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Okay, so first up on the show today is John Glazer, an editor at AntiWar.com.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How the hell are you?
I'm pretty good.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I'm actually really sick to my stomach this morning, and I'm not certain if it's the coffee, because this is some really bad coffee, but it could be the fact that I sat down and I crammed the entire transcript of the debate last night into my eye holes this morning, following your link to the Washington Post version of the Rush transcript there from your article at AntiWar.com right now.
It's called, in foreign policy debate, Romney capitulates, agrees with Obama.
Now, it's quite a laundry list.
This was the foreign policy debate last night.
But let's go ahead and start with that overview.
Is that right?
Romney capitulates?
He's no longer Romney?
He's a Democrat now?
How does that sketch Romney?
I mean, the thing that has defined this man in his entire political career is taking positions which at one point or another suit him politically and then changing them when the circumstances change.
And the circumstances changed at last night's debate, because Obama is largely viewed as more competent on foreign policy.
He knows what he's talking about.
Romney is viewed as inexperienced and sort of he's been pandering to constituents, whether it's during the primary.
He's very hawkish.
Once he won the nomination, he shifts to the center a little bit.
And that's what we saw last night.
He literally swallowed everything he had said about every major issue and started to shift towards agreeing with Obama.
He actually openly said it a number of times, well, I have to agree with the president here, or, you know, I applaud the president's work, and here, this, this, this.
And on every major issue, that's what we saw.
The two candidates now explicitly agree on every key foreign policy issue, and that's not good for the country.
That's not good for voters at all.
Well, yeah, you know, what's funny there is, you know, I wonder what people tell themselves about that.
Like, say, for example, Obama fans.
Do they have to tell themselves that, wow, Obama's doing such a great job that Mitt Romney just can't criticize him?
Or don't they have to admit to themselves that this guy Romney, who's pure evil and whose foreign policy is so dangerous they've already said a hundred times, actually has the same foreign policy as their guy, and their guy's foreign policy is the same as Mitt Romney's?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think Romney's really changed that much, has he?
It's more in rhetoric than in actual policy, because when you get down to policy, he hasn't changed that much.
He hasn't changed that much, but that's because politics and political campaigns are all about rhetoric.
They're all about saying what gets the headlines and, you know, being as vague as possible so that you can get ahead somehow and then finally get in power.
To your question, you know, people tend to hold their political beliefs pretty close, you know, pretty firmly, and they tend to disregard pieces of evidence that puncture their political views.
And so I think Obama voters, Obama supporters, they are taking the first set of circumstances you said, which is that they're saying, oh, Obama's so good on foreign policy, he's made so few mistakes that Romney can't find any holes to poke, he can't criticize him majorly.
But the reality is that Obama is so far to the right and has such an aggressive and militarist foreign policy that Romney can't find any room to be more bellicose.
Typically, it's the Republicans who want to be hard or lying nationalist pro-war and this and that, but Romney can't find any room.
Another factor is that both of them realize, and this is something that Pat Buchanan pointed out in a piece that we ran at EmpireWar.com just last week, the peace candidate tends to win.
He tends to be more attractive to most voters, and they tend to be popular candidates.
And both of them knew that.
And so even though Obama was sort of on the attack this time around and trying to paint Romney as pro-war, Romney was very much avoiding that criticism.
He said things like, we don't want another conflict in the Middle East.
He said things like, we can't kill our way out of this mess.
You know, very peaceful-sounding, non-interventionist-sounding type stuff.
Of course, that's not the reality of it, because when you get into it, they both agree, for example, that we should be aiding Syrian rebels in Syria to fight and overthrow the Assad regime, even though that's dangerous.
The rebels have committed more crimes.
They're allied with al-Qaeda and so on and so forth.
Both of them support harsh, you know, economic policies.
Well, hang on.
Let's get to all those specifics in just a sec.
But on the politics of it, I think it's interesting in it how, well, it's sort of like that Futurama where it's John Robertson versus Robert Johnson, and they're just clones of each other, and they're disagreeing about a 0.3 percent tax decrease and whether that's dangerous or not, that kind of sort of nonsense.
