08/16/07 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Introducing our next guest, my good friend, the great James Bovard.
He is a policy advisor to the Future Freedom Foundation.
He's been published in all the major papers and Playboy.
He sometimes blogs at antiwar.com and he's written the books The Farm Fiasco, The Fair Trade Fraud, Lost Rights, Shakedown, Freedom in Chains, Feeling Your Pain, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, and Attention Deficit Democracy, his masterpiece.
My friend, James Bovard, welcome to the show, Jim.
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me back on.
Oh, man, it's always good to talk to you.
We're doing the war at home this hour, at least to start here.
We were just talking about the New York Police Department doing this report that says, well, I guess you and I are to be considered terrorists.
Average citizens who get together sometimes and talk about politics or talk about Islam or whatever it is are to be considered suspects.
Well, I was reading about that report and I decided I'll never wear a burka in New York again.
Yeah, well, I keep trying to tell you to stop dressing up like that.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's hell on my motto image.
Yeah, well, and everybody knows you're sporting an SKS under there, too.
Hey, you know, I mean, you know, I think that falls under the state secrets doctrine.
Oh, okay, yeah, we won't talk about that.
Yeah, that and the wiretaps, state secrets, nobody's business.
So let's talk about that.
Let's talk about Jose Padilla.
I guess I should have Googled it during the break there, but last I heard the Padilla jury is still out.
Yeah, well, I guess I'll just tell you, from my point of view, sitting here in Austin, Texas, everything I've been able to learn about this case, it seems to me that Jose Padilla is innocent.
And that's why they turn him over to the military to be tortured.
And he's fixing to be acquitted because they got nothing on him.
What do you say to that?
It sounds like a lot of what they have on him is completely bogus.
It sounds it looks very clear that they tortured him for a long period of time.
I don't know the exact rules of evidence that the judge has allowed in this case.
But I would hope there'd be a bright line when the federal government was trying to use torture confession against someone who they had detained and abused for years.
The Fed's machinations on this case have been so obscene for so long.
I hope that the jury has the gumption that some famous American juries have had in the past to stand up and condemn what the federal government has done.
Yeah, well, you're right about him being tortured.
They're saying, and this is I guess officially in court and what have you, that he's crazy now.
He was, I guess, found fit to be able to participate in his own defense, although I'm not sure how.
And as you mentioned in your most recent article for the American conservative, you're a big part of this new, I don't know how new it is, this new way of torture is, hey, look, there's not a bruise on him.
All we did was leave him shackled to the floor of his cell all alone for three years with no sensory information whatsoever.
And see, he's not hurt.
And meanwhile, the guy's basically crazy.
They've destroyed his mind.
They've destroyed his personality.
It's not even really Jose in there anymore, probably.
Yeah, it sounds like the folks at the CIA and elsewhere may have been studying the Ike Turner guy to do interrogation.
I mean, he was famous for various ways to beat his wife that would not leave bruises.
Right.
And, you know, it might be he's the patron saint of the Bush interrogators.
I could just see him up, you know, on the wall at the, if you've ever been to army bases where they have all their logos of the flying skulls and whatever painted on the walls, and just see Ike Turner, how to slap the bitch down without getting caught.
Yeah, well, it was, you know, I mean, actually there's probably a whole lot worse than something which was interesting, which came out in some of the recent stuff on the Bush torture policy, is that it was very, it was modeled after some of the stuff the Soviets were doing.
Right.
And this has only come out very clearly in the last few months, and it's been shocking to people to see that the same things that the U.S. was supposedly fighting for in the name of the free world were the things that the U.S. decided to use itself.
Yeah, well, I'll go you one further.
I don't know if you're familiar with the book Question of Torture by Alfred McCoy.
I haven't read it, and I should have so far away.
All right, well, yeah, you know, I should have read it, too.
I'm only about a third of the way into it, and I just hate it so much I can't read it, but he's the guy that wrote The Politics of Heroin back in the day.
Oh, really?
I didn't, I'd heard about the torture book.
I didn't realize he was the same guy, so he's got a long history of telling the truth.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, and The Politics of Heroin is just earth-shattering.
So in here he says, hey, look, let's get this straight.
