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 hacked.
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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, you guys, introducing Peter Van Buren, author of We Meant Well, about his time at the State Department during Iraq War II, which is excellent.
He also wrote Hooper's War, which is a novel of World War II Japan, but really, it's about our time, of course.
He's no longer to be found on Twitter, but you can find him regularly in the American Conservative Magazine and at his own great website, WeMeantWell.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
Thank you, Scott.
I also haven't been thrown off of Facebook yet, if people prefer to interact with me there.
It's still early in the day, but as we record, yes.
Right, okay, well, that's good to know.
Okay, so you've got this great piece at TAC about the Mueller thing, but that raises a very important question of where have you been?
Because I know that you were pretty upset about the whole Twitter persecution thing there, man, and I could see why you might just throw up your hands and maybe give up.
But then I thought, you know what, maybe you're writing a new book or something.
Maybe I should ask you where you've been.
In fact, I've had a working draft for some time of a book called Post-Constitutional America.
And it posits that the United States has been through three great eras.
The pre-constitutional era, where we were a British colony and subject to the abuses of power of the king.
The post-constitutional era, which lasted from the drafting of the document up through September 11, 2001, where we struggled to create a system of government that would work for us.
And as imperfect as it was, it represented the idea of progress, if not always the practical.
From September 11th forward, we've entered the post-constitutional era, where we've thrown all that stuff out that Bill of Rights, and instead now simply shout at one another as a substitute.
The problem is that it's a story that has a very difficult ending, because so many things are still happening around us.
So we'll hold off on that.
Maybe I'll release it as a manga or something someday.
But the idea of where have I been is an excellent question.
I've been quieter recently, mainly because it has become more and more difficult to write.
I don't know how to say this without giving myself too much credit.
I'll just say intelligently and hope that people will forgive me if I sound arrogant.
It has gotten to the point where if I try to write something explaining what's going on, it's seen as pro-Trump, which I'm not.
I didn't vote for him.
If I try to write something negative about Trump, it's seen as not enough, and therefore somehow pro-Trump.
If I don't dumb it down with lots of funny lines about orange Cheeto Jesus, and petulant children, and all these silly things about Trump's penis, if I don't take what I hope would be a thoughtful look at what's going on in the Korean peninsula and leaven it with personal insults about Trump and claims on every other line, but you know you can't trust Kim Jong-un, and you know Trump is just a jerk who's getting fooled, or yeah, this is all really about him building the first water slide in Pyongyang.
If I don't do that, I find that I have a hard time getting things published, that editors simply will say no thank you.
And so it's difficult to keep shouting when you're not sure people are listening.
So unless and until I have a way to say something that I feel is as intellectually honest as I'm capable of, I just keep my mouth shut these days.
Well, I can't pay you, but I'll run pretty much anything you want to write for Antiwar.com, and you'll at least get clicks and eyeballs that way.
And to be clear, you guys have.
Antiwar.com is one of the few places that continues to publish me good and bad, on my part I mean.
In other words, most recently, for example, I wrote a piece trying to look at what was really going on on the Korean peninsula in terms of diplomacy.
And I came to the conclusion that, for better or worse, there's one of the qualifiers for you, the petulant orange child Cheeto Jesus has facilitated progress between the two Koreas, independent of whatever the United States is doing, by basically breaking a logjam where the United States stood in the way of North and South working together.
Things are happening over there.
And in the article, I listed them quite specifically, very concrete steps that both Koreas are taking, as well as some softer steps about just the whole process on opening up.
And I was turned down by a number of publications, websites, whatever, that I normally write to, because basically it appeared to be congratulatory toward Trump or praising Trump or giving him credit for something.
And they just wouldn't publish it.
Antiwar.com was, I think, unless somebody's picked it up otherwise, the only place other than my own blog that would publish something like that.
Which is crazy.
Which is crazy.
And there have been other pro-realism takes that have been published by The Nation and by, of course, Jon Pfeffer takes a great line on this.
Tim Shorrock takes a great line on this.
So it's not completely impossible to get those kind of views published by the liberals these days.
Although, I don't know, maybe they do have more Cheeto stuff in there.
I can't really say.
I think so.
But maybe they're seen as more liberal and people are more worried that you really do like Trump or some kind of thing.
Because, I mean, you're right, though, that obviously the narrative here, and this is something that those of us who have been against the empire in this century before Trump got here, have been frustrated with.
The narrative that all of the worst things about Trump are because of what an outsider he is, rather than being of the state.
And so then, therefore, you have everybody, the liberal opposition to the Republican Party, the current Trump-led Republican Party, is all based around the premise of rallying around the CIA and the State Department and the military in order to protect us from the elected government.
Which is reminiscent to me of the mistake that the Egyptian liberals made.
After they and the conservative Muslim Brotherhood overthrew the dictatorship, they just kept protesting and kept protesting after the Muslim Brotherhood won the election.
Instead of then saying, all right, now we have a chance for something like a two-party system where sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, they urged the police state, the military dictatorship, to come back to protect them from the right.
And it seems like that's the mistake.
That's the whole frame of reference about what's bad about Trump here, is what an alien he is to the system.
And so thank God for the system.
And I don't know how you're ever going to shake the liberals loose of that till he's gone, honestly.
I don't know.
I mean, I think we see that manifested in a near wholesale abandonment of history.
The great national tragedy, the number of journalists in mourning last week over the passing of George H.W. Bush.
