Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name 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.
Hey guys, on the line, I got Dan McAdams.
Of course, he runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and is the co-host of the best show on the whole YouTube, which is a lot of shows, the Liberty Report that he does Monday through Thursday there with Dr. Paul.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Dan?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you here.
Hey, so Walter Jones died on Sunday.
And so I thought, you know, it would only be appropriate if we gave him a little bit of a send off here on the show.
So I appreciate you joining me for those purposes.
Who's Walter Jones and how come we like him so much?
Walter Jones is a terrific member of Congress.
He was liked by all sides of the aisle.
And he was a person who was unique in Washington because not only was he willing to admit he made a mistake, but he dedicated the rest of his life to correcting the mistake.
And that mistake was supporting the Iraq war and believing the lies that were told him.
And so he came.
He, of course, he came from a Marine district, Camp Lejeune district.
And he thought supporting the military meant supporting the wars initially.
And so he was your typical Republican in that sense.
And then he started meeting some of the families of the young men who were being killed in Iraq, and he started hearing their stories, and he started thinking about it.
And in fact, interestingly enough, he used to drive back home over the weekend.
It's about a five-hour drive, and he listened to books on tape.
He started listening to Jim Bamford's book, Pretext for War, and then he got it.
He became one of the most vehemently anti-war members of Congress, I would say.
Yeah.
I mean, he really did turn into almost Ron, not quite.
And it's interesting, you know, James is going to be on the show later today, by the way, about his Boutina article, his great new piece that just happened to hit this week.
So tune in for that.
And listen, just under any circumstances, thank you for mentioning that book, because that is one of the greatest tellings of how they got us into Iraq War II.
And it was published very early on in 2004, and just really just nails it.
Great, great stuff in there.
And then, so yeah, now I interviewed him a few times.
I guess I should say, for people who don't know, you were Ron's foreign policy advisor in his congressional office from what year to what year now?
2001 to 2013.
Right.
So, yeah, this whole time through the whole terror war, the whole 21st century so far kind of thing.
So you were there and you had really a front row seat, not just to what was going on with Dr. Paul, but you really saw what was going on with Walter Jones at the time.
Now, do you remember when he kind of had his conversion?
Did he come to you guys, or what happened with that?
Well, you know, Dr. Paul started holding his Thursday lunches, and I think Walter had converted just before that.
And I think it was public, and actually I recounted to Kelly Vlahos the piece that she did about Walter, a story that I remember so clearly.
And that's when we were, you know, they periodically had these, Scott, on the Hill, you'd have to evacuate, evacuate, run, they're coming to get us.
Yeah, I remember that.
I think it was a real psychological operation, a lot of it was.
But one of the times, I remember most clearly, run, run, which way do we run?
It doesn't matter, just run.
It kind of does matter if it's a plane coming, which is what they said it was.
But anyway, so we all ran literally to the other side of the tracks, the other side of town, hundreds and hundreds of staffers and members, and it was just total chaos.
And I just remember on the way back, Republican members visiting and talking with each other and planning, you know, all in a group.
And then here up behind them is Walter Jones walking by himself, and none of the members would acknowledge him, none of the members would talk to him.
He became a pariah after he turned against the war.
He just became a pariah.
And I just couldn't believe it.
I think that may have been one of the first times I just talked with him, I walked with him for a little while and talked to him about his conversion to the anti-war cause.
I mean, he was just a sincere, genuine man.
But it really goes to show what happens in Washington if you go against the war machine.
You know, they are unforgiving.
Yeah.
Well, and isn't it right, Dan, that there was nothing else about this guy, right?
It's not like he was Jim Traficant up there or some kind of lightning rod.
I mean, this is this decent, kind, old country gentleman, sort of a character who everybody liked for every other reason except that he had changed his mind about Iraq War II.
Is that not right?
That's exactly it.
He was not obnoxious.
He was not a loud mouth.
He was not over there claiming his five minutes.
He was not gossiping.
He was not a drunk or a lech like most of them.
As you say, he was sort of a Gregory Peck or a Gary Cooper type of figure, tall, dignified looking, and he was almost out of central casting in that respect.
