Welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is the great James Bovard.
Let's see if I can do this off the top of my head.
He's the author of The Fair Trade Fraud, The Farm Fiasco, Freedom in Chains, Feeling Your Pain, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, Attention Deficit Democracy, and I've probably left off about ten of his books.
His website is jimbovard.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
It's great to talk to you again.
How are you doing?
Doing good.
Hey, thanks for having me on this fifth anniversary of the start of the war, and I hope people appreciate that the antiwar.com website has been one of the best beacons of truth out there.
They have never flinched.
They've always laid the facts out for people to get them.
They've been an invaluable resource, especially at a time when most of the U.S. media has cowered and bootlicked George Bush and his cronies.
You're absolutely right about that, and I can say that with a straight face from your same angle.
I didn't start my association with antiwar.com until 2005, so I can also from the outside praise them for their coverage, especially in 2002 and 2003 when there was basically nobody else.
Well, yeah, and that was at a time when critics were being Dixie-chicked, as Charles Goyette says, when it was a lot easier to label doubters and critics as traitors than it is now.
I mean, it's almost fashionable to be critical of the Iraq war now, but the folks at antiwar.com held the high ground at a time when very few other people did, and it's also important that folks at antiwar.com, in some ways, saved some of the honor of the libertarian movement because so many libertarians jumped on the war bandwagon or else chose to muzzle themselves and just let Bush expand the government across the board in the name of freeing the world of terrorism.
Cool.
Well, to whatever degree I can be part of who you're praising, thank you, but mostly I want to take your side in praising antiwar.com from the outside.
Well, and it's really great that y'all are doing the radio interviews now.
I've enjoyed some of the interviews that you've done, and it's nice that people get a chance to talk as well as write.
Right.
Yeah, it's fun.
And of course, you've got the great Charles Goyette on there, which you can never lose with him.
Yeah, he's four stars.
And also, you're a part of antiwar.com.
There are articles of yours going back over the years, and we almost always run whatever you write for the Future Freedom Foundation.
And for the past, what, year or two, you've been writing for us on the blog.
Yeah, I really enjoyed the chance to throw my two cents on the blog and see how people react.
And it was nice to be able to post the thing yesterday about how Bush deserves impeachment for what he did five years ago yesterday alone, because Bush and his memo to Congress notifying them that he was invading Iraq stated that it was justified because of Saddam's connections to 9-11.
And Bush knew that was crap at that point.
The administration has had five years to put the evidence on the table.
They haven't done it.
And for this alone, Bush deserves to be impeached.
And now, this wasn't just a statement that he made to the press or something.
This was in the official paperwork justifying the war.
Absolutely.
And I mean, it's just, you know, it wasn't like it was some throwaway line in a Meet the Press interview.
Right.
So, but this goes to the heart of what Bush has done with the war effort.
And it's amazing to me that the people have been so docile for so many brazen Bush administration lies.
You know, I figured out when I was a little kid during the Reagan years that impeachment was for crimes that were committed off the clock.
You know, having some guys break into a hotel room, break into a psychiatrist's office, that kind of thing.
But that actual abuses of power, such as, for example, secretly arming the Iranians at the same time we're arming the Iraqis in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, secretly funding right wing death squads in South America in direct defiance of the Congress of the United States.
Those things are not impeachable.
Those are just policy differences.
Well, yeah, but it's important to keep in mind about those right wing death squads.
That was something that was justified in the name of liberty.
So it was OK.
Oh, I see.
You're spreading democracy down there.
Is that how that goes?
Yeah.
You know what?
Death squad democracy.
That was the high point of the Reagan administration.
I actually have the soundbite for you right here.
I got a part of it.
The United States has been engaged in an effort to stop the advance of communism in Central America by doing what we do best, by supporting democracy.
Oh, the money.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, yeah, the CIA taught the police down there how to torture as well.
And thank God that that helped spread democracy, too.
It's the American way.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I was going back and rereading a lot of the debates over Iran-Contra a few years ago.
And part of the reason that Congress did not even consider impeaching Reagan in 1987 on this was that he was already considered to be senile and kind of out of the way.
And when there was at some point the tower commissioner or someone else in an interview with him, and he was obviously clueless on this.
Maybe he exaggerated his cluelessness on this.
But that helped set a precedent that presidents are not impeached for their dishonest wars.
I mean, it's an outrage that Bill Clinton was impeached for Monica Lewinsky and not for bombing Belgrade.
Right.
And in fact, he bombed Belgrade in order to shore up his legacy after being impeached for Monica Lewinsky.
Well, it certainly shored up his moral bona fides with the liberals and allowed the people to think the U.S. should be using an iron fist to impose its values on the world.
Now, did you support the impeachment of Bill Clinton back then?
You know, I wasn't opposed to it.
It was something which was just so profoundly entertaining.
You know, I sort of come at it like a Bob Barr did.
Bob Barr was calling for Clinton's impeachment quite a while before the Monica Lewinsky, the Monica scandal broke.
And Barr had a lot of specific issues, abuses in which he said that justified impeachment.
And I think Barr was right on that.
And it was unfortunate that the special prosecutor, Ken Starr and others, ended up going after Bill Clinton for the equivalent of jaywalking when there were a lot of far worse abuses which he was guilty for.
And, you know, I, in fact, even remember an interview with Bob Barr from 1998, listening to him on the radio.
And he was one of the managers, one of the basically one of the prosecutors in the House impeachment hearings.
And in this radio interview, he said he had tried so hard to get Henry Hyde and them to make the hearings in the Judiciary Committee about, or at least have, you know, one day or something where they brought up the role of John Wong and Bill Clinton giving him a job in the Commerce Department where he was part of licensing missile technology transfers to the PRC.
