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 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.
All right, you guys.
Here's a lady who stays anti-war no matter who's in power.
Medea Benjamin from Code Pink.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks so much for having me on.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And you know what?
I'm a big fan of your co-author here.
Nicholas J.S. Davies often writes for us at Antiwar.com and for a lot of other places he writes to.
And here you two are together doing such a great rundown on war, peace and the presidential candidates.
And so I don't think you guys include Bill Weld, who's announced he's going to primary Trump.
But anyway, this is about the Democrats and there's a whole bunch of them.
And you guys don't pull any punches or spare any favor or whatever kind of figures of speech.
You go right for it here.
So let's start with the front runner.
Bernie Sanders.
What's up with his foreign policy?
Well, he actually has gotten really better since his last run.
I mean, he has a great voting record when it comes to opposing military spending.
And he last time in his campaign, he focuses so much on domestic issues that he really stayed away from a lot of the foreign policy issues.
This year, we hear him talking a lot more.
You hear in his speeches, he actually talks about the bloated Pentagon budget.
He talks about the military industrial complex.
So we're feeling like he not only has a great record, but he's using his platform now to really educate people about these issues.
All right.
So now let's go back to, I mean, he's been in Congress and he was in the House and then the Senate.
How does his history measure up?
Well, he opposed the Pentagon spending by voting for only three out of the 19 military spending bills since 2013.
So that gives him one of the best records in Congress.
And he recently, your readership might have been following the great campaign that he has led around stopping the U.S. war in Yemen.
And he has led the entire Senate on that.
And that just passed the Senate.
So we feel very good about the position he's taken on that.
Yeah, listen, it's so important that you mentioned that.
I was just going to slam him for being bad on Kosovo 20 years ago, which is important.
And for kind of being wishy-washy on Libya at a time when Obama was preparing to attack him.
And so maybe we can go back over that.
But there's really nothing in the world more important than his effort, as you said, to lead in the U.S. Senate with Mike Lee and with others as well.
But really doing everything he can to push through this historically unprecedented war powers resolution to end the genocide in Yemen.
Well, that's right.
And I think he does understand that endless wars is not in our best interest.
He does want to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan and Syria.
And in the case of Venezuela, he's also come out against U.S. intervention there.
So I would say, you know, given the cast of characters we have running, he is the one of the best that we have.
Yes, we fault him on joining in the chorus of politicians who wanted to get rid of Gaddafi in Libya.
You mentioned his position around Kosovo.
We also do talk about the fact that he has a contradiction in supporting not only the trillion dollar F-35 fighter, but supporting them to come to his home town in Burlington and be stationed with the Vermont National Guard.
So he certainly is not totally anti-war and anti-military waste, given that this is the most wasteful, most expensive weapon ever produced in the United States.
That's the F-35.
But his record is pretty good.
Hey, here's a book for you high tech businessmen out there.
No dev, no ops, no I.T.
By Hussein Badakhshani.
And it's a great book.
It's essentially how a libertarian would run his tech company.
And I read the whole thing.
It's really engaging and I'm not much of a businessman.
But I sure liked it.
I think you really will, too.
No dev, no ops, no I.T.
By Hussein Badakhshani.
Check it out at Amazon.com.
All right.
Now, there's two more things here and they're sort of related, of course.
Israel-Palestine.
I want to hear about Bernie's position on that.
But also, I think it's so important that the Jewish Democratic Party front runner for president right now defended Ilhan Omar when she was attacked for criticizing the power and influence of the Israel lobby in Washington, D.C.
And that sets a huge precedent just going into the very beginning of this campaign.
So I wonder what you think all that means.
Oh, I think it's really important.
I'm glad you brought that up.
He is also the only presidential candidate who, in not going to speak at the right wing lobby AIPAC group this year, actually said it was because of policy differences.
The other candidates kind of hemmed and hawed.
And some of them actually showed up and didn't speak to the whole group but spoke to their constituents.
But he did not go to AIPAC at all.
And he said very clearly he doesn't agree with AIPAC's position.
He has brought up the issue of Palestinian rights as both a senator and as a as a presidential candidate the last time around.