So, no, there was nothing about him that would put people off other than the fact that not only did he turn against the war, but he became really kicked off at the people who lied to him.
I mean, he became mad and angry.
And I think he even let a couple of curse words out when he talked about these people because he was furious.
Unlike the others, they never want to admit it.
He was mad, and he was out for revenge, and that's what it was all about.
But he was also out to make amends for his own self, to do penance.
This was how he felt it.
And so he hand wrote these letters.
He wrote these letters to I think over 12,000 killed, injured, and family members of those killed and injured in the war as a way of paying his own penance for the mistakes he made.
And, in fact, Dr. Paul always says he was too hard on himself after this.
He just continues to be so hard on himself for this and unnecessarily because he made amends for it with all of the great votes that he did after that, with all the press conferences across the Iowa, Dennis Dicinich, and Abercrombie, and all the people on the left, and also picking off people on the right who were kind of feeling that way, but they weren't too sure.
They were afraid.
It was just tremendous.
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And now, so this was a big part of it, right, was I think I read that he was raised Baptist but had converted to Catholicism.
And so when you say he was doing penance, you don't even just mean that as a figure of speech.
This was really like, man, I'd better get down and humble myself before Jesus and the Virgin Mary and this kind of thing in order to try to not go to hell.
And he really meant that, right?
Yeah.
I mean, when you say 12,000, that's a lot more than died in the wars.
So that means, as you're saying there, he wrote a separate letter to the mother, the father, the sister, it sounds like.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
That's what he did to the family members of those killed and wounded.
So he just – and, you know, he put the faces of them on the wall.
And that's something that the members did not want to have.
In front of his office, he would have huge posters of the faces of those young men and women killed.
And, you know, the members didn't want to see that because it reminded them, particularly after the truth came out about the Iraq War.
It reminded them that they have some responsibility for those young people dead.
But he did it, you know, and he aligned the walls in front of his office.
It was amazing.
Yeah.
And, again, now back to why he voted for it in the first place, as you're saying.
He was just kind of a typical Republican going along.
He's from a heavily militarized district.
You mentioned Camp Lejeune, but I think I read that there were a few more different branches, military bases in that same district too there in North Carolina.
And – or I could be wrong about that.
But anyway, Camp Lejeune itself is huge.
Oh, yeah.
And a major constituency.
And they kept re-electing this guy.
And that's the real message.
You know, when we did our little tribute on the Liberty Report to Walter Jones, Dr. Paul kept saying the main thing I want to get out is what he discovered.
You know, he thought that was it.
This is over.
My career is over now that I've come out against the war.
And not only did he keep getting re-elected, they kept trying to primary him, of course.
They kept trying to run people, pro-war people against him.
It never flew.
It never flew.
He would beat the primary challenge in a big way.
And it came actually this last time, his last election.
He didn't even – he ran unopposed.
So they decided to forget it.
We can't get rid of this guy.
So he actually did better and better the more he spoke against the war.
And that just goes to show you the same story is true with Ron Paul.
When he ran for president, most of his military contributions were more than the other candidates combined.
So it's a real important story there for other members.
If they could summon the courage, it's not necessarily a career death wish to come out for truth.
Right.
And by the way, when you say they, I mean Bill Kristol, the Foreign Policy Initiative.
These were the guys behind primarying him and really running against him on the war issue and saying, oh, look, he's soft on the wars, as though that was going to hurt him.
Yeah, unpatriotic Americans, right?
That's what they all were.
And here's John, I ain't going to get shot in no rice paddy Bolton.
Just happily sending young men and women off.
That's what they love doing.
They know that they'll be safely behind their desks with a high paycheck.
Yeah.
And then so now it wasn't just Iraq either because what happened was we'd been at war all over the place ever since then.
And so he's opposed all the wars since then.
Which is quite a few, right?
He has.
He's not only opposed them, but in fact, he's been given credit now.
You know, the War Powers Yemen bill passed this week in the House, which Paul Ryan, the previous speaker, wouldn't even allow to come to the floor.
So Finesse's credit for whatever her, Pelosi's credit, no matter what her motivations are, even if it's just to embarrass the president, she let it come to the floor in the past.