Because when you go down the litany there, there really is no room for daylight, right?
Like Mitt Romney can give a speech for six months saying, you know, Obama's not doing enough to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.
But when Obama's standing right there and Schaefer says, well, what more should he be doing, he actually can't think of anything.
Because Obama's already doing everything on the menu, including threaten that nothing is off the menu.
That's right.
And a couple times Obama has said, hey, Romney, if you support going to war in Iran or if you support going to war in Syria, why don't you just say so?
And so Romney's very aware of that, and he's trying to avoid saying such things because...
Oh, that's what I was going to say, too.
Obama has to move all the way to the right in reality and rhetorically to defend himself from the accusation that he's too weak, at the same time that Romney has to move to the left rhetorically, if not in policy, in order to sound like he's, you know, peacenik and reasonable enough and not too neocon.
That's the middle ground these two are racing toward.
That's where I was going with that John Robertson thing there.
No, Dave, that's exactly right.
And you know what?
Polls show that somewhere between four and six percent of Americans think that foreign policy is an important issue in this election.
So almost everyone is looking at jobs, economy, that type of thing.
And so it's no wonder that we saw a very different debate, a very different Romney in particular in those previous two debates because they were largely about domestic issues and the economy.
That's how he wants to win this election.
The fact that he has no experience in foreign policy, the fact that he's stacked his entire council of advisors with neocons and former military people, that shouldn't be...
It's part of the course, but it shouldn't be encouraging in the least.
This is just an aside, but I'll go ahead and get it out of the way.
I just thought it was funny that Mitt Romney brought up apartheid in the context of whose diplomats ought to be shunned in the middle of a conversation about Israel and Iran.
Maybe that was a Freudian thing?
He said, I mean, this was out of nowhere.
I didn't expect him to say anything like this, and I thought it was, I mean, it's close to mental retardation what Romney seemed like when he said that Ahmadinejad should be tried and prosecuted for genocide incitement.
What in the world are you talking about?
Surely American presidents down the line have much more blood on their hands than Ahmadinejad.
Iran hasn't invaded any place in centuries.
Well, I mean, that's the thing too, right?
As Romney was referring to the president's lie that he agreed with that Iran had threatened to kill every Jew in Israel.
Right.
Never, ever happened.
And, you know, how many millions of times does Ahmadinejad have to be asked in public precisely what he said, and how many millions of times does it have to be reported in the media that actually he was not talking about nuclear war on Israel, not talking about bombing them into the sea, not doing anything like that.
For pundits and war hawks to stop saying it over and over and over again.
They don't want to bomb Israel, and they would never do it because they're not ready to commit national suicide.
A funny little thing to take into consideration whenever we talk about that whole wipe Israel off the map thing, it's funny that the Palestinians aren't worried about an Iranian nuclear weapon, right?
They're not worried about being bombed into the sea, even though they live within the same seven-mile stretch as all the Israelis.
And that should give us an indication that, obviously, we're not talking about an Iranian-provoked nuclear war here.
But, anyway, I guess that's an aside.
Yeah, well, it is.
But, well, you know, it's important that Obama was willing to repeat that outright lie now seven years out from its complete and total debunking.
It was seven years ago, 2005, when this bogus quote came out.
And it was the Iranian press office that got the quote wrong in the first place, unfortunately, but I'm sure a lot of people who are unwilling to admit that they know the truth, that it's been corrected since then.
But it makes such a good excuse.
I'm glad that Romney said that about incitement of genocide, because that and maybe one or two other things cropped out at the debate where he said really ridiculous things that have no basis in reality and are really sort of kooky and wacky.
But the rest of the debate, he seemed very much like he was just reciting lines as rehearsed and trying not to screw them up, even though he's made major foreign policy gaps in the recent past with the Libya press conference and so on and so forth.
And, you know, Russia, our geopolitical foe and all this.
He said not only that Ahmadinejad should be prosecuted for genocide and incitement, but he also said that Syria is Iran's route to the sea.
Now, not only does Iran have two routes of its own to the sea, but it doesn't even border with Syria and doesn't even have a naval presence in Syrian ports.
The guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
He says random stuff like this that are really just ridiculous and wacky.
And so I think this all indicates to us that while he is playing politics and shifting to the center and trying to be more like Obama because he doesn't want to say anything too out there or pro-war and lose votes, he also has stacked up his advisory with neocons and retired military officials, and he also says really weird things that might lead down the road to some really weird foreign policies.
Right, because he doesn't know anything.
I mean, that's the key here that what you're getting at is that like George W. Bush and John McCain, he could just as easily make the mistake that Muqtada al-Sadr and his al-Qaeda minions are training in Iran right now because he doesn't have the background to know that no dummy, Muqtada al-Sadr is the Mahdi army.
They kill al-Qaeda by putting drills in their eyeballs.
That's right.
That's right.
He doesn't know.
And you know what, it's virtually admitted because he tries to stick to the domestic issues and economics so much because that's where he feels his strengths are.
Which is hilarious, too.
Mitt Romney's strength is on the economy, because he clearly doesn't know the first thing about that either.
They asked him, well, what about Ron Paul's proposal for $1 trillion worth of cuts?
He says, oh no, that would take $1 trillion out of the economy.
And hurt us really bad.
He's an establishment Keynesian, if nothing else.
I mean, he's talking about spending.
That's what Bob Higgs calls a vulgar Keynesian.
Somebody who actually has never read Keynes or anything.
He just sort of kind of agrees with that stuff.
Yeah, I mean, he's talking about spending $5 trillion over the next 10 years and a lot of it increases in the defense budget.
And he's also not talking, he's talking about keeping taxes the way they are.
In terms of actual policies that might have any effect on the economy that is separate from what the Obama administration has been doing, I really don't see it.
I guess part of what we were talking about there before with the centrist calculation of these two guys is that, well, I mean, I don't know.
I guess anti-war sentiment is not strong enough that it actually hurts Obama.
That's the way he's calculated it.
The Rahm Emanuel on his shoulder telling him what to do says, don't worry about the liberals, they'll vote for you anyway.
But Romney is hearing from his pollsters that you better tone it down, man, because the American people really are finally getting sick and tired of this.
I mean, they don't really care that much, but they're not for it anymore.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, I just blogged about, this morning I blogged about a Pew poll, which did not, you know, wasn't encouraging on every metric, but it did say something pretty interesting, which was that 63% of Americans want the U.S. to be less involved in the political changes in the Middle East.
Now, that's a pretty hefty majority, and if Romney and Obama are too outward in their intentions to maintain dominance over this region, continue to prop up dictatorships, continue to try and infiltrate the civil war in Syria, continue to try to play mafiadon in Egypt and what's going on there, if they're too outward in that, if they're too open about all that, the American people are going to be really turned off.
They want to have the focus be on them.
They want to vote themselves goodies.
They don't want America to be overly interventionist and so on and so forth.
But the truth of the matter is that the public is really disregarded completely in matters of foreign policy.
I mean, I cited in my piece a study from the American Political Science Review that tried to figure out who had the most influence, was it business, elite opinion, labor, general public, and so forth.
And what it said was, in general, the public opinion takes a backseat to business and experts, and that's really always been the case.
War is primarily a means of satisfying economic interests of the ruling coalition by gaining access to resources of other states and expanding their power and control over other states to make them do what they want.
And there's no benefit for the public in that.
And I think that after 10 years of war, the public are really sour on long interventions and messy conflicts in the Middle East.
Right, yeah, because it's their kids and their cousins that are the enlisted men that go and actually do the sacrificing in these things for the benefit of those few in charge.
Right.
Yeah, and are just used and abused in horrific ways, as we're constantly covering at your website and on this show.
All right, now, so another thing that I thought was notable was both of them seem to have the same laundry list.
I'm not exactly sure who's copying who.
Maybe they're both copying each other here.
But they talk about, well, you know, we have to protect religious minorities.
Total straight face here, right?
No objection from Bob Schaefer anywhere.
America's in the business of protecting religious minorities in the Middle East.
And then Obama also said, and this is more about that running to the center thing, and they both agreed with this, we have to do more to build up the economies of the Middle East, but no nation building.