All this stuff about the torture techniques that the U.S. military uses on its own guys to train them, this is what might happen to you if you get shot down over the Soviet Union.
That all those techniques, the place that the Soviets got them and the place that the Americans got them is from the Nazis, Jim.
It's the Nazis who were protected, Operation Paperclip and the Rat Line and all that, were all the very worst, most heinous Nazi war criminals were hired.
And they were brought into the CIA to teach these torture techniques, and, of course, the Russians got their fair share of Nazis after the war, and that's where they learned them, too.
So all we're talking about now is the third or fourth generation of this stuff that was begun by the Nazis and developed by the CIA.
Well, you know, it's only lucky for us that the U.S., that the CIA has used those Nazi techniques only for the advancement of freedom.
Yeah, exactly.
The freedom of a guy like Jose Padilla, arrested on American soil, unarmed by domestic police.
Hell, I don't know if you saw this one, the FBI agent who actually arrested him said under oath to the judge, I didn't think he was dangerous.
I wanted to use him as an informant.
We wanted to set up a sting operation of a dirty bomb.
You wonder where they got the accusation that he was going to set off a dirty bomb.
They made that up.
They wanted to hire him to set up a sting operation like that, and when he wouldn't do it, they accused him of it.
Yeah, and I hope listeners have not forgotten the Ashcroft announcement when he was visiting Moscow in early June 2002.
This coming across was totally hysterical about this, you know, dirty bomb and nuclear this and nuclear that.
And even the Bush administration in the following days basically said that Ashcroft was full of crap.
This is how they run the entire war on terrorism.
I mean, there have been so much bogus stuff, and yet the news media continues to grovel at their feet most of the time.
Yeah, absolutely well.
Here's the scariest part of this to me.
Your associate at the Future Freedom Foundation, Jacob Hornberger, said to me that by his reading of the Military Commissions Act, if this jury in Miami does the right thing and acquits Jose Padilla, that he very well might just be abducted by the Navy and taken back to his brig to be tortured for the rest of his life, even if he's found innocent.
Well, you know, I think it's important to have faith in the system.
Oh, God.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think that the government would be quite that brazen on that, but, you know, it is exasperating that the government has done so many things and been caught lying so many times, especially on torture, and yet people are supposed to assume the government is still acting in good faith.
This is something which permeates the news coverage in the Washington Post and, to a lesser degree, the New York Times.
And, you know, I don't understand why people are not supposed to hold the government's record against it.
Right, and this is a big topic in your great book, your latest book, Attention Deficit Democracy.
I guess you call it the battered citizen syndrome, where it just doesn't matter what they do, what they say, how much they lie, how many people they kill, how many Americans they abduct and torture.
Hey, they're the government, we elected them, therefore they're perfect and omniscient and wonderful, and if they're contradicting us, we must be wrong.
Yeah, well, Bush said in early 2005 that Americans had had their moment of accountability on election day in 2004 as far as his policies.
And after that, Bush was implying that, you know, well, the American people have had their say and now it's my power.
And that's certainly how he's governed ever since then and before then as well.
It's paradoxical that more people have caught on to what the government is doing and why it's so dangerous.
Yeah, well, at least they're kind of radicalizing those of us who already had a jaundiced eye, you know?
Yeah, well, I think it's been a long time since anybody called you a moderate.
Yeah, it probably has been a while.
Gee, I don't know if anybody's ever called me a moderate.
Third grade?
How about third grade?
No, certainly not.
Certainly not in third grade was I moderate about anything.
Bouncing off the walls, man.
It's a good thing they didn't have Ritalin back then.
I'd have been completely zombied out, sitting facing the wall in the corner, you know, not learning a thing.
Well, you know, the same was true back when I was in third grade.
The main thing I did was get in a fight during a recess in the playground.
But otherwise, you know, I mean, that was, you know, people would come like, You're hyperactive.
Hell, you know, I'm supposed to sit there for six hours under house arrest?
Yeah, well, and, you know, I don't want to get too far into this, but this is something that you cover in the Bush Betrayal.
And I forget if it's in Attention, Deficit, and Democracy as well as this disaster of no child left behind.