And given how difficult it is for anybody with aspirations for a higher office in this country to dance around the issue of Israel and not come out as seemingly against the right wing government of Israel.
Bernie's done a pretty amazing job and opened up space for other politicians.
And as you said, coming to the defense of Ilhan Omar was extremely important.
You imagine if he was the president that he really would maybe even pull his Jewish card and say, you know, I don't give a damn about you, Netanyahu.
I want a Palestinian state.
I want those settlers out.
I want a resolution to this thing.
And you're not going to smear me or intimidate me and really force some sort of conclusion to this endless conflict.
Well, the question is, what is the conclusion to this endless conflict?
And I think two states at this point is not even a possibility.
See, I agree with that, by the way.
In fact, Ramsey Baroud is coming on next to talk just about that fact.
But so, OK, so that's even a better question then.
Do you think that if he was really up there in the chair, that he would be open to radical solutions such as, hey, we're cutting you off until you give these people equal rights within one state here?
I think that would be a little too far fetched to think in this country that a president would do that and be alive to talk about it.
But I mean, it seems like if anybody could do it, it could be him.
Right.
Because and I don't mean this in any sort of negative way, but just the way that he is, you know, speaks like an old Jewish leftist from Brooklyn.
It's hard to, you know, call him an anti-Semite or a self-hating anything or anything like that.
And he's got this sort of persona and temperament where he doesn't suffer foolishness like that either, where you couldn't really try that on him.
It seems like he might be in the best position of any American president to go ahead and say, listen, this is the way it's got to be or you guys are on your own over there.
Enough is enough already.
Yeah, he is in the best position.
I think there would have to be an awful lot of international coalescing of governments, including the Europeans, who have been all too afraid to take on the Israelis.
But he could at the U.N., for example, really start building this international support.
And of course, if the U.S. is not vetoing and covering up for Israel at the Security Council, you could get a lot of U.N. support then.
So, yes, it would be absolutely amazing, earth shattering, and I think could really change the face of not only Israel, but the Middle East.
Well, and so, I mean, he's got a really long record on this.
Right.
So his position is, as you say, this obsolete two state solution position.
Has he ever really talked about being open to something other than that?
No, but I think that he's got a lot of advisers who are smart and understand that the day for that is long gone.
So he better get with it soon, in other words.
What's his excuse not to?
Let's move on.
Tulsi Gabbard.
Sure.
Tell me all about what she thinks about everything.
Well, as you well know, she has come out making ending these endless wars the front piece of her campaign.
And she is in an amazing position to do it, being somebody who has the military background that she has, has been to Iraq and has been so clear in stating that she opposes regime change interventions.
She's also been very clear about not wanting to fuel the arms race with Russia.
She, of course, got a lot of heat for going to Syria, but is very clear that she doesn't think the U.S. should be intervening there.
She supports rejoining the Iran nuclear deal.
So I am delighted that somebody like her is in the running and has such a forceful position on these issues that I think she can push everybody, including Bernie Sanders, on the issues.
Yeah.
So add a couple of things to that, if I can, which is, you know, of course, her being a combat veteran or I don't know if she ever fired a rifle in the field or whatever.
She was certainly deployed in the Anbar province in Iraq War Two and did two tours there.
So that really, you know, they try to attack her like her weakness is foreign policy.
I think they're going to find very quickly that it's her strength and that they really can't say nothing to her.
Whatever happened to support and respect the troops and all of that, they're going to destroy her and tear her down for saying that she's sticking up for soldiers who don't want to die fighting no win wars that we never should have started.
That's not going to go very well or very far.
And because she's been there, she actually knows who's who.
Right.
So the rest of these kooks, they couldn't tell you the difference between Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.
But she does know because she's been over there.
And so absolutely.
Yes.
And so this brings me to another point, Medea, and this is something where this is kind of on you, I think, to be to stay the left pressure against her is it's sort of based on something that's kind of complicated for the average person out there, maybe, but shouldn't be for her.
So my point is this, and I know that you'll know just what I'm talking about, that Obama's position that we should be supporting the jihadists against Assad in Syria just because he's friends with Iran.