That was Obama in one sentence, actually.
I think there was maybe a semicolon in there, but not a period, but he said it's America's responsibility to build up the economies of every state in the region over there, but not build them up.
Yeah, where in the world Obama or the State Department or the Defense Department get these magical powers of building up economies elsewhere?
Of course, America destroying the economies of the Middle East is what caused this Arab Spring rebellion against all their sock puppet dictators in the first place.
And this goes with your comment about them actually caring about religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East.
I mean, the facts couldn't be clearer on this.
The Shia population in Saudi Arabia has been itching for some reforms for decades, and Saudi Arabia is the biggest recipient of U.S. money and weapons in the Middle East, with the exception of Israel.
The Kurds in Syria have been getting the shaft since the 90s and all that ethnic cleansing that went on with U.S. support.
The Kurds and the Shia in Iraq were getting the shaft back when we were supporting Saddam.
I mean, we can go on and on like this throughout the Middle East.
The U.S. is not in the business of protecting religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East.
And it's not in the business, and never has been and never will be, of promoting good economies in the Middle East.
It's in the business of dominating the Middle East.
It's in the business of propping up dictatorships that will conform to U.S. interests.
That's what the U.S. is concerned with in the Middle East.
And so, yeah, this kind of rhetoric that we hear at the debate doesn't have any relation to reality at all.
Yeah, you know, I don't know, man.
I try to put myself in the head of the average American who figures there's probably a lot of problems here.
But, you know, mostly they mean well, right?
I mean, they are trying, as Romney said, to just, hey, we inherited the legacy of keeping the peace on the planet.
So we have to.
It's a hell of a duty, but it's an honor too.
And, you know, hey, maybe they sometimes, you know, for example, destroy all the Christians and Druze and Yazidis and other ethnic minorities in Iraq or something like that.
But, you know, those are the breaks.
But they're not it's not like they don't care.
And, you know, that's what we got to get over.
Right.
What point do you make to explain it?
No, really, they don't even mean well.
You know, one thing I want to get in here and I want to make sure that we have time to talk about it, because it's really amazing.
It plays into what we're talking about with the public of one mind and the public hearing one set of facts from the politicians and the reality being much different and what the politicians actually do being much different.
And that's on Afghanistan.
And this occurred with the vice presidential debate as well.
Both candidates now scream from the mountaintops about how we're going to leave completely in 2014.
Both of them said this last night.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has already agreed in principle with the Karzai government in Afghanistan that we will maintain a contingent force there that will train Afghans and raid the houses of Afghans suspected to be Taliban militants or insurgents or anything like this.
And use Afghanistan as a launch pad to drop bombs on northwest Pakistan and so on and so forth.
That force will be anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 regular U.S. troops, and that's not including the security contractors, thousands of which, by the way, we still have in Iraq that are training their security forces.
That contingent force is set to probably stay until 2024.
That's another decade of war.
And by the way, we shouldn't be fooled that this will lead to some sort of stabilized military presence of the kind that we have in Japan or Korea.
What's actually going to happen is that the Taliban insurgency, which has stayed strong and viable throughout the occupation and attacks from the world's most refined and elite military in the world, they will continue to fight the occupiers and fight against the Kabul government, which is propped up by the occupiers, so long as there are any Western Jews on that ground.
The insurgency will continue.
That means the war will continue.
That means people will continue to die.
And that contingent force will not be a stabilization factor.
It will be in continuation of the war, the war that both politicians of both major parties in this country swear to the American people will be over in two years.
And that's one of the real problems with this debate as well.
Again, we're seeing a reality, and then we're seeing a BS line that is constantly pushed to the American people, because the liars in those seats last night wanted them to hear a certain version of the facts, which has no relation to reality.
Yeah, well, and the thing is, that just isn't going to work.
You try to leave some small contingent of guys behind in Afghanistan, they're going to get killed.
You know, you have to have enough guys to shoot enough fire outwards that they can at least last long enough for the helicopters to come and get them.
You know what I mean?
And yeah, you're right, the Taliban hasn't gone away, and that just means that when the bulk of the American troops do go away, they're coming back to Kabul sooner or later.
