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.
But we ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Aren't you guys introducing Daniel Lazar, journalist and regular writer over at Consortiumnews.com.
He wrote The Frozen Republic back in 1996.
Welcome back to the show, how you doing?
I'm fine, how are you Scott?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us again on the show here.
And well, appreciate this great article, Spooks Spooking Themselves.
A CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree.
Honest paranoia or not, I guess we'll reserve judgment on that for a second.
But so just to get this straight, and you know, hey, it's kind of reference, I think there in your introduction, The Frozen Republic.
That's a liberal take on the constitution, a progressive take on the constitution.
You're a writer for Consortium, not a conservative, not a right winger, not a Trump supporter of any kind.
You're writing this article from the left.
And you're saying something, you have a very critical take on the origins of the Russiagate case against Donald Trump.
So, yeah, well, okay, fine.
Let me just jump in there.
I mean, so the case, the idea never made sense to me to begin with.
The evidence that even at the Democratic National Committee was hacked always struck me as contradictory and unimpressive.
No proof was never put forth.
And I was always amazed, always amazed that the FBI never actually inspected the DNC servers itself.
It's very, very strange.
But everybody assumed from the start this thing was real.
You know, proof was superfluous.
Everyone was convinced instantly that it was like the Second Coming or the resurrection of Christ.
Everyone believed that this is true.
So everyone, that became axiomatic.
And then from there, people started spinning this huge, complicated conspiracy, really.
And it really is a kind of conspiracy mongering, you know, just like other kinds of conspiracy mongering.
Lee Harvey Oswald or how Mossad took down the World Trade Center in 2001, etc.
And I think that what's now come clear with the news that a Cambridge academic and spook named Stefan Halper, that he infiltrated the Trump campaign at the behest of the FBI, what's become clear is the degree of involvement of the intelligence agency, both sides of the Atlantic at every step of the way in this whole unfolding scandal, is really extraordinary.
And I don't want to be a conspiratorialist.
I don't want to jump to conclusions and say that it involves this and that and this and that, because we really don't know quite what's involved.
But the general outlines are coming into view.
And that shows, as I said, an intelligence agency involvement at every step in this process.
Well, at every step, meaning from the very beginning or from almost the beginning?
Because I guess, you know, the conspiracists in this case would say that, well, yeah, no, because they were trying to do the right thing and protect America from a Russian plot.
So, of course, they were, you know, a bunch of intelligence agencies and intelligence officials swinging into action here.
Well, they would say that, but unfortunately, there's something, it's an old fashioned thing called evidence, which is lacking.
I mean, so far, there's been no evidence of any Russian government collusion, a collusion, or of any Trump collusion with Russia, or even very much by other Russians.
The Internet Research Agency, the notorious firm in St. Petersburg, which took out all those Facebook ads, it just wasn't very much.
It was $46,000 worth of Facebook ads by Election Day.
You know, some pro-Trump, some pro-Hillary, some nothing at all.
It just doesn't amount to very much.
It's very unimpressive.
But everyone assumes their starting point is that this is the greatest conspiracy in history.
Yeah.
You know, I just heard, I guess on National Public Radio last week, I think it was, where they say, yes, you know, of course, the unquestionable intervention by Russia in the campaign, by way of buying some social media ads, they didn't even try to say by hacking the emails and leaking them through WikiLeaks to the public or anything like that.
That was all they even tried to invoke.
And they didn't seem to know how laughable and ridiculous it sounded that they bought a few Facebook ads, did they?
Pope endorses Trump.
And you're telling me that anyone but a Trump supporter who was already going to vote for him believe that, or that anyone in the world was moved by that?
Give me a break, you know?
Well, you know, it's the, do you know what the Protocol for the Elders of Zion were?
Sure.
That was a classic 19th century anti-Semitic text.
It was actually a forgery by the czarist secret police in Russia.
But it sort of showed this cabal of Jews, you know, as puppeteers controlling events around the world.
It's crazy.
It made no sense.
It was like, oh, it was lunacy.
But that essentially, what we have here is the elders of Moscow, elders of the Kremlin scenario, where somehow Putin has used his dark arts to install Trump in the White House.
And it makes no more sense than the elders of Zion scenario made sense, you know, back in the turn of the century.