Well, that's absolutely insane.
It's hard to even believe that that was really the history of what happened since 2011.
But here we are.
And so she knows that.
I mean, hey, but her idea is still essentially she doesn't say specifically drones or special operations exactly or what, I don't think.
But she says essentially the war against Al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists, wherever they may be, I don't know, must continue the war for them.
We're definitely calling that off.
No more regime change wars against secular dictators.
No more support for jihadist suicide bombers, for God's sake.
But, you know, she still actually has sort of it sounds like the position that she would support, say, not a war for Al-Qaeda in Yemen, but yes, for war against them.
And which is also, of course, horrible and counterproductive and led to the war that's raging there now for and against both sides, of course.
So she really needs her feet held to the fire on that, I think.
Well, yes, and I think she should.
So you're not talking about ISIS anymore, you're talking about Al-Qaeda in Yemen.
And I think either way.
Yeah, ISIS, ISIS or Al-Qaeda, too.
Yeah.
Well, she should listen to Donald Trump, who says ISIS is defeated.
And then in terms of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, of course, the war that the Saudis are perpetrating in Yemen has given space for Al-Qaeda to grow.
And U.S. involvement only gives them more reason for being.
So I mean, what I'm saying, though, is so she's good on that.
Right.
Yeah.
She's good on we should not be fighting a war that's essentially for Al-Qaeda, the one you're talking about.
But she's still for war against them, which, of course, as we know, is only counterproductive.
And Obama's war against them only grew them bigger and bigger even before he took their side against the Houthis.
Well, absolutely.
And I was saying that she is against the U.S. involvement in the war in the Saudi war, but has not come out clearly to say that that has that even separate from the Saudi war, the U.S. drone attacks, the U.S. involvement in Yemen before the Saudis even got involved was making more enemies for the United States and creating more recruits for Al-Qaeda.
Yeah.
So she sure is.
I'm really excited.
I don't want to drag her down too bad, but I'm glad you say that.
And I'm glad you take note of that, because that really is important that she still actually is proud to call herself a hawk on at least some of these missions.
And she's not altogether clear.
I mean, does this include Al-Shabaab, who say they are friends with Al-Qaeda?
But does that really count or not or what?
When there's another one that was caused by George Bush and then Obama's policies this whole time?
Well, yes.
And let's also add that she has, for the most part, been supportive of the constant increases in the military budget, even voting for an amendment that was going to cut the military by just one percent.
So she has not come out saying that the military budget has to be slashed to pay for other things that she cares about.
Yeah, good point there.
OK, so she really is great, though, and I think she's the one I like the most here.
She's the one I'm most excited about, because as you say, even though Bernie, he may even have more sound positions than her on some of these things.
She's the one that they're terrified of and all gearing up to demonize and to try to slay and fight against.
But I think that that just gives her an opportunity to whoop on them because she knows what she's talking about and all they know is what they saw on TV.
And so that gives her such an advantage over them.
And I just can't wait for these debates.
And if they're not the best TV this century, I'm going to be really disappointed.
That's right.
And she really cares about these issues and puts it front and center, whereas Bernie kind of puts it on the back burner.
So, yes, it's great to have her in the race.
And she does have that whole thing about, yeah, well, in 2006, I was in the Anbar province.
Where were you, pal?
So that's what I thought, which is really a very strong immunity card from any accusation about her weakness on this.
And in fact, she loves to respond that, hey, I'm just sticking up for my friends in the military who are sick and tired of dying for nothing.
Oh, that's right.
You really can't say too much in response to that.
You know what I mean?
She's an officer.
She's not just, you know, a friend of people in the military.
You know, she's actually still to this day in the National Guard.
Right.
A major.
Yes, she is.
And I think just like we were talking how Bernie Sanders, being of Jewish faith, has the ability to talk about Israel.
With legitimacy that other candidates might not have.
She has that legitimacy to talk about how these endless wars are making us less safe and depleting our resources and just causing more people to hate us with legitimacy that the others don't have.
Absolutely.
OK, so then I guess Kamala Harris is in a better position to end the drug war and let everybody out of prison, right?