I mean, when America intervened in that war, it was the eve of the Northern Alliance commies' complete and total and utter defeat at the hands of the Taliban.
And so, yeah, with America on their side, they could turn that whole thing around, but only as long as America's there helping them hold the line.
Simple as that.
That's right.
And the American people are under complete delusions, thanks to our lying political leaders, that this war is going to end at the end of 2014.
They're playing politics with life and death, and they're playing politics with what actually is actual U.S. policy and not just what they think the American people want to hear.
And you know what?
Let me ask you this, because I'm actually confused on this point.
I was under the impression that Obama had only always ever said that the beginning of the end of the war will be in 2014.
You know, we'll draw down some troops in 2012, but in 2014, that'll be the beginning of the end.
But he never said when the end of the end was supposed to be until just, I think, off the cuff, in answer to a question from a reporter or somebody at a town hall or something recently, he, I thought, just sort of stumbled and blew it and accidentally had said we'll have all the troops out by the end of 2014.
But now I think I hear even Mitt Romney saying, yes, by the end of 2014, they'll all be gone.
Am I missing something?
Well, you're right to say that right now, as I said, both candidates say explicitly we will leave at the end of 2014.
They may have in their mind that a contingent of forces will stay.
When did they start saying that, though?
Am I right that that was only Obama just kind of invented that part, that specific?
Obama's been saying that since the height of the surge.
If you listen to technocrats, if you listen to high-level State Department and Defense Department officials, if you listen to Obama's advisors, who sometimes are more candid about this kind of stuff as opposed to playing politics, they all say, yes.
Michelle Flourney, who was an Obama administration advisor and was high in the Defense Department, back a year and a half ago said that 2014 will merely be an inflection point.
Right.
So these are the types of people that have been saying all along, yes, we will stay with the contingent force going forward, probably for the unforeseeable future.
We reported at antiwar.com about a year ago that 2024 is a more reasonable date to expect U.S. troops to leave, and even then they'll probably leave a small contingent force.
But, yes, the technocrats have been saying openly and admitting that the war will go on.
The politicians, who are always, in everything they do, in every word that comes out of their mouth, pandering to the public, they, including Obama, have said that this will end in 2014.
I guess that's why I didn't hear it, was just because I knew it was a bunch of crap and I was paying attention to the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, who was admitting the truth.
Exactly.
You're an informed citizen.
That's why I didn't work on you.
Yeah, well, there you go.
Unfortunately, I'm sort of stuck this way, John.
All right, well, now, so let me see here.
Oh, Barack Obama, also in the debate last night, told an outright lie that he just, unlike the weak and cowardly, sissy-pants Mitt Romney, who said he would have had to ask permission, Barack Obama did the tough-guy thing that he had to do, and disagreeing even with his own Vice President, and ordered that raid into Pakistan to get Osama bin Laden without even consulting the Pakistanis.
When, well, I guess you pick which is the lie.
His statement in his announcement that they got bin Laden, that the Pakistani intelligence agencies had helped him find him and kill him, or last night when he was pretending that they didn't.
But give me a break.
I'll sell you some land in Everglades if you really think that they didn't call General Kiani and say, hey, we need some help on this raid in your country.
Yeah, Obama's trying to, again, present himself.
He's beating his chest a bit here.
You can't lose.
Obama and his whole campaign thinks that you can't lose so long as you mention the killing of Osama bin Laden.
And so, yeah, he's going to mention that.
Romney apparently said earlier that, hey, we shouldn't worry about just one man.
Hey, if I was Obama, I'd be saying all the time, the Republicans let him go.
I mean, it took electing me to get him killed.
What are you going to do?
I mean, that's just true.
And, in fact, I think any American, even the most uninformed type American, might suspect that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld deliberately let bin Laden go at Tora Bora.
Oh, you have 10,000 marines 10 miles away, but instead you hire a goobledeen hecmatyar to get them for you, huh?
Yeah, and that wasn't the only lie, by the way, not to deflect.
But in Iraq, the big gaffe was that Romney actually called Obama out on the lie that he's been selling in his campaign that he ended the Iraq war.