And he's been given credit for that because he worked tirelessly in the House to get that War Powers resolution up on the floor about Yemen.
And so it's probably like a talk about a final parting blow to the war party that he was able to achieve this really historic victory.
It's never happened.
The president has never been rebuked since the 73 War Powers Act passed.
Has never been rebuked by either house.
Now he's been rebuked by both houses for getting us into a war that wasn't authorized.
Right.
Now the Senate passed theirs back in the last Congress, so they're going to have to pass it again.
But they're expected to, you know, I guess by the end of the month or some kind of thing.
I'm not sure the timing, but it's presumed that that's going to end up on the president's desk.
So and, you know, I forget which it was and I forget who it was that taught me this.
It could have been you.
It could have been somebody else.
But there was a difference, right, whether it's a concurring resolution or whether it's some other kind of whether he can veto it or not.
Yeah.
Yeah, you caught me off guard now.
Yeah, sorry about that.
But I think they passed the kind that he can veto instead of the other kind.
He said he will veto this.
Yeah, this will be his first veto.
He said he will veto this bill.
So this will be his first.
But, you know, it stands.
And this is really and, you know, there are a lot of things about the War Powers Act, you know, it's controversial.
You know, Dr. Paul doesn't think it's constitutional.
And I think some of the members with good intentions didn't vote the right way because of that problem.
And I think that may have been the reason why Justin Amash voted the wrong way.
And that's OK.
You know, you have to vote your conscience.
So you're saying Ron's position would just be defund it rather than deauthorize it somehow?
Or I don't know.
I mean, if it was never authorized in the first place.
Yeah, you can strike funds.
You can do other things.
And, you know, the War Powers resolution is problematic.
However, he never hesitated to use it as a tool, both Ron and Walter and others.
And I don't know how Walter felt about it.
He may not have been as negative about it.
But it's a tool that could be used and it was used.
And it was used over and over, as you point out, not just about the Iraq war, but about Afghanistan and other places to try to.
Because it did have that nifty loophole that allowed members to get a vote on the floor.
Of course, until Paul Ryan broke the law and didn't allow it.
But there is that, you know, you're guaranteed a vote on the floor if you bring it up within the context of the War Powers resolution.
So it was a great tool.
And what it does is establishes a foundation.
It establishes a debate.
It's not even a debate about war.
And at least there was not only a full debate this time, but a good vote.
Right.
And, you know, of course, one of the things that he had been really great on over all these years was introducing resolutions.
I think particularly in the Bush years, I guess, in a sense, reminding Bush that he had no authority to attack Iran.
And he had made, you know, as you said, he learned the lesson of Iraq War II about the role of the neoconservatives there.
And he knew Iran was the real target and their next target.
And he really fought against that all along.
I don't know.
Did he support the Iran deal?
Do you know?
My guess is he did.
I would be 99 percent sure that he did.
Yeah.
Because he would have, you know, they could certainly look it up.
Yeah.
And you mentioned how, you know, he's been given credit for getting this Yemen resolution passed.
And that's this, I guess, obit mostly in The American Conservative by George O'Neill.
And we're running that on AntiWar.com today.
You also mentioned that Kelly Vlahos had written a great thing that you're quoted in and Jim Antle, too.
So that's three good ones at TAC.
And then you and Ron had a great show all about Walter, too, on YouTube and at RonPaulLibertyReport.com.
And then I read something.
Man, I can't keep track anymore.
It was some off brand new site.
I don't know what it was that said that there's a Democrat has introduced a new resolution to repeal the AUMF of 2001.
And it's the Walter Jones repeal the AUMF resolution named after him and in his honor, which I thought was great.
Yeah, actually, Adam, Adam Dick over at the Institute wrote it up.
It's on our front page.
Oh, OK, great.
Well, at least I know where that is.
I'll find it and link to that.
Yeah, he's got a good write up of a short little write up of it in our Congress alert section.
Great.
So, yeah, I could tell you one thing, you know, a little insight, Dr.
Paul, as you know, is a tough guy.
He's an athlete.
He's he's a man's man.
But I was at the end of that show.
I looked over at him and I could tell he was extremely, extremely touched and moved by the passing of Walter Jones.
You know, it was he was having a tough time at the end.