And prior to that, the great welling of tears that arose across America when John McCain passed away.
You know, these are perfect examples of this ahistorical trend that you've identified there, where we essentially revisit, rewrite history as a way of reflecting our current thoughts about Donald Trump.
Now, it seems kind of silly that we have to remind people that looking at history through the lens of our current passions is a very, very bad idea.
But that's in fact what's going on here.
It has become, and in my own writing, the same thing.
It has become impossible to attempt to objectively look at the events of the Obama years anymore.
Because every single thing you write about Obama is viewed through the lens of what people think about Trump.
At some point, doctors may realize that it's possible for someone to die of hypocrisy.
I think I'm patient, number one.
To see the New York Times bleeding page after page about the horrors of the war in Yemen now, because it's Trump's war.
Whereas we all know how strongly they supported that when it was Obama's war.
Samantha Power, who was one of the most bloodthirsty, along with Susan Rice, members of the Obama administration who promoted the war in Yemen, is now on Twitter explaining that it's crime against humanity.
People who ignored or praised the relationship of the Bushes with the Saudis for decades are suddenly shocked to find that the Saudis can be naughty people, simply because they now see it as an anti-Trump thing.
It's very difficult to talk objectively about, say, the last 50 years of American-Saudi relations when you've got to explain to people that they're acting in the most hypocritical way possible and viewing things.
How do you go forward?
The Saudi murder of this journalist is not even in the top 10 of the most terrible things they have done.
Honestly, on all of those, you're absolutely right about the hypocrisy, but all the cases that you cited were ones where they're finally getting it right now.
It could be worse than that, in a sense.
Now, finally, the New York Times is covering it, and Nicholas Kristof is even saying...
May he smoke turds in hell.
I'm sorry?
I said, may Nicholas Kristof smoke turds in hell.
Oh, yeah, no, he's the worst one of them.
But the point is, he said in the paper the other day that, look, we are using hunger and starvation as a weapon in this thing deliberately, and that's not okay.
When that message fails to seep through to Nicholas Kristof is when the war continues forever.
At some point, we have to have some kind of break inside the establishment from continuing this.
But I hear what you're saying, obviously, about the Obama thing, but I guess this whole time, I've been yearning for the liberals to find a way to come slinking back to the anti-war movement, and never mind the hypocrisy.
The hypocrisy I hated was when they shut up when Obama was doing it.
I don't mind that much when they start complaining about Trump, if you understand what I mean.
They need to be told that they're right, and then we need to elaborate further about why they're even more right than they know about those Saudis or whatever the case is, right?
And if I am in a glass-half-full mood, and I only do that if it's vodka, if I'm in a glass-half-full mood, I can see your point.
It's finally people are coming around to see the realities of Yemen, for example.
The problem comes is when you take a longer view of these things.
In other words, Trump is someday not going to be the president anymore, whether that's tomorrow or six years from now.
And if you blame all these things on Trump, then there's a possibility, a likelihood maybe, that the day Trump is gone, you just announce everything's been fixed.
And the Beto Hillary team that takes over in 2020 can go right back into Yemen because Trump's gone, it's all forgiven, and we go back to business as usual because the tumor has been taken out.
This is what's happened.
But this is all why you need to be writing more and constantly, is because you do set a great example for just disregarding all of that garbage and sticking with the policy.
And what counts is, for example, in Yemen, the USA is perpetrating a genocide.
I mean, you call it crimes against humanity.
That's exactly what it is all right.
Just like with the torture and the invasion of Iraq, this is going to come to define the United States of America.
We're the ones who inflict famines on people deliberately.
I mean, that is the kind of reputation that this country doesn't need.
It's already bad enough as it is.
And never mind that.
I'm trying to make this selfish for people to understand how bad the thing is.
So, anyways, I forgot what I was going to say.
Something about how, basically, at all costs, people have to stick to the policy and the problem.
The Saudis, the Lakhids, whatever you want to talk about with real substance to it.
And ignore all this partisanship.
Because, like you're saying, the next is going to be Beto, who is Israel first as Sheldon Adelson, anyway.
And so, we're not going to see any better policy out of him or out of Chelsea Clinton or whoever.
So, people need to know that there are those like yourself who consistently have their eye on the ball and take care of getting these messages right on all these policies.
No matter who's in power.
You know?
That's the lesson of history.
That's why we study history.
It's not whataboutism.
It's learning from past actions and mistakes.
I mean, when I give my rap, somebody invites me to give a speech.
My speech is about how this is all Carter and Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush and Obama and now Trump's fault.
All equally.
There's no favor there.
They're all just absolutely as guilty as each other for getting us into this mess, for killing millions of civilians and for making everything worse.
President after president after president doubling down on his predecessors' mistakes.
Of course, we can go back to McKinley or Wilson or whoever you want to, but just in the Middle East intervention era.
I mean, hell, FDR.
But, you know, the Carter Doctrine is a great place to start.
And there's no reason for anyone to have to want to prefer any of those presidents to each other at all.
Anyway, so I hear about your, I hear your frustration, but I think that's why to keep writing, not why to throw your pen down.
All right.
Fair enough.
So yeah.
So now let's talk about what you wrote here, because I think it's really important.
Because again, I think there's just no question.
Honestly, I could convict him and I'm no lawyer, but Donald Trump is guilty of crimes against humanity.
And it's true that he inherited all seven of his wars from Barack Obama, who expanded from Bush's two and a half or three.