And Romney was like, wait a second, you wanted a status of forces agreement with a large contingent force of thousands of forces to stay, and you just couldn't get it because the Iraqis said no and kicked your ass on the way out.
Yeah, and Obama just kept lying and sputtering and interrupting.
I didn't watch it again.
I just read the transcript this morning.
But that's where the transcript gets really long and thin, as Obama's just trying to interrupt him and prevent him from being able to, you know, push the coherent thought on that point, because it's so true.
He's so busted.
I also wanted to point out about Obama's glee in talking about reducing Iran's economy to shambles.
Is that just me that immediately I picture somebody's grandmother is now starving?
That's what that means, to ruin a country's economy, to bring it to shambles.
Somebody's grandmother now is going hungry, and he's just bragging, like, see how tough I am?
Exactly.
Yeah, he's beaten his chest again, as F.A. Hayek made clear in all of his writing.
To refer to the economy is simply to refer to people, because people are doing the exchanging.
People move the economy.
That's what their interactions and their activities are what an economy is.
And when Obama brags that he's crippling the Iranian economy, in layman terms what that means is I'm crippling the Iranian people.
I'm pulling out.
I'm kicking their knees down.
I'm starving them.
I'm taking away their medium of exchange so they can't buy meat and rice for dinner.
I'm blocking imports and exports coming in and out of Iran, which include, by the way, medicines that are needed for cancer treatment and treatment for hemophilia, multiple sclerosis, and things like this.
A nongovernmental charity organization in Iran that represents six million patients said that the Obama administration's policies of economic warfare in Iran are putting millions of lives at risk.
Millions.
That's what he's talking about.
He didn't mention, by the way, that the sanctions have had precisely zero effect on the policies of the Iranian government.
Exactly zero.
They have not changed policy one iota, but what is happening is that Obama is making the population suffer, and that kind of bravado, that kind of chest-thumping bragging about making millions of people in Iran suffer needlessly in a cruel form of collective punishment, somehow the Democratic president gets away with bragging about things like that.
And that's what's really insane, and Obama voters aren't about to come to grips with what he's actually talking about there.
Right.
I mean, if he's doing it, it must really be necessary, I guess.
That's about all you need.
So we're like, well, of course Saddam Hussein was in on 9-11, or else why would we be attacking him then, dummy?
That's the kind of decisions people make, man.
They just work it out for themselves, it doesn't matter if it's right.
Just try to make the facts fit somehow, you know?
Yeah.
So here's what I was hoping you were going to say when I was asking about how do you show people that it's really not just that they suck at this, they really don't even mean well in the first place.
I was hoping you were going to go the direction, I guess I could have led you down that path a little better, but look at the consequences of the Libya war for Libya and for Mali and for Syria, where Libyan fighters are fighting on the side of Ayman al-Zawahiri and Obama, the president of America and al-Qaeda in Syria, I guess.
And there's Bob Schaefer hosting the whole thing, and everybody just pretends, and nobody's going to mention the irony whatsoever.
Mitt Romney is going to sit there and accuse Barack Obama of allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to come to power in Egypt.
In the same breath, he's criticizing him for not doing enough to back al-Qaeda in Syria.
And then Obama's just going to come back with, hey, listen, I'm doing everything I can to back al-Qaeda in Syria, just like in Libya, and yeah, maybe we'll have to go to Mali, but never mind why, there's a problem in Mali.
And they just continue on.
And that's the part where, to me, the cynicism is just too blatant.
I mean, I know that there are a lot of Democrats, perhaps including sometimes even presidents, who tell themselves a lot of horrible lies.
But in this case, these guys know they're BSing.
It's just like when John McCain and Barack Obama and Tom Brokaw all stood there in 2008 and pretended that Russia attacked Georgia without any mention whatsoever of Georgia's invasion of South Ossetia and attack on the Russian peacekeepers there.
And they all looked at each other and they all told each other silently, okay, we're going to go ahead with the lie on this and no one's going to bring up the actual facts of the case.
Oh, okay, good.
Let's continue the discussion based on the lie then.
And they all knew they were lying because they're damn liars.
