02/15/16 – Chris Ernesto – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, Scott Horton Show.
I really screwed up there, man.
I meant to not address politics in the second segment, but instead address the top headlines on antiwar.com right now.
Turkey attacks North Syria, targeting Assad's military, as well as the Kurds, as the U.S. urges Turkey to halt Syria's strikes.
As Saudi Arabia confirms deployment to Turkey in the name of fighting the Islamic State, but I think we already see what their agenda is.
And this is, of course, right at the same time that John Kerry has hammered out some sort of so-called ceasefire with the Russians, and what a disaster.
And I emailed Patrick Coburn, but it didn't work.
But I'll see if I can get him on the show tomorrow, buddy, to explain what the hell's going on, if we all live that long.
All right.
But now on to our first guest on the show today.
It's Chris Ernesto, and he's a regular writer at antiwar.com.
This one is called Bernie Hysteria and Liberal Hypocrisy.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Chris?
Doing great, Scott.
Great to be on with you.
Very happy to have you here, and very happy to see this article.
It's very important.
I really like how you do Toward the Beginning here, where you talk about, you know, it's funny, you make the analogy that what would happen if Gloria Allred started donating money to the Bill Cosby Rape Defense Fund, or if David Duke started donating to Black Lives Matter, or members of Mad Mothers Against Drunk Driving helped publicize an Anheuser-Busch ad campaign.
This is the level of hypocrisy that we're talking about when it comes to leftists and liberals, so-called peaceniks, supporting Bernie Sanders.
Is that your claim here?
Yeah.
You know, we've been doing this for 14 years, and many of the times we've been protesting against the wars, there have been liberals who have joined us, and they've been absent as of the past eight years.
And we're trying to find ways to reach people just through facts.
So we just want to know, why is war the one area in which liberals are willing to accept this lesser of two evils?
And why do they constantly accept promises of less war in place of guarantees of no war?
Well, of course, the answer is because Ted Cruz.
Right.
And that's the beauty of the left-right system, is no matter how bad our guy is, their guy's worse.
So we'll settle for 99% pure evil to avoid 100.
You know, it'd be fine if those same liberals would make concessions if their candidate was just a little bit better, but still really bad on gay marriage or the environment or workers' rights, maybe race relations or a woman's right to choose.
They're unbending in that area, but on foreign policy issues, they'll accept someone that possibly might be a little bit better.
As it turns out, their guy, Barack Obama, has ended up bombing more countries than George W. Bush did.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess they really just deal with that dissonance by ignoring it, right?
Yeah, there is a lot of willful ignorance that we've noticed.
And, you know, when they are quick to point out facts about the Bush administration, they really do not want to hear the facts as it relates to, you know, we try to talk to them about Bernie Sanders agreeing with Barack Obama to add U.S. troops to Eastern Europe, and they don't even want to hear about it.
And then we say, but Bernie Sanders wants to continue Obama's drone policy, and he supports Obama's airstrikes in Syria.
He supports the U.S.-Saudi invasion of Yemen.
Bernie Sanders supported the war in Afghanistan.
He supported a U.N. no-fly zone in Libya.
He supported the neo-Nazi-aligned coup government in Ukraine, supported Israel's war in Gaza in 2014, and as you and Sam Husseini have talked about, he's called on the Saudi Arabian dictatorship to get their hands dirty in the Middle East.
You know, they just don't want to hear it, though.
Yeah.
You know, that is an interesting thing, isn't it?
Because, you know, the easiest answer is that nationalism is sort of kind of, and we'll get back to that record that you mentioned there in a sec, but, you know, nationalism is sort of a pseudo-racism, right, where even if you're black or Mexican, when it comes to our government killing foreigners, you get to be an honorary white person, and then, you know, it's American supremacy instead of white supremacy, but it basically serves the same thing.
It makes it okay to nuke cities.
It makes it okay to carpet bomb them off the face of the earth.
I don't know.