Absolutely.
All right.
Now, so go ahead.
Tell us about how horrible she is.
I don't think there's a good thing about her in here.
Well, certainly she's been one of the darlings of AIPAC.
And even though she said she wasn't going, she actually went and spoke to her constituents there.
She has been among the senators who vote for the military spending bills each year.
She takes significant contributions from the military industry.
And she has not come out saying that we've got to end these endless wars and take resources from the Pentagon to put them in things that are good for the people of this country.
All right.
Well, you did say she was good on the Yemen resolution, right?
Yes, she was.
So that's important.
She waited till the very end, though, to come out in support of that instead of being a leader, which she should have been.
Yeah, which is such an important point.
I mean, what kind of senator are you to be a coward, to be up front and center, taking a lead on this?
They all have been pushing each other out of the way to be the world's greatest hero on this.
We had to get people to her offices here and her offices in California and pushing, pushing, pushing, which was a waste of our time.
She should have come out very quickly and we could have been putting our efforts into some of the others.
Yeah, very well put.
And yeah, so you know what?
Let me ask you this.
Overall, how do you kind of measure sort of the emotion of support toward her on the liberal left side?
Does she seem like people think she's got a lot of charisma or she's sort of a dud falling flat already?
I don't know.
It's hard to tell.
I mean, certainly being a woman of color is something that is very positive for a lot of people in the liberal world who are concerned about the white men domination.
The I think a lot of progressives look at her history and don't see her as very progressive on issues like you were mentioning of mass incarceration and and see her as kind of more middle of the road.
Certainly, I have a lot of friends who say they would support her.
And if she starts rising in the polls and started looking like she was one of those candidates that could get a cross section of voters interested in her, then I think people would move towards her.
But right now, the progressives see her as among the bottom.
Hmm.
You know, one of the things I use as kind of a baseline when I'm looking at the Democrats is in the primary season of 2008, when it was Gravel and Kucinich are the human beings in the race.
And they're over here on this side of the stage.
And then there's Obama, Hillary and Edwards over here who are the lizard people or whatever.
You know, I'm joking.
But the the bought and paid for establishment drones up there, carbon copies of each other.
And Kucinich and Gravel are like, we demand justice and we demand peace and we've got to set this right.
And Obama's up there going, hey, I'm Hillary Clinton, but a little bit cooler.
And you know what I mean?
And so then I'm trying to look at these guys sort of through that same lens.
And I think she's up there with Edwards and Hillary and Obama rather than you couldn't mistake her for being over there on Kucinich's side, you know?
Absolutely.
And I would put Cory Booker there with her.
I saw the funniest meme and I quit Twitter, but somehow this one filtered through.
And it was the scene was somebody with a folding metal chair like in professional wrestling.
And it's like in a gymnasium.
And one guy's already laid out on the floor and another guy's running for in terror.
And the one on the floor is labeled Kamala Harris.
And the one running in terror is labeled Cory Booker.
And the guy with the metal chair swinging is labeled leftists with Google.
Which, in other words, with access to free information about who these people are and what they're really about and never mind surface and skin deep and all of this.
But what's their profession and what's their real record and what's there about them to believe in or not, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, we haven't talked about Elizabeth Warren.
Let's do that.
We should.
Please do.
I was going down the list in order just because I have no imagination.
But you can skip around all you like.
Well, I just wanted to say that I think she when she started really did not have foreign policy experience and wanted to stay away from those issues and to go with the mainstream.
Because I remember we were in her office moaning literally on the ground saying when she was supporting the U.S. well, supporting the Israeli government invasion of Gaza at a time when all of these civilians were being killed.
And she came out and said that Israel had the right to defend itself.
And that was back in 2014.
And since then, she's come a long way.
She has especially staked out her position around the military spending that I find quite positive.
Not only is she talking now about cutting the bloated military budget, but she also has been specific.
Unlike any of the other candidates, she said that she doesn't support any more spending on nuclear weapons.
And this was under Obama when there was a bill passed that would give over a trillion dollars in the next 10 years to develop these more usable nukes.
