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

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
Introducing our guest today, it's the great libertarian journalist, James Bovard.
He's the author of The Fair Trade Fraud and the Farm Fiasco, Lost Rights, Feeling Your Pain, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, Attention Deficit Democracy, and at least a handful that I left off the list there.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I'm really glad to have you here, and I know that you've reported on FISA over the years and written about it in your books and all that kind of thing, and I think before the Protect America Act or the recent controversy about the telecom immunity and all that kind of thing.
Help me understand correctly.
You already had a problem with the FISA statute, as is in 78, as what, somehow violating the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
Is that right?
Well, FISA uses a much lower standard to justify a search warrant than what the Fourth Amendment requires, and there were some twists and turns that the Congress did and the Carter administration did back in 1978 to put that law into place.
So it's, you know, there are real doubts about the law itself, but the thing that's fascinating is that in the last few years, it's been obvious that the Bush people have trampled this law up and down.
They've trampled the Constitution's prohibition on warrantless searches and wiretaps, and yet you have almost the entire political establishment on both parties cheering this on, acting like it's no big deal, and acting like, you know, telephone companies and others which violate the law should receive a pass simply because they were doing their duty, because some government agent asked them to violate our rights.
Well, that's what a duty is, right?
Something that a government agent asks you to do?
Well, that's a good definition.
That's pretty close to what Senator Kit Bond used.
He said, well, you know, I think people understand that if the government asks you to do something, you should do it.
And it's kind of like, you know, I guess he wasn't around in 1946 for the Nuremberg trials.
Yeah, that's kind of funny.
You know, I think we all learn, even as little kids in this country, that just following orders isn't good enough.
I mean, that's part of the basic story of us as good guys in World War II.
Well, yeah, that's part of the story.
Yeah, there's some doubts about the story, but that's a different show.
You know, the thing that's fascinating to me, and I want to say it's great that anti-war.com has been so hard-lined and valued on this FISA issue, and the same with a handful of liberal groups like Glenn Greenwald's folks, Fire Dog Lake, Blue America.
Those folks have got a full-page ad in today's Washington Post.
It starts out, on July 4th, America celebrated the rule of law.
On July 9th, the Senate will vote to bury it.
And it's really great that these folks are attacking head-on the total betrayal of the Constitution and everything else that's going on in Washington.
You know, it's funny that there's all this controversy about immunity for the telecoms, but nobody even mentions immunity for the government agent who told them, hey, the president wants you to do this.
What about that guy?
He just gets immunity, and nobody even thinks otherwise for a moment.
They don't have to pass a new law to grant it to him, whoever he is.
Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing that happened with the Military Commissions Act.
People kind of pretend not to notice that it's also giving immunity to the top policymakers, people who knowingly conspired to violate the law and the Constitution.
I mean, it is an outrage that people like Cheney and David Addington are not facing charges for this, you know, so-called terrorist surveillance program.
And yet, almost nobody in D.C. has got the balls to go after this.
People like Ron Paul do, Fine Gold Center, Fine Gold of Wisconsin does, and Dodd does.
But there is, I mean, this is so much worse than what Richard Nixon did.
And there seems to be so much less courage than there was back in Nixon's time.
Is it so much worse than what Nixon did?
What did Nixon do, and how is this worse?
Okay, the thing that Nixon did was a handful of targeted wiretaps on individuals that he thought would be, you know, were threats to national security.
I'm talking about the wiretap charge in his impeachment articles.
But what this terrorist surveillance program does is basically let the government wiretap whoever it pleases, and they don't even need a warrant.
And with the Protect America Act that they passed last August, the government has a blank check to do wiretaps on any international phone call that an American is making, or in any international email.
There is no need for a warrant.
It's like the government's entitled, say, for instance, someone there in Austin is calling somebody in Mexico City.
Well, that's all they need.
That's all they need to tap the call.
And so is there any difference?
I know the Protect America Act was allowed to expire back in February, but now they have these new amendments to FISA.
Is it basically just the Protect America Act again?
Is there any difference, do you know?
I think that there's been some worse stuff added.
I haven't gone through line by line looking at it, but there's such a total disregard by the members of Congress as far as their oath of office and everything else.
And I had hoped that there would be much bigger backlash by the American people on this.
But for some reason, it's almost as if this FISA program is some kind of hellishly complex cotton subsidy program that no one wants to pay attention to.
But it's a real bellwether for people just kind of shrugging their shoulders when the government torches the Bill of Rights.