Yeah, I think there's one critical factor here that allows this entire parade of lies to go on.
Bob Schaefer.
Oh, no.
Exactly.
That's precisely right, Bob Schaefer.
Bob Schaefer, who's enough of a hawk to be completely blinded by his imperial biases.
When he was talking to Ron Paul last year in an interview on his show, Ron Paul said the 9-11 terrorists were motivated by U.S. foreign policy and not by our coveted freedoms.
And Bob Schaefer, his eyes almost rolled in the back of his head.
He couldn't understand it.
You mean America is blamed for 9-11?
He didn't know what was happening.
This is a man who speaks to millions of people with his broadcast journalism every week and who has tens of millions of people watching the debate last night.
And this moron of a journalist who doesn't know the basic fact about 9-11, that the terrorists are motivated by brutal U.S. foreign policy and not because they hated our freedoms or because we shop at the mall or watch Jersey Shore or whatever kind of baloney the Bush administration was trying to sell it.
The CIA, the State Department, the FBI, all of the academic literature ever written on the subject, including al-Qaeda members themselves, all of them are in consensus that this 9-11 attack was motivated by U.S. foreign policy.
And Bob Schaefer, who talked to tens of millions of people a week, had no clue and actually pressed Ron Paul against it.
Ron Paul said, I'm mentioning the 9-11 Commission, the State Department, the Defense Department.
These are the people that said these things, not me.
And Bob Schaefer couldn't believe it.
So this is who we have moderating our debate.
We shouldn't be surprised that the two politicians get away with such lies.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that Greenwald's always writing about is, you know, when it comes down to it, this isn't his words, it's mine.
But it's not conspiracy, it's consensus.
And in fact, it's consensus of ignorance.
I mean, you know, if you're Candy Crowley, you learn the news from watching the news, not from reading it, right?
If you're Jim Lehrer, you learn the news just by hosting your little news anchor show and sitting in your little makeup chair and whatever.
They don't do like you do, John, and sit there obsessing and reading for hours and hours and hours every day from sources all over the world and cross-checking all these facts and trying to get it right and hyperlinking to your proof and all these things.
They just don't do that.
They've got a, they're TV performers, you know, and same thing with these politicians.
John McCain, he doesn't know the first thing about, you know, Mokhtar al-Assad or whatever.
He never sat down and read a thing about him.
At most, he heard Dan Sonor describe him, but he couldn't remember it.
You know, he just, you know.
You know, I'm reminded of Chomsky, Noam Chomsky's work on manufacturing consent and his analysis of the media.
He says, you know, the smart way to keep people passive and obedient and stupid and ignorant is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow a very lively debate within that spectrum.
So we have two supposed sides here, and they're very vigorous in their views, and they fight and fight and fight, but they're in a very narrow spectrum.
So if you get a little bit outside that spectrum, you start to learn the facts.
You start to understand the fact that the United States, for example, is the greatest terrorist state in the world, as opposed to boogeymen like Iran and North Korea.
And you start to learn something about the world.
But you have to get outside of that spectrum.
And when people have jobs, when they have to wake up and, like, take their kids to school and, you know, fill up lunch boxes and so forth, they don't have the time or the inclination to pay tons of attention to complex societal issues and the innards of foreign policy.
So what they do is they take shortcuts, and they go, well, what are my options?
Well, I have the Republicans and the Democrats.
Now, in a broad-spectrum view, they both agree on nearly everything.
In a narrow-spectrum view, which is what Americans pay attention to, these are, you know, lively debates with a lot of difference of opinion, and the American people have the illusion of feeling like they have a choice.
And that's one of the problems, not just with our media and our journalistic class, but our whole country right now.
Yep.
Afraid so.
The one silver lining is that it's so bad that more and more people are seeing through it every day.
They're reading John Glaser at Antiwar.com.
Thank you very much for your time, as always.
Great talking to you.
All right.
Bye, Scott.
Everybody, that's the great John Glaser.
Antiwar.com is where he writes.
Antiwar.com/blog and news dot Antiwar.com.
In foreign policy debate, Romney capitulates, agrees with Obama, and vice versa, of course.
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