Usually, I guess I would say because they look Japanese or because they look Arab, but maybe it really is just a matter of distance in that, because it sounds kind of silly to just accuse liberals and leftists of being racist against Arabs, because, I mean, mostly they're not, right?
They would stick up for the rights of Arabs in America if they were being discriminated against, but I guess it's just the amount of salt water between here and there.
What do you think?
Oh, that is such a great point.
The liberals are cheering when Sanders says that he doesn't want to kick Muslims out of the United States.
But then they turn a blind eye to the fact that he wants Muslims in the Middle East to bomb and shoot each other.
And Sanders talks about, not just Sanders, the Democratic Party talks about supporting women's rights in the United States, but at the same time, they support Saudi Arabia, who is one of the worst regimes in the world on women's rights.
So I think you're right.
As long as it doesn't happen to us here, and if it happens overseas to those people with my tax dollars, I can just turn a blind eye.
Yeah, the funny thing about that is, I can understand the mindset, not that I would agree with it or anything, but I can understand the mindset when it's the era of World War II, and Japan and their society at that time and the way it was portrayed, they might as well have been Martians, right?
Their humanity is just completely denied by everyone, basically, in a way that, I'm not saying it was really plausible, but I can see why and how people bought it.
But in 2016, you can't be on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, you don't have Facebook friends in the Middle East.
These are real people.
The world has shrunk since then.
Never mind, I'm not talking about government control and all that, but I'm just talking about the ability of the average Joe in any society in the world to talk with each other and to see each other's news.
You mentioned Bernie being so bad on the Gaza War in 2014.
The Gaza War in 2014 was the first one where the Palestinians were able to tweet what was happening to them in real time, and the first one where the Israelis therefore lost the PR war in the United States of America as it was going on.
So, I don't know, it just seems like they've got a really shoddy excuse when it comes to looking the other way on these things, because it turns out that Iraq is not so far from here.
You know, when Obama got elected the first time around, I think many people had a sense that this was going to normalize the whole war on terror and American exceptionalism.
It was really going to suck the people in, and we've seen it happen.
You know, when John Kerry was running against George Bush in 2004, so many liberals were like, we have to do everything we can to get rid of Bush, and of course you've got to get rid of Bush, but they put forth this John Kerry, and at one point John Kerry put on his website that he believes in preemptive war, and ABC News reported it, and at the time, you know, times have changed, preemptive war was taboo.
Now everyone says it, but back then you couldn't, and we were telling people, but this guy Kerry believes in it.
No, he doesn't, and so we showed him ABC News.
That's propaganda.
Well, actually, it's on his website.
Go check it out.
And that actually turned some people and made them say, you know what, I'm not sure that Dennis Kucinich is electable, but I'm going to vote for him anyway.
So in Florida at the time, a lot of people in the anti-war movement that I'm involved with were registered independents, and they said, you know what, I'm going to register a Democrat for this primary so I can vote for Dennis Kucinich just so we can make a statement.
Well, the sham democracy that we live in, by the time the primary votes came to Florida, John Kerry already had enough votes to secure the nomination, and that was the final straw for many people.
And, of course, you know, his wishy-washiness that you cite there is exactly why he lost to George Bush.
In fact, I've been calling Rand Paul Jeb.
I should be calling him John Kerry because that's the better example of flip-flopping around and being so damn wishy-washy that, hey, you agree in the same problem, but you just don't want to do anything about it, you lose.
And I'm sorry, we'll be right back after this with more of the great Chris Ernesto from AntiWar.com.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And you know what?
I'm messing up here.
I'm talking with Chris Ernesto, and I didn't give you a proper introduction because I can't seem to find it anywhere, but you have this peace group, St. Pete's for Peace.
Can you tell us all about it, Chris?
No, don't worry about it.
Yeah, so St. Pete's for Peace.
No, I want to give you a chance to talk about it and at least introduce yourself properly.
No worries.
Since I didn't.