And yet he has escalated all of the wars.
We bombed Afghanistan more this year than any year since 2001 and 2002, starting with the origin of the war.
He sent infantry into Somalia.
He's escalated the genocide in Yemen that, again, yes, he inherited from Obama.
Still fighting on both sides of that war.
He's expanding the mission in Syria against the Shia, not against the Islamic State or al-Qaeda there, which not that I'd be for that either.
Iraq war three and a half still raging in Western Iraq.
And so, but meanwhile, he's being accused of this whole Russia treason thing, which I'm just not impressed by at all, but maybe I'm wrong.
There's been a lot of new developments lately.
So here, pardon me, let me get the title of your article right.
It's Mueller's investigation is missing one thing, a crime.
Well, are you sure you're not overlooking something there?
Because look at all this smoke, Peter.
I know it's very hard to see through all that smoke.
And when you do kind of get a clear line of sight, what you see is that there are three strands here.
That need to be looked at independently and very, very briefly.
And it's going to go into more detail in the article.
And on my blog, we met.
Well, I'm going to have a longer piece about this tomorrow.
It's a lot of excerpts that didn't fit into the piece that people will read on the American conservative.
But basically, you start off with what we call Russiagate, the concept that was originated by the Democratic Party through paid for opposition research done by Chris Steele that basically made undocumented, unproven claims that Donald Trump is under the influence of Putin, that either through blackmail and the so-called P-tape and or sweetheart deals for property real estate in Moscow, that Putin is controlling Trump or influencing him or something along those lines.
There's simply no evidence of that.
And the most recent events in Russiagate, and we'll use that a short term here, are simply that Trump's organization, which had been pursuing business in Russia for many years, as had many other American and other foreign businesses, none of which is illegal, continued to pursue business deals in Russia five months longer than we all knew about originally.
Now, I don't think anybody was out there tracking this day, by day, but anyway, we found out through Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, his guilty pleas, that this went on a few months longer.
It didn't result in anything.
There were no deals made.
There was no money exchange, no contract signed.
And Trump has conceded that this much is at least factually correct.
Is that right?
Yeah, this is all well known.
I mean, the only new edge of this is that it went on for four or five months longer.
But I mean, he's conceded that much, correct?
That we knew several years ago.
I believe so.
Yeah, I mean, I think I saw a tweet where he was saying that essentially this was true, but that it still didn't matter.
And it still doesn't matter because none of it was immoral or illegal.
None of it was anything that was unknown to the electorate.
And none of it proves any connection between what's being claimed.
That sitting down and talking about a business deal equals Putin has control over Trump in some way.
Those two things have never been connected in any way and they still haven't been.
Now, I realize it's only been two and a half years since the investigation began.
And one of your listeners is out there somewhere saying, but just you wait.
OK, we'll keep waiting.
The article that I wrote this week for American Conservative is a follow up to one I wrote 10 months ago where I said basically the same thing.
10 months ago, I said, as things stand today, there's no evidence proving any kind of active causal relationship between Russia and Trump where one causes the other to do something or influences the other.
10 months ago, I said that.
And this is an article saying, well, it's been 10 months and a lot of stuff has happened and we're no further ahead on that so-called proof.
All right.
Now, on the Trump Tower thing, the first thing I heard that might be a credible accusation, at least I'd like to hear an answer to it, is the idea that, well, since he lied and said that he stopped seeking the deal before the primary season started, that just the fact that he lied at all meant that the Russians had something over him, that he was now compromised by them and vulnerable.
Well, let's, I mean, does that make any sense?
I mean, first of all, how big a deal is it?
I mean, it's no big deal at all.
I mean, to get caught in lying about something that doesn't matter is, you know, you get into the realm of metaphysics there.
You know, I remember when my kids were little, you know, they'd be standing next to a broken lamp holding a baseball and saying, you know, the dog we didn't own broke the lamp.
You know, it's like, yeah, that's a lie and lying is not a good thing.
But I'm pretty sure I know what really happened here.
Second, if the Russians, in fact, don't like Trump, either because of this, this most recent door buster or because of the pee tape or because of whatever you think it's because of, they're really pretty bad at using it.
The big stuff, the sanctions against Russia are all still in place.
NATO is still perched on Russia's borders.
NATO has actually expanded by adding Montenegro to the mix.
The United States has sold weapons.
And Macedonia.
And Macedonia.
NATO is the biggest threat.
The sanctions are still there.
The United States and Russia haven't cut any sweetheart deals that anyone can point to.
If the Russians have got all this influence on Trump, they have really not made very good use of it.
In fact, it's hard to find that they've done anything to their advantage other than a few, you know, otherwise, you know, if you've got all this influence and you don't use it, you kind of wonder if the influence is actually there.
Sorry, just one second.
Hey guys, here's two important books you need to read.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakhshani.
It's about how to run your technology company like a libertarian would.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakhshani.
And the title of this show, The Great Charles Featherstone is called Keslan Runs.
It's about the very near future.
I think you'll like it.
In fact, you link to this piece by Paul Sperry, who I sometimes agree with.
He does good work, certainly on the Saudis and stuff.
He's written great stuff for years.
And he really says that if you look closely at the Cohen filings and all that, it's at least exculpatory in a sense.
And the biggest part of that, I think was, well, Cohen on behalf of Trump was in direct communication with the Kremlin.