And so for her coming out against that is a very important benchmark to try to get the others to agree with as well.
I know that she disappointed.
I believe it was Rachel Maddow, but it was one of these MSNBC hosts by saying, hey, man, you know what business is business.
And if Trump wants to get out of Afghanistan, I support him on that, which the partisans do not want to hear anything.
They would rather keep a war going than let Trump be the one to end it.
And she was saying, hey, and I know she's been there and has formed an opinion about that war.
So I thought that was because after all, the war is lost, right?
The Taliban is going to make major advances.
They are making them now and they're going to make even more after we leave.
And to be able to say, oh, well, you know what?
Enough is enough.
We still have to quit.
Despite that, politically in D.C. is pretty courageous.
Absolutely.
And especially if you're a Democrat, because these Democrats, even if Trump is doing the right thing, like in Syria and in Afghanistan and in the initial efforts to talk to North Korea, and we hope he goes back to the talks, the Democrats have basically been just trying to trash it because it's Trump.
And so for her to come out and say, yes, it is time for the troops to leave Afghanistan.
I think when she was asked about Syria, she said, you know, it shouldn't be precipitous, but yes, we should be getting out.
So that is a positive thing and does take courage, given the constellation of forces in the Democratic Party that just want to trash anything that Trump does.
Yeah.
You know, so I wonder and this goes back to to Tulsi Gabbard there for a second.
You know, I wonder about what effect Gabbard is going to have on Warren, because I think Warren must know that she's in such danger of being typecast as the next Hillary Clinton.
And so she's got to do something to really distinguish herself from that, you know, kind of narrative or image.
And so it seems like Gabbard is in a way sort of throwing down the gauntlet about what's a legit Democratic foreign policy and what's more hawkish than that.
She's sort of drawing a line in the sand and making them choose.
Right.
Yes, I think she's helpful to pushing all of the candidates on this issue.
But let's remember that Elizabeth Warren has really staked out her reputation around the economic issues and fighting the banks and the big corporate lobbies.
And so we do have to give her credit that she's nowhere near Hillary Clinton, who was the darling of Wall Street and all the corporate interests.
But you're right when it comes to foreign policy.
I think Tulsi is not only staking out positions in the really anti-war side of things, but she is also bringing it up so much that it forces the other candidates to talk about these issues more.
Sorry, hang on just one second.
Hey, guys, as you know, I have a notorious history with server problems, but those days are over.
It's all solved.
And that's because of the great Harley Abbott at ExpandDesigns.com.
ExpandDesigns.com.
Your website is too old.
It's out of date.
You need a new one for the 2020s.
ExpandDesigns.com and go to ExpandDesigns.com slash Scott and you'll save $500.
All right.
So Beto O'Rourke, Medea, what's his deal?
Well, I think he's the Obama.
He wants to take the middle ground on things.
He he people like him because he's charismatic.
But when you look at his voting record, he voted for most of the military spending bills.
He has been pretty quiet on these foreign policy issues in general, and he has close affinity to the military industrial complex that are so strong in the state of Texas.
So I wouldn't look to him for any good positions when it comes to ending war or cutting the military budget.
Yeah.
And by the way, he's no skateboarder either.
I keep hearing that he is.
But ask anyone who's actually a skateboarder.
Take one look at him in that Whataburger parking lot.
And he's what we call a poser.
He can stand on a skateboard maybe.
But you look at the way he stands on it and with his arms out all stupid.
And yeah, he's not one of us.
Well, I don't know about that, but he's probably pretty good on a bicycle.
That may be.
Anybody can ride a bike.
But listen, there's one more thing about him.
And you know what?
I presume the Washington Post guilty.
They must have been spinning and editing and treating this poor guy unfairly.
And I always assume the worst about them.
But according to them, his answer on Syria is he sounds like the doctor on idiocracy.
Oh, yeah.
Who me?
My job.
I just kind of, you know, I don't know.
I've been in Congress for six years and I don't know the first thing about that.
And isn't that interesting?
Maybe we need to have a discussion about what we're doing in Syria.
I mean, are you kidding me?