But yet it's believed very widely.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
Well, it's the same thing we've heard, you know, for the last 15 years about the elders of Islam and how, you know, the Ayatollah and Osama and Saddam, and they're all in on it against you, Daniel, you know?
Better look out.
Yeah, I mean, like Sigmund Freud once said that even paranoids have enemies.
So even the most anti-conspiratorial skeptic has got to admit that there are conspiracies at times.
But...
Well, look, you're talking about a conspiracy to frame up Putin and frame up Trump here.
I mean, look, the question isn't whether powerful people have agreements or whether intelligence agencies do covert operations, which sometimes succeed.
That's not a question.
You know, for all the talk about conspiracy this, conspiracy that, or truth or this or that, what you're really talking about is, as you said before, jumping to conclusions or speculating unreasonably and letting speculation fill the place of known fact and then carry on as though it's not still just an exercise in guessing or what have you, right?
So there is such a thing as being a truth or kook, but there's also such a thing as hating and fearing the CIA and knowing that they're up to no good and trying to do as best you can to figure out what it is that they're doing.
I mean, hell, they backed al-Qaeda in Syria from 2011 until Trump called it off last year.
That's high treason.
So that sounds crazy, but yeah, actually, it's not, as I know you know.
Yes, that is quite true.
I mean, you know, back when I was — I started out as a newspaper reporter back in the mid-70s, you know, we were taught — I was taught, you know, how to write a news story, how to let the facts speak for themselves, how not to jump to conclusions, right?
And these editors who are very, very tough-minded are printing some small paper in Central Jersey.
And if we try to go beyond the facts, these editors would yank us back, you know?
But now we see all those publications like The Washington Post, The New York Times, or CNN running riot.
I mean, engaging in all kinds of speculation for which there is no evidence.
It's just nuts.
So the role of the intelligence agencies is really key here.or a lifetime subscription, not only for $100, not two, a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think audiobooks, Libertarian audiobooks, listenandthink.com there.
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All right, thanks.
Okay, so let's talk about that and turn it back around the other way.
Because you say you have the outlines here.
You're not exactly sure.
You're speculating, sort of.
But you have a very in-depth recitation of the known facts here about these different intelligence officials.
Some of them foreigners, including Ukrainians and God knows who intervening in the election last year.
Not too many Russians around, but plenty of Brits.
So what is it that you think happened here?
And go ahead and speculate if you want to.
Just don't claim that your speculation is a fact.
I'm trying to be as conservative and careful as I can.
Okay, we know that sometime around, well, first of all, we know that Trump was surging ahead in the polls by late 2015.
And that he was also making startling statements, startling in terms of what the received wisdom was in Washington, regarding calling for a rapprochement with Russia.
So people were very careful.
Their eyes were popping.
They were getting quite along to what Trump was saying.
So somewhere around late 2015, intelligence agencies in the Baltic, in Germany, in Britain, kind of started getting together and exchanging messages, claiming that there were people in the Kremlin who were colluding with Trump.
And then in March, Trump appointed this young guy named George Papadopoulos.
The foreign policy investor, Papadopoulos was traveling in Italy a short time later where he ran into a Maltese-British academic named Massoud.
And Massoud sort of cultivating Papadopoulos when he heard that he had connections to the Trump campaign.
And we know that Massoud, and we know this is not speculation.
This is quite hard fact, is connected to top British intelligence agencies.
But that's all we know.
That's a fact.
We know that he was cultivating Papadopoulos.
I don't want to go any further than that.
And we know from the prosecutors that on April 26th at breakfast at London, he told Massoud, he told Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Hillary in the form of hundreds of emails, golem emails.
OK, so then some time goes by and then Papadopoulos was put in touch with a guy named Alexander Downer, who was essentially the Australian ambassador to the UK.
And through a famous bon vivant drinker, et cetera, he invites Papadopoulos out for drinks.
And Papadopoulos, in the course of this evening, passes along Massoud's tip.
And so then a couple of months go by, then Downer informs the government, a couple of months go by, and the Australian government then informs the FBI.
But meanwhile, the head of the GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA, was flying to Washington to pass along other evidence regarding a Russia connection to John Brenner, the head of the CIA.