And then it turns out that that meant he emailed from the public email submission form on the Kremlin website that he didn't even have an email address for an important contact there and he writes all the examples of that being cited by others in the media as direct contact with the Kremlin, direct contact with the Kremlin and this giant thing they're making out of nothing again.
Doesn't it remind you of the run-up to Iraq War II where we got 16 reasons and none of them are true and none of them would be good enough even if they were true but it adds up to a million and so we're going.
I think one of the things that I think is safe enough to be allowed on Twitter has said that we haven't seen this purposefulness of the media since the run-up to Iraq War II where the media as one voice has taken on the task of telling us that Trump and Putin are one in the same.
And it comes down to this absolute and I'll give you an example of how you can play this.
As your listeners know because I remember we did a show about it I visited Iran in May and in order to visit Iran you have to interact with their government to get a visa and get approved.
So it is perfectly legitimate for someone who doesn't like me to run a headline that I've been in direct contact with Tehran.
And it's kind of not incorrect but it kind of isn't very truthful in any significant sense.
And so what happens is is that Michael Cohen who's representing a multi-billion dollar corporation who does real estate deals around the world was talking to some people in Russia for many years about the idea of building a hotel there.
That gets translated into the idea that Michael Cohen is in direct contact with the Kremlin.
And it's simply not an accurate, complete, useful way of looking at this.
It's essentially the tabloidization of everything.
And you know it would be a little bit I mean slightly more forgivable if essentially the story was true.
Right?
But instead it's nothing but a pile of a lot of these.
And speaking of which let me ask you this.
Have you seen any of the WikiLeaks?
Well of course we haven't seen any of that any evidence.
All we've seen is a finding by three of however many intelligence agencies we have one of which only had moderate confidence in their answer the NSA.
The others were the politicized CIA and FBI who clearly took a stance in this last election.
You know that's all we've got to go on.
Everything else there's been no evidence shown.
The FBI and the federal government has come to these conclusions without ever physically examining the hardware that was hacked and I realize there's questions about that but just to say well we don't need to look at it it's cool.
You can't just kind of impeach your president based on that information which seems to be what this supposedly is all aimed at.
You can't accuse people of treason formally or informally so no I haven't seen anything that's conclusive.
I have seen a lot of noise that will never be satisfied.
Mueller has indicted whatever 30 people in Russia for this hacking but none of those indictments will ever be seen again and for those people out there who haven't gone to law school or lack access to a dictionary an indictment is a statement by the prosecutor where he or she is trying to make the case seem as clear and unambiguous as possible but take a look at that word prosecutor.
There's a hidden clue right in there.
Their job is to prove the crime.
Their job is not to produce in the form of an indictment or a report or whatever a independent fully all sides reviewed look at something.
It's one-sided.
It's meant to be one-sided.
In our adversarial legal system the prosecutor takes one side and says hell and here are the reasons and the defense if they're ever given the opportunity takes the other side which says no no this guy is completely innocent.
If anyone out there has ever served jury duty or seen anything beyond TV that's how it works and so all these journalists who are rewriting passages out of Mueller's indictments whether they're about the so-called hackers or whether they're about whatever the flavor of the week is absolutely ridiculous.
It's meant to be one-sided it's obviously one-sided it has to be one-sided the prosecutor wouldn't be doing his job if it wasn't one-sided but yet to state well the U.S. government has made clear that Trump and Cohen worked together on these payments the U.S. government hasn't done that a prosecutor whose job it is to present evidence against one side is being contested and simply to repeat them as now facts is out of the range of reality the same thing with these intelligence findings a finding is simply the best conclusion that can be drawn on the available evidence at that time and in the intelligence world sometimes you need to do that you know the president is going to negotiate X, Y and Z with France next week what is our best finding at this moment in time on how the French see that problem you know you can't wait for the final results the meeting is next week and our best conclusion with moderate confidence is that the French position will be blah blah blah so this finding that is now what more than two years old if I'm to you yeah more than two years old simply represented the best guess of the evidence available at that time and that's assuming there were no politics involved in it I hasten to mention that those same findings concluded that there were weapons of mass destruction strewn across the landscape in Iraq that we'd practically be tripping over them in parking lots after the invasion so these findings can oftentimes be wrong yeah well especially ones by James Clapper I mean now the people who were supposedly all objective you know when they wrote these findings James Comey the other day actually just in my neighborhood made a I didn't get to go because I had to use the restroom but James Comey said we need to resist Trump and vote against vote him out of office with our with all of our breath you know he the idea that he's always been objective but you know John and Clapper and all these other guys who are now commentators on TV talking about the end of democracy the idea that these partisan views were developed you know only recently is again it strains one's assessment of human nature to say that these guys once were completely non-partisan and now are completely partisan but I want to go back to Mueller in the article because the Russiagate thing is fading completely though the media puts it forward as a crime that's been committed that Trump has to exculpate himself from in fact reality works the other way nope you have to prove something happened and yes yes yes I know tomorrow could be the day but it's been two and a half years and nobody has proven Jack and unless and until they do I'm going to say there is no collusion for lack of a better word now what's come out in this last day of Mueller findings is now a whole new thing which is campaign finance violations we sort of knew about this for a long time we've all been fapping off to Stormy Daniels constant pictures for a couple of years now but the idea is that now it's the headline issue it's the top of the pile it's the thing that's going to bring Trump down Southern District of New York attorneys are going to indict Trump yada yada yada with pointing out that Mueller investigation which started out looking at questions of treason is now waist deep in technicalities of campaign finance law involving keep quiet payoffs to two bimbos who allegedly slept with Trump parenthesis my god if you slept with that guy you deserve all the money but that's separate that's a separate story the idea here is that we've now morphed we've gone full circle on this where we're no longer talking about what mattered and we're now down into some extremely archaic campaign finance law questions and we we won't have time to go into all the details here and I didn't have space in the article American Conservative so people are interested might be interested my blog we meant well.com on starting on Wednesday the 12th we'll have all this laid out but essentially in order for any of this to matter what supposedly what happened is Stormy Daniel slept with Donald Trump