He was also a member of the House Armed Services Committee, so he definitely should know what's going on.
And, you know, and then I wonder, like, what's worse?
He's lying because he doesn't want to take a stand at all or he really doesn't know anything about it.
I think probably the first one, which is he wants to skirt the controversial issues to just keep himself as kind of a, you know, somebody that everybody could love.
All I can think of is like launching him out of a trebuchet into something or over something far.
I just.
How could any member of Congress talk that way about this just absolute catastrophe of American policy in Syria over these last years?
You know, he should have just said, you know what?
I resign.
I don't have a good answer for that question.
I quit.
I'm going back to the city council.
Well, you can't really get up to the position he's been in in the state of Texas and not be close to the military industry.
And let's call it what it is.
It's an industry.
They've made a lot of money in these wars in the Middle East, especially in Syria.
Yeah.
It's a huge part of the economy, especially in Fort Worth area and up in the Panhandle.
They make the nukes.
Oh, man.
You know what?
Some of these people I don't really know anything about.
I quit Twitter and it's like I closed one of my eyes.
It's better this way.
I was abusing it.
But anyway, who is Andrew Yang and what is he about?
Well, I don't know how much time we have, but I think we should go and talk about Joe Biden because he's pleased by all means.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
And then but then Andrew Yang, because he's a curiosity and people are excited and interested in him.
Uh-huh.
Well, I wanted to go on to Biden because, you know, if he does finally decide to run, I mean, my goodness, he's taken forever.
But he's going to be seen as placing the stake in another end of this foreign policy debate where Tulsi is on one end.
He's going to be on the other because he prides himself on being an expert when it comes to foreign policy.
And goodness knows, you know, he's been in enough foreign policy roles over the years as during his time in the Senate when he was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and during his time as vice president.
And he puts himself forward as this pragmatist.
But we've got to say that he was there during the lead up to the Iraq war, that he certainly could have come out very strongly against that war.
And he didn't.
He has since apologized, but he knew better and he supported that war.
Well, and by the way, so let's elaborate a little bit.
It's always 2002 to me.
He was the chair, as you say here, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he held the hearings and he allowed only hawks and no one to dispute it, refused to allow Scott Ritter to testify.
I mean, just that right there makes him might as well have been on Cheney's staff.
Well, yeah, you know, Raimondo had an article then, which, by the way, I apologize to you for everything Raimondo must have said to you, God knows what.
But anyway, he had a piece back then in 2002 called The Fix is In, and it was all about Joe Biden's phony hearings where he was pretending to be the slightest bit critical of why we needed to launch a war against Iraq.
And it was also just as clear.
I know you knew it was as clear as day at the time that for Biden, for John Kerry, for Hillary Clinton, that this was purely politics, that they had been embarrassed for being doves after the wonderful Iraq War One.
Bill Clinton had opposed it as governor, had mentioned something that had always been his shame.
And and I forget about Biden and Kerry and their exact votes on that, but they definitely did not want to be embarrassed by opposing another wonderful Bush adventure in Iraq.
And so they made the political decision that they would probably be that it was a safe bet that it would be worse to oppose this thing than to support it, you know, politically speaking.
Well, that's right.
And I don't think we can ever forgive him for that, because, as you said, being in such a key position where he could have educated the public and helped us in the anti-war movement to stop the war.
Instead, he went along with this idea of weapons of mass destruction and he was a part of the the military establishment that got us into that war.
So I don't think anything he's done afterwards of saying it was a mistake we should forgive him on.
Right.
And by the way, and I know Hillary isn't in the race yet, but we should mention, too, how she was the first lady, the wife of the previous president, and she and he knew good and well there was no case for attacking Iraq in a preemptive strike.
And she could have personally, I mean, literally by herself.
And of course, she would have been able to rope the rest of these guys in if she'd taken the brave stand.
She could have stopped this war just as well as Biden.
She could have got up there and said, look, I'm sorry, but I'm married to the previous president.
I know the truth.
And the truth is that this is not true.
And we should not be doing this.
She could have stopped the war because she could have made Kerry and Biden and those guys take her side, too, if that had been her mission to try to do.