I don't know if you know Greg Palast has a section in his book, Our Madhouse, where he calls it No Child's Behind Left, where, you know, basically the federalization of education and the terrible consequences that have flown from that, just in the last few years, never mind how bad it was under Clinton.
I didn't know that Greg Palast would cover that.
I'll take a look at that.
That sounds excellent.
Yeah, in fact, if I remember right, I read his book right after yours and I thought, Oh, isn't that a real nice comparison contrast in takes of both of them extremely negative on the nationalization?
I shouldn't call it federalization because, you know, who are we kidding?
The nationalization of American schools, two very different takes, both extremely negative and very informative.
And, you know, I don't know, I don't want to get too far into education, but I just can't imagine if I had any kids that I would turn them over to the state to be taught at this point.
Well, that's prudent.
That's prudent.
All right, so let's get to this article, Breaking Bush's Resistance.
It's in the American Conservative magazine by my guest, James Bovard.
And this is basically, I believe, your premise, sir.
And we can go through all the details and I really would like to.
But your premise here is that George Bush is guilty as hell and that his days are numbered, that there's been a change or seems at least there's a possibility that there's comeuppance possible for the president, the vice president and those responsible for America's torture doctrine?
Well, you know, people have always criticized me for being an incurable optimist.
Yeah, that's always been my criticism.
What's that?
That's always been my criticism of you.
Well, fair enough.
But there are a number of things percolating on the torture scandals that could make the roof fall in on George Bush.
One of them is the Supreme Court has flipped.
There was a big push by the Center for Constitutional Rights and some other groups to get the Supreme Court to consider an early challenge to the Military Commissions Act.
The Supreme Court said last spring that it would not do that.
But then in the last day of its term, it announced that it would.
And that's going to be one of the first cases, I believe, here once they start up again in October.
And this is going to be looking at some of the procedures that the U.S. government has used and some of the military tribunals down there in Guantanamo.
And it's going to probably look at how the evidence was gathered.
I don't think that this is the kind of thing which can stand the light of day.
And I think there is going to be so much, assuming that this goes forward and the Bush team doesn't find some way to proclaim state secrets and stifle all of its, you know, favorite methods.
This could cause a much greater backlash than anything has before, including the Abu Ghraib photos.
Yeah.
I don't know.
On one hand, I'm always worried when the Supreme Court is getting a case.
If they decide the wrong way, that's it.
And then on the other hand, you know, hey, they're all we got left, really, at this point.
Yeah, I mean, I certainly don't want to be, sound like I've got confidence in the Supreme Court because they have let the Bush administration get away with so much nonsense in the past.
And the court's a lot worse now than it was even two years ago because of the new pro-government appointees.
So I don't know which way this is going to go, but simply, you know, it's always nice to see the administration forced to explain itself because the facts as they are and have already been established are such should be radioactive.
Right.
Well, besides the things that you're not in a position to really speculate on what might be found out, as far as the things that are already known, if the court in this case does open up the chain of command back to the people responsible, what are they going to find, Jim?
Lots of pre-signed pardon letters.
Yeah.
They're in the man-sized safe in Cheney's office, right?
There you go.
You probably need a safe that big.
Yeah, you've got all those things pre-printed and pre-signed.
There is so much darkness and so much barbarism that has permeated Bush policy on interrogation, much of it from Cheney's office and Addington and people like that.
And yet we have seen just the smallest amount of it.
And that's part of the reason why some of the other things that I dealt with in that article, which is now online, the folks at the American conservative put online a couple days ago.
So it's at the www.amcommag, I think,.com.
Right.
Also at my blog site, jimbovar.com blog.
And we'll have the link up to it at antiwar.com.
Oh, yes, yes.
Thanks.
But there are a number of other things which have been coming out.
There's been a number of cases on the CIA torture taxis which are percolating out.
There was a report by the Council of Europe that basically talked about how the CIA used NATO military agreements to run secret prisons in Poland and Romania where detainees were tortured.
There are other details which have come out about how the Washington Post series in late June on Vice President Cheney's power.
There was a great line in there that the Washington Post said that in early 2002, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive's will to resist.
And the Vice President's office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion in U.S. custody.
Shattering limits on coercion.