and Michael Cohen on behalf of Trump gave her a bunch of money to not talk about it now first of all paying people to stay quiet things I cannot talk about in any way that it's not illegal it happens what's supposedly illegal about this is the characterization by the prosecutor that that money was not a legal payoff for a non-disclosure agreement but in fact a campaign donation designed to influence the flow of the campaign so in other words if Trump himself on camera took a bag of money and handed it to Stormy and said thanks for the roll take this money and never see me again bimbo there's nothing illegal about that what's where it becomes illegal is a if the money was used to influence the election then it becomes a campaign fund or a campaign donation and Trump directed Michael Cohen to do that so you've got to prove a bunch of stuff that no one to date has asserted other than perhaps Michael Cohen well and by influence the election that means prevent it from being influenced by these facts coming out which is you know getting into a pretty detailed argument about something that happened before the election that as you're saying they went fishing looking for treason yeah you know I can see the distaste for Trump as I'm saying guilty of crimes against humanity and all of that none of this is good or tasteful or elegant or one it's all bad your grandma would never be happy if you did any of these things but we're talking about overturning an election or you're going to have to convict Obama and Bush next to them and they can't do that and Bill too that's the funny thing you say because people would say well they're no longer president haha but it's important to realize that the things that are being talked about on Maddow et al about impeaching Trump over this these payoffs happened before Trump was even elected yeah well and look you talk about treason you got John Brennan running around using the T word but he was the guy who was the number one armor and financier of Abu Muhammad in Syria for five years straight yeah but at least he was working for the government when he did this Trump was a private citizen and they're going to impeach him as president over things he did before he was elected presidency I don't think they're going to I think they know they can't do that no no no but I mean that's what we're talking about here we're talking about retroactive actions this is a guy or if there weren't Twitter if Twitter wasn't available then things you wrote in your high school yearbook this is what this is Trump they want to impeach Trump over something he did before he was even president that's absurd that is absolutely outside of the boundaries of what impeachment was written into the Constitution it's a serious felony or that time he launched a genocide against the Iraqi people or that time he used white phosphorous weapons against children or anything like that I noticed this when I was a kid that Nixon was run out of town over a burglary and not over the secret war in Cambodia and it made perfect sense to be guilty of the latter crime whereas just Nixon and his henchmen were guilty of the former yeah whatever killing brown people has never been a problem for Americans now the other thing I want to throw in here very quickly is because it's getting a lot of press is the idea that well fine Trump is going to not be impeached he's going to be indicted by the president of the United States for the crimes well first of all we have a long history in the United States that we don't indict our sitting presidents and both sides do not want to throw that baby out with the bathwater here nobody wants every day that the southern district attorneys are going to seal the indictment and unveil it the day Trump leaves office well first of all no because if Trump leaves office in 2020 that means a Democrat won and they're not going to start their term of healing in 2020 all this goes away because there's a five-year statute of limitations on these so-called crimes and they occurred in 2016 so the point is nothing of this is going to come to anything and what here's the final phase the third thing so Russiagate nothing there this whole thing with the with somebody maybe Trump maybe Don Jr.whatever obstructed an investigation that ultimately found nothing and the Democrats are going to play ball with that for two years this is the essential element of a perjury trap a process crime a created crime that had there been no investigation concluded there was no Russiagate or anything but he obstructed it and therefore there's a created crime here manufactured essentially by the process of having an investigation and Democrats here you go please hold hearings on that for two years and that's what's going to happen here yeah well it is sort of like the Benghazi thing where you get this political foundation and credibility with the kind of populist talk radio right-wing audience by talking about by you know with his claims that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim born in Kenya and a usurper of John McCain's rightful throne and an illegitimate occupant of the Oval Office and the White House and so really if anybody deserves this it's him you know just for irony's sake not that the accusations that he was more substantive than his against Obama were you know the Democrats and the media and we still say them as separate things but essentially the majority of media in the United States has adopted the Democratic view on these issues has wanted from literally the first day of Donald Trump's election to put an asterisk next to his name that he was not legitimately elected we've gone through with the whole popular vote thing one of the stupidest means that has ever emerged in America that well Trump didn't win the popular vote so he's an illegitimate president we've been through that we've been through the Hamilton Electors we've been through the Emoluments Clause we've been through all sorts of silliness that I don't know there was something about how Trump was sworn in that wasn't right I don't know but the whole thing since his day of election has been an attempt to put an asterisk next to his name and claim he is an illegitimate president and that's what this is all going to be these two years of Benghazi like hearings and hey how'd that work out for the Republicans lessons of history this whole thing is going to oh wait and Ken Starr prosecuting Clinton how'd that work out for the Republicans it is so horrible and ironic though like what you're talking about and again it's because of how false the accusations are if they would only focus on the things he's really doing wrong he absolutely is a legitimate president again in the very same sense as his predecessors it's a war criminal I mean there are little babies dying in Yemen right now right now no matter when you're hearing this right now at the hands of the USA I mean man well the same week that the headline in the United States was kids in cages the United States accidentally blew up 30 women and children in Afghanistan with a misdirected cluster bomb that was you wasn't it that said that all the all the Republicans have to do is seed the Mexican immigrants with a few Palestinians and all the liberals will shut their mouths about all the refugees from now on yeah and if the Palestinians aren't available the Afghans or Iraqis or Yemenis you can blow up children in Afghanistan and it barely makes any news outlet never mind a mainstream one but if you put a kid in a cage you know this is the time for the democracy is threatened or something like that and you know Scott going back to our original statements in this session the very first things we talked about when we picked up the mic here today you know on shows like yours or antiwar.com because anyone else would have been screaming that I am a Trump supporter by poking holes in all this and I don't poke holes in the Mueller process because I support Trump I poke holes in the Mueller process because I try to see the bigger story here that the process is damaging to the United States and every president getting their own special prosecutor on Inauguration Day is not going to be good for us.