And in fact, you know what?
It was you who, I'm sorry, this neuron just snapped.
You confronted her and said, please don't do this.
And she said to you, and we have the video of this now, she said to you, yeah, but George Bush gave me 20 billion dollars for New York City as though the federal government wasn't going to bail out downtown New York after the terrorist attack there.
Well, that's right.
And talk about never forgiving anybody.
I mean, as you say, she knew well and she was just part of the whole war machine.
So bad.
And yeah, and the opportunity, it's not just that she could have voted against it.
She could have really invoked Bill Clinton's authority and said, this is just I'm sorry, it's just not true.
Forget partisanship.
Iraq is a weak, tiny fourth world country, man.
They're nothing to us.
They're not doing anything to us.
You know, and Bill Clinton, of course, went on The David Letterman Show and said, oh, don't worry, David, it'll be over in two weeks.
It's going to be great.
He supported it, too.
Right.
Anyway, I'm sorry, but it's a tangent, but it's an important one.
So now I'm sorry.
Talk about a little bit.
Well, go on to whoever you want.
But I want to hear about Andrew Yang because I don't even know who he is.
All right.
Well, let's do Andrew Yang.
He is an entrepreneur.
He's the founder of a company called Venture for America.
And he his his claim to fame has been founding all these startup companies.
So he's got plenty of money to do on on his put into his race.
But one of the interesting things is that he has talked about the military spending and that it's out of control.
And he has said that it makes it harder for us to have other kinds of non-military engagement with the rest of the world.
And he wants to reinvest in diplomacy.
So I think he does add some positive things to this issue about the how we conduct our foreign policy.
All right.
Well, you know what?
I I sent a book to the Starbucks guy.
I don't know if he's going to read it or not.
I wrote that one about how it feels.
Well, that was nice of you.
Well, you know, it seems like especially for these outsiders, you know, a friend of mine was talking about how Donald Trump has just lowered the barrier to entry where you can have people, you know, when Ron Paul ran as a member of the House of Representatives, that was that alone was a major strike against him.
You got to be either a governor, a senator or a vice president.
Those are the rules kind of thing, you know.
But Donald Trump has certainly changed all that.
So you have all these other businessmen and members of the House of Representatives like Tulsi Gabbard and other outsiders running.
And hey, why not if this guy can do it kind of a thing?
And so that could either lead to, you know, better or worse consequences, depending on the situation.
But, you know, what if we could convince some of these outsiders that the best thing that they could do to get attention for themselves would be to rail against this empire?
And this obviously bogus.
You know what?
You're Code Pink and I'm Antiwar.com.
And we know and we've been saying all along, but the deal is that actually everybody now knows the average Joe in any party or any point of view in this country can and has already figured out that, hey, it shouldn't take 20 years to kill 400 guys.
What the hell is going on here with this war on terrorism?
Anyway, we don't have to do this.
You know, I know people who sacrificed everything in this war and everybody kind of feels like, oh, yeah, I guess we never had to do that after all kind of thing.
And yet it continues.
And this is the right time.
And you're right.
I mean, in that sense, Donald Trump has opened it up.
And you you have to take all these different candidates seriously because you just never know.
And it is great.
I mean, we have this presidents for peace campaign that we're trying to see who is going to be the best one, who has the best positions.
And I think one of the areas where we really got to push them on is about the Pentagon budget to say, call for the U.S. to close its foreign military bases and save one hundred billion dollars a year.
Call for the U.S. to stop putting money into new usable nukes and save us a trillion dollars over the next 10 years.
Call for these candidates to say, bring all the troops home and stop the wars.
And what are we going to save on that that position?
So we've got a moment now where we can, like the environmentalists who are pushing this Green New Deal, we got to push a new peace deal and show how we can save lots of money, make ourselves safer and more loved in the world.
And this is the time for these candidates to step forward with an exciting position that says and they are for ending the endless wars.
Yeah.
And, you know, you think about the precedent set where Donald Trump and literally, you know, I don't think you or I would have guessed.
I thought it was going to be Jeb for sure, because obviously anyone can be Hillary.