It's okay.
So St. Pete's for Peace is an anti-war group.
We're nonpartisan, and we started in St. Petersburg, Florida before the 2003 Iraq War.
And we regularly protest.
We write articles.
We produce videos.
And for 10 years, we've been showing a free weekly movie on socially conscious topics.
And we just maintain our principles that we are opposed to wars in any form, regardless of which party is doing it.
Right on.
And you got a great archive at original.antiwar.com slash Chris underscore Ernesto, which is unfortunate.
It should just be Ernesto.
But anyway, original.antiwar.com slash Chris underscore Ernesto.
And over the weekend, this was the spotlight article, Bernie Hysteria and Liberal Hypocrisy.
And, you know, this is the thing, and I know you hear this all the time, but if Rand Paul is scum and Bernie Sanders is scum, then, I mean, I know you don't prefer Hillary Clinton, the mad bomber.
I know you don't prefer Ted Cruz, who wants to use nuclear weapons on him, spread gamma rays around.
So who do we believe in, Chris?
There must be an affirmative answer to this question, they say.
You know, I have to say, Scott, I know a lot of liberals who are friends, and so many of them are really nice people.
I know a lot of Tea Party people.
I really like people.
I think people genuinely deep down inside, we always try to find common ground.
And so when you have a discussion with a liberal about what's going on, and you start making progress in the discussion, they always fall back on what you just said.
So what are we supposed to do?
Like, they get all frenzied.
And what we have always said is the same thing.
Understand that you're a citizen of the American empire, and your responsibility is to stop what your tax dollars are doing to – the damage it's doing to people around the world.
You know, when you talk about elections and things like that, take a few minutes, decide what you're going to do, and then actually go out and do something that can make a difference.
All right.
Now, so let me ask you this.
And you know what?
Yeah, I agree with that.
It's an unsatisfactory answer, really, because most of us, the best thing we can think of to do is, like me, a little radio show.
You seem to actually have a little bit better of a work schedule as far as getting anti-war activism done.
It can be very unsatisfying to do this for years and years and years on end, and yet nobody listens, nobody learns, and the wars keep going on and that kind of thing.
And it's a lot easier to believe in a candidate and then, you know, vote.
And then that either works or it doesn't, but then you're over it.
You're off the hook within a few months either way and that kind of thing.
So it sucks that people get stuck in that political mind frame.
But then again, Hillary Clinton is really, really, really bad, Chris.
And so for people, I mean, she's never even mine.
We all know.
Okay.
So for people who lean left at all, is Bernie Sanders not a better choice?
Well, it's funny because eight years ago Hillary Clinton came to Tampa and we protested her.
And Democrats were like, what are you doing?
She's comparatively better to Obama.
And so, you know, people change their mindset over time.
And I'll be curious to see if and when Sanders loses the primaries, are these same people going to support Hillary?
To answer your question, no.
In terms of foreign policy, Bernie Sanders is not better because there are certain things that are black and white.
And war is right at the top of the list.
You cannot be for war in any form.
And you cannot be for child molestation in any form.
Racism, there's no degrees that are acceptable.
And Bernie Sanders has a proven track record of being part of the American military establishment.
And so many times I hear people say, oh, I know he's not perfect.
Well, actually Bernie Sanders is a lot closer to being absolutely imperfect than he is to being perfect.
And when you challenge people on that, their go-to answer is, yeah, but he didn't support the Iraq war.
Well, the response to that is, but he then voted to fund it on numerous occasions.
And if that's your gold standard, then Donald Trump is your man.
Because he speaks out against the Iraq war even more vehemently than Bernie Sanders does.
So the long and the short of it, on certain issues, socially, domestically, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are pretty similar.
And from a liberalist point of view, that is an improvement.
So they're just going to have to make a decision.
Are they going to be able to cast a vote for Bernie Sanders or eventually Hillary Clinton?