I disagree about that I just think the questions need to be pertinent not a bunch of garbage.
Well that's the second side of it which never gets talked about which only gets talked about here is that we ignore the larger crimes for example Robert Trump cheating on his wife who he married after cheating on his earlier wife you know we were focused so much on the political these special prosecutors if they actually did what their job was then they'd be a wonderful thing but instead and as long as we allow this to happen and support it we also allow we empower the empire because I can't say deep state we empower them to have free reign in so many other ways which are so much more devastating to the world to human beings to us as Americans to our soul Hey guys here's how to make money in Afghanistan everybody likes it it's got great reviews read the paperback the kindle or the audiobook and the EPUB is available at Barnes & Noble and everywhere else online as well Fool's Errand Time to end the war in Afghanistan and also I take donations if you go to scotthorton.org slash donate you'll see the kickbacks you can get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audiobooks or a silver commodity disc for $500 and you get a signed copy of Fool's Errand for $50 so that ain't too bad and anyone who donates by way of PayPal or patreon.com slash scotthorton show $5 or more per month and you'll get access to the private subreddit the new reddit group there at r slash scotthorton show and all new signers uppers to patreon also get two free audiobooks as well and yes I take every kind of cryptocurrency most especially horizon but also bitcoin and the rest of them too so check all that out at scotthorton.org slash donate and patreon.com slash scotthorton show thanks oh yeah and don't forget to shop amazon.com by way of my link at the bottom of my page at scotthorton.org you'll see it there well I'm telling you yeah the whole narrative about the cults in the room are here meaning a bunch of marine corps generals are here to veto any you know wild and crazy things that this you know again this horrible president who the worst thing about him is that he's an outsider that he's not that he hasn't been vetted and vetted through being a governor or a senator first and all this kind of thing and so thank god that mattis is here we cannot withdraw from syria no we cannot withdraw from somalia when on those three at least i think trump is worse than mattis on iran probably but at least on those three and the terror wars where trump says i want to give these up what are we even doing there they tell him hey man anything bad that happens there after we leave we're gonna blame on you and basically extort him into expanding but yeah and then but you have you know again the entire dissent uh thinking that thank goodness for the entire unelected executive branch of government and particularly the national security state bureaucracy to protect the permanent power establishment from this wacko who might do god knows what he might he might take it way too far in a place like iran or he might back down but either way they're not in somalia or something but either way they're not having it and of course he's just as happy to expand the war in somalia or in afghanistan so screw him too i mean he doesn't he could at least just leave it the same and not make it all worse but instead he says he wants to tell the military take the gloves off that way later when none of it works which he knows none of it'll work he'll at least be able to say hey i'm no lyndon johnson here micromanaging i'm no barack obama micromanaging i told the military do your best and the thing is you know is his m.o he said that before you know those actions are politically at worst kind of neutral nobody cares um they're barely reported on and they influence no significant voting blocs uh the media has no interest in those things um at best they actually appeal to some bloc voting blocs that we're being more aggressive we're taking the gloves off or something like that i mean there's people who still think that we didn't blow up enough stuff yet in afghanistan that's the problem we were too easy on them um or pick your favorite spot um and so that's the that's the thing and the more that we are all distracted by stormy daniels uh prodigious bosom then the less we we care um it's it's a stunning turn of events in the united states and it will represent damage to our nation long long long after trump is gone he's going to be a little blip on the political landscape whether he's in office like i said two more years or four more years or whatever um it's not going to matter what matters are 18 years of war in afghanistan which will continue under the next president whether it's beto or anybody else yeah which he just lost for senate i don't know how anybody thinks he's going to be the president yeah let's take a guy at least he ain't joe biden and that'll be our guy let's go with that oh and by the way he's a white guy you know that that's messaging that that's consistent who writes this stuff yeah i don't know hey listen i know you wanted me to let you go 20 minutes ago but let me go ahead and keep you 10 minutes more and talk about korea here 10 minutes more let's talk about korea okay so uh i don't know who's this president moon and what has he accomplished so far in his life president moon is the guy who wants to be the world leader who brings peace to the korean peninsula he has previous korean leaders have had lesser ambitions and even those ambitions have been held back by the united states who has refused to negotiate with the north koreans the last serious attempt we made at negotiations was was bill clinton uh back in 1999 and since then eight years of george bush and eight years of barack obama we have refused to negotiate with the north koreans in any substantive way meanwhile while we've been sitting on our hands the north has had a significant change of leadership kim jong-un has assumed uh leadership and has consolidated his power and has sent a number of signals yes i know we can't trust him um number of signals to the united states to south korea and to his allies in china that he is interested in some version of reform that he wants to explore this for those who actually have looked at a history book he envisions himself as as as some form of deng xiaoping and bringing north korea closer to the modern world these are all negotiable terms um he's got exactly one card to play and that is his nuclear weapons that is the only reason north korea isn't somalia or yemen or afghanistan or pick your favorite uh in in in the developing world the only reason that north korea exists and the only card kim has is nuclear weapons he can trade those away or make adjustments to his his military to return for things other than that he's got very little to bargain with he now has a government in south korea that wants to talk with him and whatever happens in north korea it's going to fall most heavily on south korea look at look at what