And also, Christopher Steele, an ex-MI6 agent, MI6, the British CIA, was hard at work at his dossier and had come up with sensational charges that Putin had been cultivating Trump for five years or more, and that the Russians had a secret tape of Trump cavorting with prostitutes at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton and doing really nasty things.
And so all this is converging on the FBI.
But there was the GCHQ, MI6, Massoud, the Australians, these are all sort of intelligent, top diplomatic circles were going on.
And then others got involved as well.
One was Michael Derulov, the former head of MI6, who was a key player in developing the case that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had tons of WMDs, weapons of mass destruction, that warranted a U.S. invasion.
Andrew Wood, the next British ambassador to Moscow, was also involved with a personal friend of Steele.
That's about it.
And then, of course, James Clapper, head of the Director of National Intelligence.
So they were all pushing this theory that the Russians were puppeteers who were playing Trump, and they were all pushing for an FBI investigation.
And eventually Trump was elected to everybody's surprise, and eventually then this became a major push by the intelligence agencies to cripple Trump or even, there's evidence, well, at least there's a report by The New Yorker, to drive him out of office, to force him to resign.
So it just seems to be an intelligence operation at every step of the way.
I don't want to speculate.
I don't want to go beyond the facts.
But these are the facts as they appear today.
You know, let me just add for context here real quick that if people remember that shortly after the election, even, they were pushing, including Hillary Clinton, you know, this was on the record, I forget if it was The Post or The What, but where Hillary Clinton's very top aides confirmed that they were working on this and trying to figure out how to get the intelligence community to brief the Electoral College so that they would throw the election to the House of Representatives and appoint somebody safe like Colin Powell or Paul Ryan to be the President of the United States.
It sounded ridiculous.
Where do they think they're getting these electors from?
But they really were in that typical Hillary Clinton-esque way with no self-awareness of how horrible it looked at that point.
They were talking about, yeah, let's see if we can throw this thing in the Electoral College now based on Russian ties.
According to The New Yorker magazine, an aide to Senator John McCain came up with an idea of having McCain confront Trump with the dossier, the news of the golden showers, the Moscow golden showers, in the hope that Trump would resign on the spot.
This was after the election but before the inauguration.
And on June 6th, Clapper and Brennan persuaded James Comey to meet with Trump one-on-one to show, you know, to confront him with the same evidence.
And Comey said he didn't want to pull a J. Edgar Hoover.
But that's the way it appeared to be.
So things were going on.
Explain what that means, pull a J. Edgar Hoover.
Well, J. Edgar Hoover was notorious.
I mean, J. Edgar Hoover was, you know, head of the FBI for, what, 30 years.
And he had a file on everybody, okay?
So if anybody crossed Hoover's path, he would pull this file out.
Look, I'd hate for this to wind up in the press.
And the person would then turn white and said, yes, we'd hate to have this wind up in the press.
So therefore, Hoover would say, your cooperation therefore is necessary.
So Hoover became the power behind the throne in Washington.
It's really an amazing story.
So that's what it appeared that Comey was doing when he met with Trump on January 6th, 2017.
And that's even what Comey himself admits it looks like what he was doing.
Host 1 Okay.
Now, but so let me ask you, is it just that everybody else, as you said, and you're completely correct about this, obviously, that everyone else in mainstream media and all that, the consensus, they're all begging the question here.
They're all starting out just like a conspiracist with their conclusion first, and then cherry picking everything that makes that feel right and seem right, and that kind of thing.
So are you saying that just because you're not starting out with your same conclusion as them, that you are this level of unimpressed with the case?
And even now, you're looking at this more like, geez, it sort of looks like these intelligence agencies and officials are trying to set the president up rather than they're trying to get to the bottom of anything that's really going on here?
Or is there something else that really you could articulate for us that really makes you look at it from the other direction here, other than just not buying their conclusion outright to start?
David Morgan Well, I mean, I'm not a tabula rasa.
I've got political beliefs of my own.
You know, I never liked Hillary Clinton.
I thought she did some really utterly appalling things.
And it was very interesting how Trump sort of wound up attacking her from the left, amazingly enough, during the campaign.
So that was all quite fascinating.