I don't know what the Washington Post or the Washington establishment could say that would be more overt as far as saying that Cheney pushed the U.S. to go barbaric.
Yeah, well, and he even said it was an interview with Tim Russert not long after September 11th.
We're going to turn to the dark side.
Yep.
The language of Emperor Palpatine.
Yeah.
If someone like Cheney says we're going to the dark side, that sounds really bad.
Yeah, exactly.
Whoa.
He's already breathing through a black mask in the first place.
Okay.
Yeah, and now, so the Military Commissions Act that was passed last year, if I remember right, basically the Supreme Court in the Hamdan case said, hey, you can't kidnap and torture people unless Congress says it's okay.
So Bush turned to Congress and said, you better say it's okay and you better do it retroactively.
And so they did.
And they served up this Military Commissions Act.
John Anti-Torture McCain signed onto it as well.
And in that bill, is it not the case, Jim Bovard, that they gave the President the authority to decide what's torture and what's not torture?
Absolutely.
I mean, it was one of the biggest defaults in the history of the modern Congress.
There was so much evidence before Congress acted on this last September that the administration had lied about its torture politics, the administration had deceived people about what it was doing in interrogations, and that people, well, it was already established by the U.S. military.
That a lot of people have died during or because of these interrogations.
I mean, the body count is at least 30 or higher, according to, I think it was Human Rights Watch, which had gone through some of the military records on this.
We have no idea how many people the CIA has killed during torture.
And yet Congress simply rubber-stamped this, and it was done in a way that was a mockery of everything that Americans are taught in high school civic class about how the government works.
Right.
And yeah, I mean, that's the thing with embracing the dark side openly.
I thought the whole excuse for all this was America's pure light.
That's why it's okay we can do all these evil things.
You can't go ahead and admit it's evil because now it's just evil for evil's sake.
It's not even a means to a good end anymore.
You know, I really wondered about the motivation of some of these torture advocates and some of these torture policymakers.
There's so much evidence from the military and elsewhere that torture does not generate good intelligence.
It generates what the person has to say to stop being tortured.
But I think some of these folks really don't care if it generates good or bad intelligence.
They're just very enthusiastic on the idea of torturing Arabs and Muslims.
Yeah, because it's fun.
Well, and because a lot of these people have an intense dislike of Arabs and Muslims.
As long as those are the ones that are being brutalized, then, you know, it's a harmless error.
Well, and in your book, Attention Deficit Democracy, in your torture section, you quote a Justice Department memo that says, hey, listen, if you kill them, don't worry.
We know that you only kill them in trying to prevent a greater harm.
So you're good.
Yeah, this is, I think, from the Bybee memo written by John Yoo.
I guess David Attington also had some stuff in it.
It was from August 2002.
It leaked out in May of 2004.
It is a license of barbarism.
And there were so many devious evasions in that memo and so many invitations to abuse.
I was amazed that that memo did not cause a much greater backlash against the Bush administration.
And I also thought that the Democrats would have the gumption to use it in the 2004 campaign.
But it was the, to say that the Democrats have been almost worthless on torture is the understatement of the year.
Didn't you say in your article that they haven't issued a single subpoena, that they have not looked into this at all?
Right.
And it's even worse than that because back on June 19th, the Democrats had the perfect case, perfect opportunity to showcase their superior values.
The Senate, Bush had nominated John Rizzo to become the general counsel for the CIA.
Rizzo is a long-term CIA veteran, and he was heavily involved in 2002 onwards in crafting the new torture rules and putting them into place.
And he was the one who gave the CIA's approval to the Bush administration redefinition of torture.
Yet, so Rizzo is going in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
This is the perfect chance to put the heat on him and find out, you know, what happened, what did you do, what's this all about?
But as the New York Times noted, no member of the Senate Intelligence Committee directly challenged the agency's secret detention or harsh interrogation practices.
Only Senator Dianne Feinstein voiced opposition to his confirmation.
It was like John Rizzo was doing a photo shoot for GQ magazine.
He goes, you're all dressed up and affable and calm and just acting like he's just, as the Washington Post said, dapper, white-haired and bearded.
He looked like a slimmed-down Santa Claus in civilian dress, more than Hollywood, the version of a CIA.