And obviously, Jeb is the anointed prince to inherit the throne or whatever kind of thing.
And he was the front runner.
And no one thought really that Donald Trump was even going to run, I guess, or really believed at first that he would win.
But who would have guessed that he would have won deliberately running against not just Obama's legacy, but against George W.
Bush's legacy?
And of course, Jeb put him in that position to use Junior as a, you know, W as a cudgel against him.
But, you know, he told right wing audiences that we never should have fought that war, that one that you just spent, you know, 16 years supporting and championing.
I'm telling you, we never should have done it.
And they said, you know what, he's right and elected him based on that.
So if the right wing, broadly speaking, that Tea Party, you know, massive Republican voters out there, if they feel that way, then, hey, the liberal Democratic consensus better be for peace or else should be certainly should be the narrative of the left.
There's nothing more important than, for example, calling off the crisis, you know, the American generated crisis in Yemen right now or these other things.
Yes.
And they better not let Trump come across as the peace candidate, because if he is saying get out of Syria, but the troops actually stay there, he's saying get out of Afghanistan, but leaving 7000 of them there.
He's saying let's talk to North Korea, but then doesn't follow up on the talks or give an inch in terms of something that would incentivize the Koreans to move forward and continues to antagonize Iran and threaten to invade Venezuela.
And Palestine, a horrible on Palestine, Palestine and horrible on supporting the Saudis not only in their war in Yemen, but just selling the Saudis all of these billions of dollars in weapon systems that they can use to repress their own people and repress other countries in the Middle East.
So the Democrats really have to come out there, you know, in this NATO stuff that has been going on with the visit from the head of NATO.
Democrats should have come out and say, hey, NATO is obsolete.
Trump was right in the beginning and he's wrong now.
We shouldn't be spending more money on our military and we shouldn't be telling the other countries in the world to spend more money on their militaries.
Instead, the Democrats jumped up and down for the NATO commander when he was speaking before the joint session of Congress.
That's not going to stake out an antiwar position that we need.
Right.
But it does.
The whole situation really does open every liberal, democratic, more or less centrist type congressman or senator or politician on the national level, policymaker on the national level to such wonderful attacks that by people on their left, members of their same coalition to absolutely demand that you cannot be worse than Trump's best phrase on these issues, whether he follows through or not.
If he says he wants out of Syria, you have to say you want out of Syria faster.
If he wants out of Afghanistan, you have to say you want out of Afghanistan faster.
If he says he wants beef with Iran, then you have to say, hell no, I'll impeach and remove you before I let you attack Iran.
But I support you on withdrawal from here, there and the other place.
And these things that and they have to know that they can't be simply partisan about this.
They have to do like Warren has to know that this is what's smart politically.
For example, the rest of them also have to understand that.
Hey, talks with Korea.
I support that even if it's Trump.
You know, America must talk with North Korea.
We must negotiate with them regardless of who's in charge.
That kind of thing.
They have to know that if they refuse to go along with that sort of, you know, manner of campaigning, that their goose is cooked.
And unfortunately, you know, the left has a lot of separate and other priorities than foreign policy.
But like you were saying, you know, essentially they can't have any of what they want without ending these expensive wars first anyway.
So there you go.
Step one, quit doing the worst thing in the world.
Then we'll get to fix another step.
Absolutely.
And let's bring the anti-war left and right.
And libertarians and everybody else together to make this an election where they're trying to one up each other to see who is the candidate that is going to have the position that will get us out of wars and and the the the forking over of over 50 percent of our discretionary money to the Pentagon.
Trillion dollars a year, which is just unbelievable, but it's true.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you.
And I think I have told you before, you know, every once in a while or something.
But I honestly and truly cannot tell you how much I appreciate every bit of your efforts this whole millennium along so far.
And I don't know what you're doing in the 90s, but you're just great.
And your whole group is great.
And I don't know what in the world the world would do without you over there at Code Pink, Medea.
Well, thanks for having me on, Scott.
It's been great talking to you.
I look forward to doing it again.
OK, you guys, that is Medea Benjamin from Code Pink.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org.
Antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