But I do insist that if you just go back and you look at this so-called scandal as it unfolded step by step, and you look at each step very carefully in an unbiased, skeptical point of view, you'll see that the evidence is really just not there.
I mean, as was the case with Iraqi WMD 15 years earlier.
Yeah, but you know, I saw a headline.
But I saw yesterday where General Hayden said that there is no deep state.
These people don't have a will of their own.
They're simply public servants trying to help us all.
Well, of course, that goes without saying.
But cast your mind back to 2014 or so.
I mean, the U.S. empire had gotten itself into big trouble in two global hot spots.
One was the Ukraine, the other was Syria.
And in both those places, Vladimir Putin was able to intervene very neatly and check U.S. ambitions on the spot.
I mean, Putin apparently was a judo player in his youth.
He's probably a chess player as well.
And so these were very sort of classic chess gambits, where somebody gets himself in trouble, someone else comes along and just sort of just stops them right there with a neat little maneuver.
So, you know, so Putin stopped, you know, detached the Crimea from Ukraine, probably gave some encouragement to separatists in eastern Ukraine, elsewhere in eastern Ukraine.
And in Syria, he intervened in the war to save Bashar al-Assad by providing him with air support.
And by the way, I'm not saying any of these things were right or just.
I'm just saying the U.S. was furious at what he had done.
Well, in fact, you know, Robert Perry of Consortium News, where you're writing here, his theory then was, and it was, you know, a bit of speculation, but he thought that a big part of the rationalization or the motivation for the putsch in Ukraine was as revenge against Russia for helping Obama avoid war over his stupid red line and the Gouda false flag al-Qaeda attack in August, September 2013.
And when Putin came and said, look, I'll pull your chestnuts out of the fire here, Obama.
I'll have Assad give up all his chemical weapons, and then you can back down from your threat to attack, which he didn't really want to do anyway.
He boxed himself in, obviously.
And so that was when the Kagan swung into action and said, let's overthrow the government in Kiev, and that'll teach Putin to try to get along with the president of the United States.
That'll teach Obama, too.
Well, you know, everything had been building for a long time.
I mean, there was a war between Russia and Georgia in 2007, 2008.
And if you recall, Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, was on the phone nearly daily with John McCain, was urging him on.
And so Georgia actually started the war.
Russia finished it by briefly invading part of Georgia.
But the U.S. was very, very angry.
And, you know, America is like the Serbs.
You know, it forgives, but it doesn't forget.
And so significant elements in Washington, the neocons, the Kagan, as you point out, you know, were thirsting for revenge.
And their moment came in 2013-14 in the Ukraine, when they were, you know, going to, you know, have the Ukraine join NATO, and therefore force Russia to give up its naval bases in the Crimea.
But Putin, you know, stepped in and stopped it quite jointly, which really, really made Washington very angry.
And so when Washington is very angry, when the neocons are angry, they get really upset when a major presidential candidate, you know, parts ways with Washington orthodoxy.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I mean, this goes back to 10 years before that, when they, in fact, overthrew the very same Ukrainian president, Yushchenko, when he won that election then, and they did the Orange Revolution, and then they did that whole series of color-coded revolutions, including even in Tajikistan, to try to limit the influence of the Russians.
Yeah, they've been playing a great game for a while.
I mean, as you know, as Big Brzezinski wrote a famous book in 1998 called The Great Game, in which he called for the breakup of Russia itself, and for winging Russia with a circle of hostile states, first and foremost of which would be the Ukraine.
And that really has been more or less U.S. strategy.
And, you know, and Putin was quite alarmed, and he's done his best to stop it.
He's a very clever guy, there's just no doubt about it.
All right.
So now, I mean, and it really, okay, so this much is established.
There's been a Cold War.
It's the Americans who are the aggressors, as we all know here, and that doesn't make the Russians the good guys.
But it does mean that, you know, in fact, in Syria and Ukraine, for example, they are reacting to American policy.
And the fact that they keep besting the Americans is really all the fault of the Americans.
Rather than, same thing with the Iranians.
They keep getting over on us, too, but only because we keep doing things for them.
Yeah, but America is like a Brontosaurus, a walnut-sized brain.
And now all these little mammals are scurrying underfoot, eating the Brontosaurus's eggs.