Well, anyhow.
But they had the chance, and the Democrats were as cowardly as most of the Republicans have been.
No, you mean they're as tough as the Republicans.
Well, that's right, I'm trying.
You know, Scott, I'm hoping some of your positive thinking rubs off on me.
Yeah, well, I'm trying.
It's really all sarcasm, but what are you going to do?
Yeah, so basically what happened here, the lawyers said, George Bush, terrorists are outside the law, so you can torture them however you want.
Then they said to him, oh, by the way, the Taliban, because they're in the middle of winning a civil war against the Northern Alliance, they're a failed state.
And so their signature to the Geneva Convention doesn't apply.
You can torture them and basically anybody you abduct in Afghanistan as well.
That's how this really got rolling, right?
Yeah, that was a huge part of it.
John Ashcroft was pushing that as well.
It's funny to see some people trying to burnish Ashcroft's reputation now, but he was as lawless and as dishonest as Bush was.
But it was fascinating how the Bush team first established a predicate, well, since terrorists are trying to mass murder civilians, then terrorists don't have any rights.
And once people accepted that, then the Bush team proceeded to constantly expand the definition of terrorist to include other groups such as individuals captured in Iraq.
Because at some point the Bush team decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Iraq detainees as well as the people they captured in Afghanistan.
Well, Iraq sure is a failed state now.
Yes.
There's one way to erase that signature to the Geneva Convention, just obliterate that former state.
Well, yeah, and it's fascinating to see how the Bush team would basically come up with these absterities such as, well, this is a failed state, so therefore the U.S. can torture people who live in that state.
I mean, if you put it that bluntly, then almost everybody is going to say, well, that's a bunch of hokum.
But with the way that they have done it, with all these lawyers putting out fog banks of verbiage to cover it up, people let it go by.
One of the things people were not drawing the lesson of in the Bush administration was the absolute failure of the intellectuals and the media in this country to do almost anything to stand up for individual liberty.
Yeah, and you know, once they, well, let's see.
Now, let's talk about the media.
I was going to get into Abu Ghraib and Iraq there, but I want to take the different tangents.
You're right.
The media, what does it take?
I mean, I can read Jane Mayer in the New Yorker magazine or something, but what kind of circulation do they have?
They have a big circulation.
She and Seymour Hersh have done great work on a number of issues.
Christian Satchmoder has done great work in the last week or two on the Jose Padilla case.
There have been individuals at the New York Times and Washington Post have done some excellent stuff.
And there have been some magazines and stuff out there that have done fine work and lots of excellent bloggers.
But the bulk of the media has been servile, and I don't know how it's possible to preserve individual freedom when the media is groveling at the government's feet.
Yeah, I mean, I think the average American out there thinks that the torture scandal amounts to some naked guys being stacked in a pyramid at Abu Ghraib.
And that was over three years ago.
What are we still talking about here?
What's the big deal?
Yeah, and this is something which I've heard in conversations with people, people who are relatively intelligent, and they just get very indignant about, you know, well, I don't know why you're still talking about this.
Well, because the government's still torturing people is most likely.
I mean, we don't know for sure, but then again, we know almost nothing about what's going on.
And most of what we did know is that Rumsfeld might say would be absence of evidence of torture is not evidence that torture is not occurring.
That sounded like a pretty good Rumsfeld, isn't there?
Yeah, I've been wearing the hip boots today.
Yeah, yeah.
What we already know about Abu Ghraib, just from the journalists, you know, never mind any internal investigations, I guess the Tuguba report had some, just from all the reporting that's gone on, we know that Abu Ghraib, you know, the trumpeted portions of the Abu Ghraib story were the very least of it, even just at that jail, never mind what was going on in the rest of Iraq for the moment, just at Abu Ghraib.
We know now, I guess, you cite Hirsch's last article in The New Yorker about, you know, brutal rapes and murders and the very worst of crimes taking place at Abu Ghraib.
It wasn't a bunch of fraternity pranks by any measure.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know of too many frats that use, that need body bags after the end of hazing, but this is what happened in Abu Ghraib.