And how Henry Hyde and the Republican leadership, i.e.
Newt Gingrich, just absolutely would not allow it.
They said, this is going to be about Lewinsky and nothing else.
And Barr was willing to criticize them for it in the middle of the thing.
Yeah, that was all to Barr's credit.
You know, it's interesting going back to some of those hearings back in the mid-late 1990s, watching Bob Barr in action.
He was one of the few members of Congress who could pay attention and do an effective job of cross-examining administration witness.
Because most of these hearings on the Hill, I mean, it's the same is true now as it was then.
Most of these congressmen are suffering from attention deficit disorder, and they really don't know their backside from a hole in the ground.
And it's easy for the administration to skip along with lies or brazen, you know, just bluster.
Yeah.
You know, this is what I'm learning more and more is, whenever I think these people are just liars, I come later to understand that, no, really, they are that stupid.
Like when John McCain was accusing Iran of training al-Qaeda yesterday.
These people really don't have any idea what they're talking about, do they?
You know, John McCain doesn't need to have even the rough handle of the facts because all the media is lined up to kiss his feet.
Right.
I mean, it doesn't matter how stupid he sounds.
It doesn't matter how many false assertions he's made.
And he has made so many, they're just kind of mind-boggling.
There is still this long line of media folks wanting to burnish his halo.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Bill Clinton in 2000, I mean, pardon me, same difference, but George W. Bush in 2005 got busted and, wasn't it in 2005 when they broke the story about the, well, I'm sorry, I think I'm getting my timeline all screwed up.
Was it after the election when he announced that, yes, I have been tapping your phone, using the military to tap your phone without a warrant and there's nothing you can do about it?
Was that before or after the election in 2006?
I'm trying to remember now.
It was in the late December 2005, the New York Times, which finally broke the story.
The New York Times had been given the story before the 2004 election, but the New York Times did not have the balls to run with it.
Right.
I was trying to remember which election that they withheld it for, but yeah, that's right.
So it was 2005.
It was a re-election.
The big one.
And Bush said, yes, you're right.
I'm a felon.
I've been breaking the law.
What are you going to do about it?
And then it was less than a year later, the Democrats took the House and the Senate and Pelosi raced onto TV to meet the press and tell Tim Russert that impeachment is off the table.
Yes, this man has admitted outright that he is a multiple felon and yet there is zero chance that we will pursue impeachment at all.
She announced that from the get-go.
Yeah, that was very, well, I mean, that's a slap in the face to so many of the voters who voted for change and voted for the rule of law because George Bush has been so brazen in his trampling of law.
I was just, I was reading some of his speech today that he gave to the Pentagon on the fifth anniversary, and he was bragging about how the U.S. has shut down Saddam's torture chambers.
You know, just the fact that the, uh, the U.S. president could brag about that any place in the world is a distrace because, uh, if George Bush had made that claim in front of a college audience, Bush would have been hooded down.
Right.
Yeah.
This is what we need to replace the Washington press corps with the freshman class of any college in America and we'll be all right.
Well, I don't know.
At least get a follow-up question somewhere.
I'm not sure about Bob Jones.
Okay.
Yeah, well, there's a couple exceptions.
And also the University of Texas, but no, I'm not going to go there.
Oh, okay.
Well, no, I don't care if you pick on the UT kids.
Doesn't bother me one bit.
No, I'm sure that they do a lot better job in the Washington press corps.
Yeah.
I mean, and that's the thing, apparently, uh, yesterday, and I don't know the exact situation whether the press corps was all standing around when John McCain was making all his false statements, but apparently no one asked him a follow-up about, wait a minute, are you accusing the Ayatollahs of training Osama's friends?
What are you doing?
It was Joe Lieberman who corrected him.
It wasn't a reporter who followed up and said, don't you mean to say this or that?
You know, well, reporters don't even know.
Yeah.
It's sad that most of the, well, I mean, part of the trouble is that you've got reporters following McCain who were on the, uh, uh, from the campaign beat.
And many of those folks don't know, um, are profoundly ill informed about everything except McCain's hairstyle.
Yeah.
And so, uh, and that's part of the reason why they're blind to his lies and also a lot of them are invested in John McCain because if John McCain becomes president, that means a lot of people that are following his campaign now become White House correspondents.
Oh, that's, that's often how the case works.
It might not work this time around.
I don't know.
You know, that might be a little too sweeping, but, uh, you know, there's just, there's so many different levels of conflict of interest here, but the, uh, press corps, uh, it would have been interesting to do a survey, the, uh, members of his, of the people that were following McCain, the press corps to see if they knew the difference, right?
Yeah.
You know, it's funny cause we, the FBI, uh, the head of the FBI counterterrorism division and, and, uh, the head of the Senate, uh, pardon me, the, uh, house intelligence committee, they've been called out and busted for not knowing anything about the so-called enemy and the jihadists and so forth.
It'd be funny to, to give that same quiz to the Washington press corps and see how well they do.
Well, I think that the results would not boost the, uh, the public respect for journalists, but then again, almost nothing.
Well, all right.
Now I got to let you go here, but, um, I want to ask you real quick, uh, are you working on a new book?
I can't wait for the next.
Yeah.
I'm trying to get something finished up and, um, um, moving off the, uh, moving off the rails here.
All right.
Well, in the meantime, I'll send everybody, I'll send everybody to go get attention, deficit democracy in the meantime.
It is a masterpiece.
Absolutely.
Excellent.
And everybody, you can read, uh, Bovard's blog at jimbovard.com.
Thanks very much for your time today, Jim.
Hey, thanks a lot, Scott.