Did you see where the Ayatollahs said it was like Tom and Jerry?
And they're Jerry, and we're Tom, and the mouse always wins.
Right.
I mean, so, no, it's just that the U.S. is just grossly overextended, and the quality of leadership in Washington has plummeted.
Just plummeted.
And it hasn't just plummeted under Trump, it plummeted under Obama.
Because Obama gave a free hand to the neocons.
That's the important thing here.
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All right, so now back to the specifics of this case here.
Papadopoulos and Page and this and that.
Help me out what you think exactly.
The narrative here is that these spies decided we got to make it look like Trump is compromised by Russia.
And let's go ahead and we'll exploit the Carter-Page, you know, appearances of impropriety and build something out of this.
Yeah, well, you know, according to a Washington Post article, but what it's worth, Michael Dearlove was talking with Christopher Steele in an exclusive club in London.
And Dearlove was the head of the MI6.
And Dearlove recounted a story where apparently there was a U.S. vice presidential candidate, Dearlove didn't say who it was, who had had some kind of contacts with the Kremlin.
And all it took was one phone call from Dearlove to force this guy to withdraw from the race.
So that's the kind of assumption.
That's a template.
These guys assume that they have control.
It's that somehow they find that they somehow get it in their head that there's some kind of communication between the Kremlin and some figure in U.S. politics that they will simply issue the order and the order will be obeyed.
Now, the important thing to keep in mind is that I think Dearlove really believes this stuff.
I mean, he believes in his own machinations.
He probably believes there was some kind of collusion between the Kremlin and Trump, even though no evidence has come forward.
So anyway, so Dearlove encouraged Christopher Steele to keep pushing his famous dossier.
And then Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Moscow, pulled aside John McCain at an international conference at Nova Scotia and told him about the dossier.
Anyway, McCain then, you know, then, you know, he and his aide allegedly came up with a scheme to force Trump to withdraw after the election.
And so, you know, so this whole this whole effort kept building and building and building.
And at every step of the way, these individuals were involved in pumping it up.
So that brings up, yeah, this guy Halper.
Who is he again?
Halper is an academic at Cambridge.
He is kind of a hard letter on China.
He's written a couple of books that have very well received in certain quarters.
So he was a spook who had infiltrated the Carter White House and was passing information onto the Reagan election campaign back in 1980.
And then he swung back into action 36 years later at the behest of the FBI and sought out and befriended three key figures that George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, another Trump advisor who was the object of a prize of search warrant obtained by the FBI, and Sam Clovis, the national co-chairman of the Trump campaign.
Now, I mean, first of all, if under George W. Bush, if George W. Bush had agents who were spying on Barack Obama in 2008, the liberal press would have gone wild.
But now they're defending these same tactics eight years later.
But so Halper is another key figure as part of the same set, close friend of Michael Dearlove, apparently an anti-Russian paranoid, etc., etc., who was also involved in this attempt to somehow pin these collusion charges on Trump.
And the whole thing is just smells to high heaven.
Well, and it's funny because the real foreign collusion here then would be the Hillary Clinton campaign with the British intelligence officers here.
Yes, that's exactly right.
Exactly.
Yes.
If there's any real collusion, it's really with the British intelligence and, of course, Israeli intelligence and others.
Right.
But everyone is bending over backwards to blame the Russians.
You know what I don't understand, though, is why are they so scared of Donald Trump?
I mean, here's a guy who gets up there and goes, oh, yeah, I'm going to be even-handed on Israel-Palestine.
So only a ridiculous hopeful fool or a ridiculous paranoid neocon like David Frum or something would believe that.
All the rest of us said, yeah, right.
Like Donald Trump cares about Palestinians and enough that he's going to make Israel back down, which would be obviously the necessary step for having any kind of peace there, you know, and that's why.
So I can see why Kook's panicked.
Total, total, you know, right wing wing nuts panic.
But the rest of them should have said, ah, don't worry about Trump.
He's fine.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, Trump is a reactionary idiot.
OK, let's get that straight.
I mean, the guy is a complete fool and jackass.
Yeah.
So what's the problem?
Well, of course, the campaign managed to come up with two semi-good ideas.