happened in europe when the wall came down between the two germanys who got stuck paying for all that and cleaning up the mess in east germany it was mostly the west germans and so south korea is one of those nations that's going to suddenly take on the responsibility of bringing north korea into the 21st century with all that entails and they're ready to do that they've got a government now that wants to do that moon is secure enough at this time politically that he doesn't have to worry too much about his right wing flank flank that are picking at this and for the very first time since 1999 the united states is willing to not get overtly in the way in other words the united states is willing to participate in this process in some form currently our participation appears to be just standing to the side and letting the koreas talk to each other which is good it opens the door to the united states participating more directly in the process that's kind of where we are right now um you don't want to be too optimistic this is a lot of moving parts but to be absolutely pessimistic ignore the realities of what's going on the fact that trump uh in the summit was in june my goodness it's been six months since then anybody who thinks that major diplomatic things happen in six months is quite frankly an idiot it took years to negotiate obama's deal with iran and that didn't even involve actual nuclear weapons so this is going to take a long time it's going to have lots of small steps there's going to be forward steps backward steps what have you but it represents an opportunity that we may we we the world may find a way out of another one of the little tricky potential armageddons that exist out there um we can blow it so easily and it's very easy to if trump is a one term president this will this will end um whether it's a republican or a democrat neither will be willing to take the political risk that trump has and listen to the crap that's been shoveled at him so this is a two-year window that the koreas have to work inside of and hopefully come to some kind of of agreement they're going to have to earn every step forward they take because the media both the media in the world outside of korea the south korean media by the way has generally supported moon and generally understands what's going on and the reporting has been pretty good um the media outside of korea still thinks it's the cold war and still is absolutely convinced that you can't trust the north koreans you don't have to trust them we're talking about making deals not you know getting married here we're talking about you do this we'll do that or we'll do this then you do that and if you don't do it we're going to reverse ourselves and when reagan said trust but verify about the reds what he meant was pretend like you trust and have a smile and be polite but don't trust verify that's all that ever meant in the first place it's like a faucet you know i'm going to turn it on and water's going to come out but i can turn it off just the same you know we're not talking about one afternoon you know north korea is going to just you know fedex all its nukes to uh to us in the united states for disposal and then later that day all u.s. forces are going to withdraw from korea not that that even matters because the majority of our deterrent isn't in korea anyway it's in japan it's floating in the pacific it's flying in space so none of what you've read makes is any realism i mean the whole thing about well the u.s.has canceled some exercises we can restart them any time if those soldiers really need to practice loading their weapons and running around we can put them we can do that someplace else doesn't have to happen in in korea per se and as i mentioned the majority of what we would bring to war in korea is not ever in south korea never will be in south korea what's there is essentially a small trip wire force so in other words those exercises really are just provocative and think about how provocative they are from the north korean point of view right if the british were training like that on our northern border or something like that you know i don't know what you could compare that to sure the chinese occupying mexico and train in there you know and i say that having participated in those exercises i was in seoul at the american embassy for four years um i was involved in the evacuation of american citizens planning which would have been a major part of any conflict in in the koreas so i and because i'm a curious guy i always took advantage of that and sat in on all the meetings i could and overheard what i could and learned everything i can and you know i i can say with some certainty what these exercises are all about what's gained and lost by conducting them what can be reproduced uh either by electronic exercises or doing things in smaller pieces or what have you so you know when you get some 24 year old journalist out of brooklyn whose world knowledge consists of of knowing more about artisanal coffee than is healthy and you know he or she then writes an article that without these exercises the u.s. has given in to trump or given into kim and trump has sold america out i respectfully say i'm sorry you don't know what the hell you're talking about all right well so let me ask you this then yeah what has been the chinese role so far because i know kim went to china and met with i've assumed the bosses they're the very highest ones of them maybe president and told and was told what and then so then the secondary would be and now all of trump's ham-handed bumbling and sanctions and arrest of this cfo of this major chinese telecommunications firm who's the daughter of the founder and apparently a huge important personality in chinese power and politics there uh does that jeopardize the situation with the korea talks in other words is that yep is that a change america's situation as far as our relationship with china and incentives for how they're dealing with the north koreans in terms of what i assume is them encouraging kim to continue forward with this maybe they're even forcing him to what i while i absolutely hate the term 3d chess because as it's constantly applied to almost everything these days especially the muller investigation if it applies anywhere the chinese get the get the uh get the nod there they've got obviously a very complex relationship with the united states and they're i don't know if they're our largest trading partner outside of canada or whatever but i mean they're you know they're they're one of our largest trading partners they hold i think the second or third largest amount of of u.s.government debt overseas um our countries are obviously deeply intertwined economically um and we share political interests even though we we kind of make a lot of noise about the places we we don't agree so china and the u.s. have a very complex relationship and north korea is one smaller part of all that the value of north korea is as a buffer state the north korea sits between the chinese border and the american