And then are they going to be able to tell someone who lives in Yemen or Syria or Afghanistan that, you know, I had to vote for this warmonger because he or she is better on domestic issues?
Could a Sanders supporter look a 14-year-old from Afghanistan who has lived under U.S. bombs every day of his or her life, could they look that 14-year-old in the eye and explain why they support Bernie Sanders, a man who supports the use of force in Afghanistan?
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, back to the metaphors and the analogies, that's what's most powerful for people anyway, I guess.
What if he was for Jim Crow, but only in Mississippi and Alabama because they really insist there and you just can't fight it.
But in the rest of the South, they shouldn't have Jim Crow anymore.
What if he said that?
You know, like, yeah, no, you know what?
Like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, he wants to bomb Eastern Syria, but not Western Syria.
Hillary wants to bomb Eastern and Western Syria at the same time.
So these are the angels on the head of the devils on the head of the pin we got to argue about.
And you know what?
This is kind of surprising to me, not very surprising, but just kind of a little bit.
And I've been watching Sanders for a while now, so I'm sort of just pretending to be surprised.
But he is an independent, not a registered Democrat this whole time.
And, of course, being from Vermont allows him to be able to get away with that.
But he calls himself a socialist, which means he's staked out a place further to the left than progressivism or something.
And yet he really seems to have decided over many, many years now that, well, maybe just a business decision, or maybe he just doesn't care, that he's just going to be pro-war on all this stuff.
It's not going to cause too much trouble with his base, and it's going to keep him out of trouble in Washington, D.C.
And when you go down your laundry list of things that he's bad on, it's pretty shocking.
It's pretty much everything.
Yeah, and when Barack Obama came into power, the United States people and people around the world, they were ready for different rhetoric.
They were ready for the fear-mongering and the hatred to stop.
And Obama just dashed those opportunities quickly.
I'm not sure that our society is ready so much for a global change, as people here want a domestic change.
The liberals, not all of them, many of them, they really just want a piece of the empire's pie.
They're tired of the 1% getting – they want their piece of the pie.
What we're challenging them on is stop the empire.
It may not be good for you personally, but it's going to be better for everyone around the world.
And we're challenging these people, tell Bernie that you know that he's trying to downplay the foreign policy, but you know his position.
Push him on it.
Challenge him.
Tell him, look, I'm really considering how to vote.
I need you to change your rhetoric about the drones.
And don't talk about sending more U.S. troops to Eastern Europe.
Challenge your candidate.
You don't have to pull support from them yet, but at least challenge them.
And I'm not seeing too much of that.
Scott, did you hear at the debate last Thursday night when the moderator asked who would your domestic and world leader – which one would influence your foreign policy decision?
This is where they had the big fight about Henry Kissinger, right?
It was hilarious.
And she pulled out Kissinger and the blogs and Twitter world was going crazy about Hillary Clinton saying Henry Kissinger.
What I forgot and didn't mention is that Bernie Sanders said the person that would influence his foreign policy was Winston Churchill.
Like, do people not know history?
And Sanders, you know, I hear him talk about the overthrow of Iran's Mossadegh in 1953.
I'm like, yeah, right on.
Keep going.
Good job.
But then the next minute he said he's going to be influenced by Winston Churchill, the man who co-sponsored and co-orchestrated the same coup of Mohamed Mossadegh.
Well, and, you know, they asked him about the Islamic State and Syria policy right after Hillary's ridiculous answer about Syria and carving out a safe zone and all of this stuff with Turkey, which could mean war with Russia.
And he goes, yeah, yeah, you know, I think we should get along with Cuba.
So he absolutely refused to attack Hillary over Syria at all or say anything about it.
Damn disgrace.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks very much for writing this article.
Hawkeyes on this issue here.
The truth about Bernie Sanders' foreign policy, Bernie hysteria and liberal hypocrisy by Chris Ernesto at Antiwar.com.
Thanks, Chris.
Thank you, Scott.
Take care.
Hey, Al.
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