OK, and one of them was a rapprochement with Russia, and the other one was the idea that instead of trying to undermine Assad in Syria and thereby pave the way for an ISIS al-Qaeda takeover of Damascus, which is bonkers, that America should stop trying to overthrow Assad.
Those are the two semi-good ideas, OK?
Yeah.
Now, the Democrats, rather than attacking him on all the incredibly stupid things he said, have concentrated their fire on the two semi-good things the guy said.
The incompetence, the reactionary quality, the general disgustingness, the Democrats, I mean, can't be overemphasized.
And so they've attacked him on the two semi-coherent ideas he came up with.
It's an amazing performance.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
And, you know, I don't know.
It's funny because, you know, even among the right-wingers, like you look at all the resistance neocons and this kind of thing, that they ought to love this guy.
He's fighting the terror war in exactly the way that they would want him to, doubling Obama's drone wars and special operations wars and all of the, you know, anti-Al Qaeda-ish wars out there.
Now, he did call off support for Al Qaeda in Syria, which I know is, you know, for them, crossing a major line or something.
In fact, the Washington Post headline was, In move sure to please the Russians, Trump calls off support for Al Qaeda in Syria.
What the hell?
They thought we'd just swallow that whole.
I guess a lot of people did.
But it just seems like, you know, if I was part of the war party, I would rest assured that everything's fine.
You know, as they do say sometimes, well, we do have General Mattis up there making sure everything continues rolling along.
So, I don't know.
And even as far as, wouldn't it be nice if we got along with Russia?
Or, geez, I don't know.
I think NATO, they don't pay their fair share or whatever.
Anybody who took that to mean that he really was anti-NATO and was going to completely call off and change American policy toward Russia was a fool.
I mean, whether a hopeful fool or a crazy reactionary war party fool.
I mean, that was so obvious back then.
Well, bear in mind, the war power, the war party is dumb, Martin.
I mean, Hillary Clinton was the favorite of the war party.
And then when she lost the election, they were really shocked.
And they really then swung the fashion.
They tried to deal with this guy, Trump.
But I agree.
But again, Trump's a fool.
He ranges all over the map.
But the Democrats have attacked him on the two semi-good ideas he came up with.
And their incompetence is just astounding.
Well, and it really is working on the liberals, right?
Like, I see so much.
And, you know, I don't know.
It's really a sad thing that so much of my view is formed from looking at Twitter.
But I follow a lot of liberal journalists on Twitter and a lot of leftists and progressives, too.
And the further left you go, the easier it is to see through this stuff, apparently, for people on the left.
But there are so many liberal media people, especially, who are just so invested in this horrible Russian attack on America here and the rise of Trump as the result and whatever.
I mean, this is never going away.
And it's really, as you're kind of saying, too, is this it's corralled their take on all kinds of foreign policy issues where they, instead of just measuring whether America's military should be doing this, that or the other thing to somebody, they measure it in terms of, yeah, but what will Russia think if we stop if, you know, and that kind of deal, just like The Washington Post would have them.
But, you know, and it really actually been really playing right into Putin's hands.
I mean, I mean, the U.S. behavior across the board is so it's so out of control these days from Trump onto the onto the Democrats.
You know, one side is imposing a trade war, engaging a sword rattling toward Iran.
The other one is sword rattling towards Russia that the Europeans are quite spooked.
And and therefore they have no choice but to essentially to try to improve relations with Russia and to wind up taking Russia's side.
So this could be the start of a historic shift from a U.S.-European alliance to some kind of Eurasian alliance.
I mean, I know that's Putin's dream, but actually the U.S. is making it easier for him to to implement that idea.
Yeah.
Well, you know, a few years ago, two or three years ago in Foreign Affairs, they ran a piece by John Mearsheimer saying the Ukraine crisis is America's fault.
And basically, you know, I was happy to see that the editor of Foreign Affairs at the time who championed the coup, Gideon Rose, was man enough at least to run the Mearsheimer piece.
But so my question is, is there really any faction other than Doug Bandow at the Cato Institute and a few writers at ConsortiumNews.com and so forth who really have anything like a realistic take on Russia?
I mean, there are a lot of different think tanks in D.C.
What about any of them?