forces um the u.s. will not attack north korea because of china and china won't it's a buffer it's a buffer zone and that's very important it's a client state so it has some political value but essentially north korea is is not that important in chinese foreign policy except as a wedge or a tool that can be used to influence other areas of foreign policy whether or not issue a and this week it's this woman who got arrested but next week it'll be something else whether or not issue a is a big enough deal to pull north korea into the negotiations in other words the chinese say well look if you want our help with north korea you gotta you gotta give us something over here i can't answer that case by case um i doubt it's that big a deal in most in the instance as many instances as as the new york times would have us believe but it is a factor and north korea probably matters right now more to the united states than it does china it certainly matters more to the south koreans than it does to china um and the chinese will be using it as a wedge to get whatever they're they're looking for these days from south korea that's much more likely but it's it's a bargaining chip it's something that is negotiated i mean the chinese have their their issues and they've got to keep north korea as a buffer in some form doesn't have to be the form that it's in right now um they're not going to negotiate that away and you don't know you should never expect that i mean no one is realistically going to negotiate away their their their final hold card hey did they uh did the chinese government at the time encourage the uh kim jong-il government to go ahead and withdraw from the non proliferation treaty and start making nukes at the time i can't i don't know the answer to that i can guess that they were probably more kind of non committal than encouraging um i don't think they would discourage him but i again if you're china do you want a new a nuclear armed power on your border because what we what we know what we never talk about but i guess they didn't have the influence i mean because i agree with that it makes no sense to me that they would want that and yet they didn't stop but they didn't have the influence to tell kim to sit there and take it when john bolton was doing everything he could to provoke him to withdraw from the treaty yeah that'd be my guess but i'm just kind of spitball on that yeah you know i think if i was china and if i was south korea the thing i would be most worried about in terms of nuclear things in north korea which we don't talk about is not that they're going to launch this multi-missile attack i would be much more worried about a chernobyl situation where what must be fairly low standards of industrial safety in north korea um result in some kind of nuclear accident that becomes a global event well yeah i mean the russians built that uh young beyond reactor back in the 1970s or something i think and i'm gonna guess they probably cut a few corners and you know what yeah i mean gordon prather i hope i'm getting this right i'm pretty sure said that it was actually originally designed to run on highly enriched uranium like virtually weapons grade if not weapons grade uranium in the first place yeah so yeah not not exactly the 21st century design we'd like to see there yeah so there's there's a lot of things but i think that it's it's very shameful that the media has decided to label and the and the democrats um has decided to label active diplomacy on the korean peninsula as trump got played by kim um i hate that narrative so that's so transparently stupid and partisan and wrong that and especially because forget whether it's trump or anybody else america has no right to insist that north korea do anything other than not attack anyone else but even then we don't have the right to really lay down any ultimatums about that um but then secondly we have everything to give and we have absolutely nothing to lose that's right for making friends with north korea that's so everybody who disagrees with that is wrong and that's the end of that that's the end of that all right scott well i encourage uh folks who found our discussion about what's going to happen next in mueller to take a look at my blog we meant um tomorrow or wednesday the twelfth uh because i'm going to have like i said the outtakes the director's cut of the article that's appearing on the american i'm glad you mentioned that because that's the thing you often do and i'm not sure people are aware of that uh you can often find the longer better version of your articles at we meant well dot com and as everybody doesn't know or maybe doesn't know when you're writing for someone else and especially if you're being paid for it as as i try to to be um you face a lot of restrictions and this isn't like man the man tells you what to do or anything this is reality um articles can be only so long everybody knows attention spans are short and so in in every case you are given a word limit um and in some cases there are political considerations in some cases an editor might say this is a great point but we just paid famous person x a lot more money to make that point in an article that's running the next day so i'm sorry i gotta cut you all sorts of things happen that mean that you can't produce the version you personally want if you're writing for someone else it's the same reason there's director's cuts out there of hollywood movies so on my blog i almost always will run the a different version of what was published um and it often is longer and more detailed um and if people are interested in that kind of thing they're welcome to take a look at it i i will not ever share really why a version is different when it's printed uh at reuters than what it's on my blog or whatever i mean it's just there's no value in getting into that too deeply um but basically in nine times out of ten it just has to do with length so uh take a look at the director's cut tomorrow and otherwise scott it's a pleasure um hey can we say merry christmas on this show you say whatever you want on this show man okay i try to mute out the f-bombs but other than that yeah no man all right well support bds on this show all right well merry christmas to all of your listeners who find that a nice thing to be told and happy holidays or whatever i wish everyone the very best and we'll be back at it in 2019 if not sooner yeah right on man you too thank you very much pete appreciate it take care please bye-bye all right you guys that's the great peter van buren he wrote we meant well about iraq war ii well about his time in iraq war ii i don't think he was speaking for bush and cheney there um and then uh yeah he wrote uh hooper's war a novel of post-world war ii japan but you know it's about us and find him at tac the american conservative.com mueller's investigation is missing one thing a crime all right y'all thanks find me at libertarian institute dot org at scott horton dot org anti-war.com and reddit.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