And yet, there was Bush team, the Bush White House, and the right-wing media working cahoots to frame this story in a way that made it almost toxic for anybody, for any politician to keep pushing this issue out there, because it was amazing to see how fast the Bush team wrapped Abu Ghraib in the American flag, and to say that if someone talks about Abu Ghraib, they've slandered all American soldiers.
People fell for that crap.
Yeah, as though wrapping Abu Ghraib in the American flag isn't going to leave a stain.
It's great as a shield for the story, but don't worry, the prison won't stick to that flag after this.
We'll be just fine.
Take some tide to it.
Folks who had a pro-U.S. government instinct on this perhaps have still not faced the fact that because Bush was able to defuse the Abu Ghraib scandal, the backlash in May and June of 2004, that meant that the U.S. government continued to torture for years and years afterwards, and is probably still torturing right now.
It was not a harmless error, the fact that the Abu Ghraib scandal got defused.
It meant that torture continued, and the secret taxis and the secret prisons, they all continued because of how the Bush team spun the Abu Ghraib.
Well, there was that article by Chris Hedges, and I forget the co-author's name, in The Nation, where they went and talked with, I guess, 50 veterans of the Iraq war.
Yeah, an excellent piece.
Was it an Arab co-author on that?
Yeah, I believe so.
Yeah, I mean, it was great that Nation, Chris Hedges, and the co-author did that, because it laid out so many of the routine abuses.
But that was something, back when I was doing this issue in 2005, there have been so many other cases outside of Abu Ghraib where American soldiers had talked about what they had done, and about the barbarism that they had done, and how they were horrified, or having a sense of national disgrace on it.
And yet, this is stuff that has simply not stayed on the radar.
Yeah, in fact, I heard a story not too long ago about, can you believe it?
Some American soldiers killed a guy and then planted a shovel on him to make him look like he was planning an IED.
Well, we first heard stories like that, as you're saying, in 2004, 2005.
I blogged about that in 2005 when I got home from Camp Casey.
I talked to some guys who told me stories like that.
And you know, remember that Frontline special on PBS, The Question of Torture.
And they interviewed that guy, Tony Lagaranis, who said, Oh, you think Abu Ghraib was tortured?
You don't have any idea what we do to these people in their houses, on the front yard, out in front of their houses.
What we do at these secret bases and prisons, you have no idea about.
We freeze them almost to death, we sic dogs on them, we hang them upside down, we beat them half to death.
We, you know, bright lights and loud noise and dogs again.
And, you know, this is what we do all the time over there, he said.
Well, you know, it's not easy to win hearts and minds.
Yeah, I guess, you know, it's like on The Simpsons where Kang says, Well, we got their hearts and minds.
He's holding a heart and a brain in each hand.
We got that out of them.
Yeah, I think there was some, I think that Lyndon Johnson may have had some variation on that about getting people by the balls and their hearts will follow.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, man.
So, let's talk about something good.
What, beer or what?
Let's talk about Ron Paul's campaign for the presidency.
Excellent.
Good choice.
Good choice.
Did you know, everybody, that there's a politician who's running for the presidency of the United States who's anti-torture, avowedly anti-torture?
Just one.
His name's Ron Paul.
What do you think?
Well, not only that, but Paul was opposed to torture even before the public opinion polls shifted on the issue.
He was opposed to the war in Iraq even before it happened.
There was a wonderful hearing, which I happened to see on C-SPAN 2002, and it was, I don't know which committee it was, Foreign Affairs, whatever, that Congressman Paul was on, but they had these giant, it had some of the war advocates of attacking Iraq, and there was the, they had a giant video screen of Richard Perle testifying from London, and it had a giant close-up of his face.
It was like something from some horror movie.
And Paul made, Paul had some kind of, he had a very pointed question that was not insulting, and all of a sudden, Perle and some other hack who was a Woolsey, I guess, both were deeply offended because they said that Paul's question implied that they were chicken hawks, and that was a terrible thing to say.
And Paul had not implied that, but it was fun to see Perle and Woolsey, you know, piss and moan about that.
Perle especially.
Paul is, you know, Paul is upholding the American flag in the way that no other candidate is.
It's been, I've not had, I've not been enthusiastic on a major party presidential candidate for over a quarter century, but I've got, I'm really happy to see what Paul is.
