I hate to even say the name.
Well, anyway, some journalists we all hate actually wrote about the fact that there actually is no statute that even authorizes the existence of the FBI or the position of the FBI director.
And there are appropriations for the FBI under certain appropriations for the Department of Justice and what have you.
But Congress never even created that position.
Just Hoover did, essentially, way back when.
So, in other words, there's any question whatsoever whether the president has the absolute authority to fire the FBI director for any reason he feels like.
I mean, it's crazy.
And not only, so you have a bunch of Democrat, you know, not just leaders, but voters crying that that's some kind of crime.
Then you have the FBI for revenge, apparently, if The New York Times is right about this, open a counterintelligence investigation directly against the president, which they denied doing up until just a couple weeks ago, this whole time.
Based on that, as essentially revenge because they were angry that he fired Comey.
Well, that's right.
And I was reading McGovern this morning in his latest article.
No, I didn't see the last one.
It was this, you know, Comey holding the Steele dossier over Trump's head in that private meeting early on.
Oh, it was before he was actually inaugurated, right?
Which explains a whole lot of what Trump has done in this regard.
Yeah.
Yep.
But, you know, look, every day the mainstream media feeds this.
You know, recently we had, oh, Manafort gave some some private polling data to a Russian.
Well, you know, as Aaron Maté has pointed out in The Nation.
Well, first of all, most of the data was public data, so it wasn't private.
And they weren't Russians, by the way.
They were Ukrainians.
And then as he points out, and you and I have talked about this, when Manafort was in Ukraine back before the, of course, before the campaign, had nothing to do with the campaign.
But when he was consulting, when he was a campaign consultant to Yanukovych, the president who was run out of office and out of the country with the help of the U.S. government under Obama.
When Manafort was working as a campaign consultant to Yanukovych and helping him out, he was pushing Yanukovych to take the European Union, i.e., you know, American position on which deal, you know, to take.
The one being offered by the EU or the one being offered by Putin.
They used to kid around Kiev that he was actually, what, the ambassador or an agent of the CIA because he was saying, don't go with Putin, go with the EU.
This is the all-important trade deal upon which the maiden, you know, coup, essentially so-called revolution hinged.
Yeah, because the EU was saying, you've got to make a choice.
It's us or Putin or Russia.
Right.
The thing is, Russia was also offering a deal with like $15 billion in cash, but not making it exclusive, right?
Putin was saying, take our deal, but you can also deal with the EU.
The EU was saying, it's us or them.
You can't have both.
And it is a reasonable suspicion.
I don't know if there's any evidence of this or if anybody has claimed to know this, and they may have.
But it's certainly reasonable suspicion that Manafort was actually acting as an agent, not necessarily an officer, right?
But as an agent of the CIA in that role where you have Yanukovych, who is the more Russian-leaning candidate, who was democratically elected there.
And so as long as you do have that, you send Manafort in there to try to get him to go the American way, which, you know, they pushed him too hard and it backfired.
Right.
And I feel like that was the quote from Yanukovych was, I feel like I showed up, I'm a bride, and I showed up at my wedding to be confronted with a prenuptial agreement.
And so now I'm not so hot on this deal after all.
And so maybe I'm going to turn around and go home instead, because they had added all these new restrictions, especially that it had to be an exclusive deal and that the deal would be off if he signed a deal with the Russians too.
And Matthei's piece on this in The Nation has the quotes from both Manafort at the time and then later testimony on this.
And also his Rick Davis, the guy that was working with him, who's also been indicted, they were saying, our job is to make sure we didn't lose Ukraine to Russia.
Explicit statements by those two guys saying part of our job there was to make sure the EU and the U.S. didn't lose Ukraine to Russia.
So he was not doing Russia's bidding.
Wait, so let's get back to the point, though, and we're out of time, so I'll give you the last word on it, though.
But it's not the point of the whole article, but where we're really kind of summing up here is how this Russiagate story is making the liberal and much of the progressive left insane and turning their whole perspective inside out and upside down, where they're rallying around the national security state to defend America from the elected president that they hate and fear so much.
But then the point that I'm interested in your comment on is about just how permanent this brain damage is and just how meaningful this is for the next decades of liberal thought in America, who these people are and what kind of priorities that they put first here when they're desperate for the FBI, the CIA and the military to save them from the elected president of the opposing civilian party here is essentially what we're talking about.
No, you nailed it.
That's the thing.
And how they're going to live with themselves.
Are they ever going to say, what the hell were we thinking, especially when it comes back to haunt them?
Because the conservatives have no principles that will keep them from doing something very similar someday when there's a Democrat in the White House and they need to use everything they can think of against that person.
So it will come to haunt them.
I don't know why they're not a little more savvy and realize what is this game we're playing.
And they just keep getting in deeper and deeper.
They haven't noticed it yet.
It's been really over two years since they've been harping on this.
And it hasn't yet dawned on them that, number one, the mainstream media is beginning to tell us, hey, folks, you're in for a disappointment on the Mueller report.
It's going to be anticlimactic.
We're starting to be clued in.
Jonathan Karl at ABC and Politico have been saying, hey, maybe you should lower your expectations.
And they say this is coming from the Mueller office, the Mueller camp, lowering expectations.
So why are they not pulling back, though?
They're hammering every day they think they have a story and then it collapses the day later.
Yeah.
Well, it's something else.
It's a scrape.
Well, you're just pro-Trump.
No, I'm just kidding.
Sorry.
Listen, so.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm from that charge.
I'm immune from that charge.
Yeah.
No, of course.
I was just joking.
Everybody's pro the thing that's on the other side of the argument that they're against, no matter what.
It's the iron law of political argument by Twitter in America.
Anyway, I'm sorry, Sheldon.
I got to cut you off and interrupt you, but I'm late for my next one.
No problem.
Thank you so much for your great article and your time and all of your cooperation here.
Libertarian Institute dot org.
And it'll be running on antiwar dot com on Monday.
America's war culture under TGIF.
The goal is freedom at Libertarian Institute dot org.
Thanks again.
My pleasure.
Talk to you soon.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org.
Antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book Fool's Errand.
Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