Or is anybody saying, hey, snap out of it here?
There's complete unanimity across the entire centrist spectrum, from the neocons to the neolibs to the liberals, etc.
There's perfect agreement, total consensus, absolute uniformity.
And they're united behind this increasingly bellicose policy towards Russia, which is just a losing strategy.
Yeah, well, and you know, the real shame of this, to me, I always think of it in these terms, and maybe this isn't it.
You know, moral character certainly has a lot to do with it.
But it always seemed to me, too, that if Trump was just a little bit smarter, that if he had just a little bit more curiosity, he might stumble across the national interest website and read some Paul Pilar.
You know, nothing revolutionary about that, but acceptable, right?
Read some Andrew Bacevich.
Read some Doug Bandow.
He doesn't even know these men exist.
He doesn't even know that there are Paul Pilar articles to read, and go, well, you know, I don't know, this guy has a little bit more sensible take, you know?
He just doesn't even know.
He has no exposure to it, and Pompeo ain't going to tell him, and so here we are.
This is a battle between the bad and the worse.
I mean, Trump is just a blithering idiot, and he has no idea, no idea of strategy.
You're absolutely right.
If he was smart, he could run rings around.
Yeah, I mean, and never even mind, like, changing his mind, right?
Like, he could cite, I'm just talking about things that he could rely upon to reaffirm, as you said, what's already, you know, his take is, eh, let's get along with Russia, let's not overthrow Assad.
I'm not even talking about changing his mind, making him good on Afghanistan, or, well, that's a bad example, too.
He used to be, have good opinions about that, but.
Yeah, but he also has tied himself up in knots over Iran.
I mean, if Trump was going to be consistent, he would support the treaty, the nuclear accords with Iran, because Iran is essentially, you know, on a lead together with Russia in supporting Assad.
So if he was halfway smart, he would, you know, he would have attacked those accords.
The guy is just, is not halfway smart.
He's totally, completely, 100% stupid.
And it's such a great irony, isn't it?
That the impossible happened, that anyone could have stopped the Clintons and the Bushes and their duopoly control over American politics these last, you know, this last generation.
I mean, Obama was nothing but a Clinton, anyway.
And it's Donald Trump, for Christ's sake, and where he could say, everything wrong with American policy is all stupid Bush and weak Obama's fault and make a clean break with whatever he wants and do whatever he wants for good or for ill.
He only does the wrong thing.
You know, he did, he did stop that CIA support for Al Qaeda.
But other than that, let's be real here.
I mean, it takes, it takes, it's just not easy to steer the ship of state in a different direction.
So Trump would have been a smart guy who knew what he was doing in order to implement a different course of action.
And he just is, you know, he just is not.
He's a babe in the wood.
He doesn't know anything about politics at all.
He has some kind of gut instinct, but he has just no idea how to really play the game.
Yeah, geez, now I don't want to hear your answer to, well, you think maybe they're going to make peace in Korea?
Are they going to go along with Moon making peace?
Because that could be a good way.
This Simpleton president we're talking about here.
If people really slap him on the back a lot and tell him what a hero he is for making a peace deal, that could really influence him a lot.
That, you know, instead of waging wars, you could stop them and we would all like you very much, kind of.
Well, that's a possibility.
But he's got Bolton whispering in his ear and Bolton is dead set against the peace.
I mean, Bolton is intent on making a peace impossible.
Pompeo's with him though, right?
I mean, and he's still the boss of Bolton.
Before there can be any accord in North Korea, Kim Jong-un would want strong blanket assurances that the U.S. will respect North Korean sovereignty and security.
Washington will never give that.
I am just convinced they will never go that far.
They will never give Kim the assurances that he needs and requires.
And so, therefore, I'm very skeptical about an agreement, you know, being reached.
Yeah, I feel you.
All right.
Listen, Daniel, I love talking with you.
Thanks very much for coming back on the show.
That's great, Scott.
Thanks a lot.
All right, you guys, that's Daniel Lazar.
He's writing over at ConsortiumNews.com.
Spooks spooking themselves about the bogus Russia-Ghazi fake scandal of stupidity.
And you guys know me, ScottHorton.org, LibertarianInstitute.org, AntiWar.com, Twitter.
See ya.