I'm glad he's still in the fight, I'm glad he's marched forward, I'm glad people are hearing and rallying to his message.
Yeah, it seems like I've been reading story after story that say no matter what happens with this thing, this is the rebirth, at least, of the libertarian movement, if not the birth of a brand new one.
I mean, this is, you know, what, I don't know, tens, hundreds of thousands of Ron Paulians out there meeting each other, making friends, business relationships.
This is, they keep making the comparison that the Goldwater movement came around and elected Reagan.
Let's hope we don't get, you know, warmongers like them.
But if the Ron Paul movement can elect somebody just like him next time around or even 20 years from now or something, that's progress.
Well, that would be progress.
I hope you're right that this is going to be a last movement.
I mean, Congressman Paul is showing great courage and working very hard out there.
And he is, he's right on so many issues that all the other candidates have been wrong on, at least until recently.
And people should give him credit for that.
People should go to his website.
Is that RonPaul2008.com?
Yeah.
And check that out.
People should do what they can to spread the message on Ron Paul.
And, you know, they can go to antiwar.com/Paul.
We've been featuring his article since 2002.
You talk about his disputes with Richard Perle in 2002.
Well, all of his speeches are as transcripts from that time, posing the use of force against Iraq, questions that won't be asked about Iraq and many others, all the way through from the summer of 2002, all the way through the beginning of the war and, of course, ever since at antiwar.com/Paul.
You can't do better than that.
Yeah, that's an excellent source.
That's an excellent source.
It's nice, it's funny to see how the mainstream media is kind of dealing with Ron Paul because in some ways he is such a mirror image to a lot of their conventional beliefs, to their conventional wisdom.
Some of the journalists who have written about him have done a very fair job.
Some have probably bent over backwards to be fair to them.
And that's all to their credit.
Yeah.
You know, I even heard hearsay that, oh, what's his name, Tweety Bird, they call him, the lefties call him.
Chris Matthews.
Chris Matthews, yeah.
Chris Matthews accused, perhaps is the right term, accused Ann Coulter of liking Ron Paul.
And she kind of went and shook her head like this was a conversation they had off camera that he wasn't supposed to bring up.
But he basically said, you like Ron Paul.
And then he says, I do, too.
Of course, not that he'll give him any coverage beyond that, but.
Yeah, I mean, I think you're right that.
Well, I mean, the thing is with Ron Paul is all of his positions are basically just straight out of what we all grew up to believe America was all about.
You're free.
You get to do what you want unless you violate somebody else.
Only then do you have to mess with the government around here.
That's the way we all think it's supposed to be.
Right.
Well, I think that's how Americans might have been raised like a century ago, but I think it's been a long time since that was the prevailing idea.
Yeah.
Well, it was compared to the Soviets.
You know, when I was in fifth grade, that was the difference.
You know, that's the way you teach the Soviet Union to a fifth grade.
You say in the Soviet Union, the government owns you.
They own your house.
They own your business.
They pick their job for you.
They tell you what to do.
In America, you're free unless you commit a crime.
That was the distinction between living in a free society and living in the Soviet Union when I was a kid in the 1980s.
That's a good point to make.
I mean, and it's a nice contrast of ideals.
And the Soviet Union was far more oppressive than the U.S. government was then or now.
So that's a good contrast.
It's just, it's frustrating that it's so easy for Congress to pass a law that makes 10 million people criminals, such as the laws on marijuana possession.
I mean, it's total BS that the government can put 10 or 20 million marijuana smokers in jail.
Right.
We're not so good now that we don't have the Soviet Union to compare ourselves to anymore.
Well, at least in Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, them Arabs, you know, when they talk, I can't understand them.
I bet they're plotting.
They're talking bad about us behind our backs.
Well, you know, it's the same thing as they used to.
No, I won't get that crude.
Yeah, that's a good point.
All right, everybody.
James Bovard, he's the author of a million books, including his masterpiece, You've Got to Run Out and Get It.
It's Attention, Deficit, Democracy.
The website is jimbovard.com, and you're the best, man.
Thanks a lot.
Hey, thanks for having me on, Scott.
I appreciate that.