Yeah, man, it's a sad thing.
I hated to see the guy go.
We could have got another good few years out of him, but I think that about everybody when they die, too.
So I guess it's true for everybody.
Even at even at 76, he died too young, man.
86 would have been all right, probably, you know, I don't know.
Yeah, but yeah, no, he was he did great work and he set a great example.
So it's important we find the time to stop and honor him before we get back to the work.
Can I tell you one?
Can I tell one other Walter Jones story?
Please have a second.
Yeah.
Walter Jones was was an exceptional man because he did not buy into the hierarchies of Capitol Hill.
And those were set in stone.
You know, I could never get a call back from a chief of staff because I was a legislative assistant.
And that's just how it works there.
That's that's the pecking order.
And he he didn't play that game.
He would he's the only member.
He would call my line directly from his office.
A member to a legislative assistant.
Totally unheard of.
You know, I would see that I would see it coming from his office and it would be him.
And he said, now, Daniel, I'm looking at this legislation and I just don't know.
Have you had a look at it?
What do you think about it?
It was just unheard of.
And that that says a lot.
He did not give a crap about all this phony hierarchy and who's who and what's what.
He just wanted the truth.
And I think that that's the thing that struck me the most about him.
Yeah, that's great.
You know, Eric said that, too, that he would, you know, get phone calls all the time at anti-war.
Com headquarters there.
Please hold for Walter Jones.
And then he just called to talk about some stuff he'd read on the site that day.
And he was always very kind.
I interviewed him, I think, five times, something right around there.
And wow.
And yeah, he was, you know, always very kind and always very decent.
Seemed like he, you know, was trying to do his best.
So and you know what?
I don't know, man.
At the very least, he shows the rest of them up for what they really are and who they really are.
As you said, a bunch of drunks and scumbags.
And I can't remember exactly which one it was.
It wasn't the most recent Max Blumenthal one where he was trolling him about Venezuela.
But it may have been Max Blumenthal.
But just maybe it was his previous one.
I don't know what it was, but something very recently where someone was up there on Capitol Hill with a video camera hectoring these congressmen.
I think about the Yemen vote last.
It was Matt.
Yeah, it was Max Blumenthal.
It was Max about the Yemen vote last fall.
Is that right?
And how they had no idea what he's even talking about.
They're like, oh, my tax committee.
And it was just absolutely, absolutely disconnect.
In other words, like any one of us who tries at least to find the time to sit around reading the news.
Any of us are better educated than these guys.
I mean, assuming we're not slaves to NBC or Fox News, but have, you know, a plethora of sources to read.
Any of us are doing better than these congressmen who are really just a bunch of know nothings.
I mean, you know, I mean, you worked there for many years.
Tell us, is it really like that?
They're really as bad as I think they are, aren't they?
They're among the least informed people on Earth, you know.
And I'm not against people being drunk.
I'm just against them being drunk when it means that all they care about is themselves and their senator.
Yeah, that's it.
They're absolutely uninformed and their staff is uninformed.
They are incurious.
I would always print out my articles from antiwar.com when we had a committee hearing so I could read them and let everyone see what I was reading, what I was reading from, because it just drove them nuts.
Yeah.
Incurious.
That's the best word for it.
That's exactly what it is.
You see that with success for people all the time, right?
Is, hey, look how smart I am.
And if you're so smart, how come you're not in the position I'm in?
So what do I need to hear from you?
And that goes from, like you're saying, people dealing with their own staff and stuff like that cannot be taught.
Anyway, I'll let you go, man.
Have a great day and thank you for your time.
I really appreciate your time on the show, Dan.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's the heroic Dan McAdams.
He's over there at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, ronpaulinstitute.org.
And then here's the one that he mentioned here by Adam Dick, Walter B. Jones Restoring Power to Congress Act would repeal the 2001 AUMF.
And at the Ron Paul Liberty Report, which is ronpaullibertyreport.com, you can find their great sendoff of Walter Jones, Dan and Ron from a few days ago there.
And again, I guess I'll recommend over at the American Conservative Magazine, they've had quite a few great write ups there.
I guess three now, great write ups about Walter Jones on the way out.
So, all right.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