Yeah.
You know, that's a good point.
The farm subsidy thing, I think a lot of people, when they hear people complain about central banking or what have you, they just say, oh, you know, forget it.
That's something that's too complex.
They don't want to take the time to want to learn about it.
So it goes on to somebody else's business category in their head and they go on about their life.
But this FISA thing is, you know, where the Fourth Amendment isn't that long.
It's pretty clear what's going on here.
It's not OK to go around tapping people's phones unless an independent judge says it's OK based on probable cause, a sworn affidavit.
That's the rules.
Period.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, the founding fathers, part of the reason that we kicked the British out was that they were boundless searches of people's homes, papers, letters, stuff like that.
And here we are.
And it's so funny to see, you know, like the wizards of the Washington Post editorial page have been gung ho in favor of this latest FISA bill, which they label compromise, which is BS.
But it's just funny that you get all these liberals telling us that we should trust the government even after the government admitted that it's breaking the law and violating the Constitution.
This is a sign of how far we've fallen.
And the fact that so few conservatives give a damn about this, I'm starting to doubt whether they were sincere back in the Clinton years when they said they were upset about Clinton violating freedom.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I guess it just depends on the face that's taking it away from them.
I was actually kind of shocked.
Not that I really would have expected any better at this point, but when the story came out at the end of 2005 there that they'd been doing this, I guess, James Risen, The New York Times, they withheld the story forever and they finally revealed that Bush had been tapping everybody's phone without a warrant or whoever he felt like.
And he gave a press conference the next day, Jim, where he just said, yeah, what?
And everybody said, well, I guess nothing.
And that was just the end of that.
But he was basically confessing to committing multiple felonies.
I mean, the FISA statute is a felony statute.
It says you have to do this or you go to jail if you try to go around this method of doing this.
Well, it's very clear in FISA that there's warrantless wiretaps, that there's no justification for them, that there is no national security pretext that the president can get around the Fourth Amendment.
I mean, that was why FISA was enacted, because the Nixon team and LBJ before him and others would do these warrantless wiretaps and claim that they had some kind of magic powers present to do that.
Well, FISA said no.
And yet it's a fascinating study in the lack of courage and balls of the entire political establishment and the media establishment as well.
I don't recall Tim Russert being outraged by this, but he was never outraged by much.
I don't think unless you were standing up to the state, maybe that can tend to get him going.
I mean, he was kind of rather outraged by Ron Paul, but I guess that's a special case.
Yeah, he's especially deserving of contempt, that Paul, of course.
There you go.
But it's just, you know, it's fascinating.
It's hard to think of a better battle line to fight for freedom on than where the government has already admitted it violated the law and is ongoing violating the law and privacy and trapping the Constitution.
I mean, this is the perfect invitation to take a stand.
Very few people have come to the barricades.
Well, there has been somewhat of a realignment.
You mentioned with Glenn Greenwald and FireDog Lake and all those guys coming together.
They're coming together with Trevor Lyman and the guys who raised the money for the Ron Paul money bombs and doing this strange bedfellows thing.
I guess that's the full-page ad in the Washington Post that you're referring to there.
So that's kind of a broad coalition, and I mean, it's a few in number, but it's wide and varied in terms of membership as far as that goes.
That's great.
That's excellent.
I was not aware that Ron Paul money bomb wizards were involved with this, but that's great.
Bob Barr is also excellent on this, and Barr's comments on this have gotten a fair amount of attention.
Now, I'm trying to remember the context in which this came up the other day, but I went and had to hunt down the quote from George Orwell talking about, oh, it was from the book 1984, and it's the scene where Winston Smith has been given the secret copy of How We Do It to You by O'Brien, who later tortures him in Room 101 and all that.
He's reading the book, and it says in there, listen, the only reason that we're working on this rocket program and working on the floating fortress is so that we can take the excess wealth, the excess productivity of the people, and we can sink it into the sea or blast it off into space so that they can't get to it because they might otherwise spend that money, that excess wealth, bettering themselves, making themselves too comfortable, too intelligent, and have their own ideas, rather than celebrating that the ration got raised from 20 to 15 at the end of the week.
I wonder to what degree you think that that is perhaps even the motivation of some of these wars.
It seems like just trillions of dollars of wealth of the American people are being destroyed willy-nilly.
The prices are just going up on everything, and we all know why.
It's because they cut taxes and yet just turned on the money machines to pay for their wars anyway, right?
I don't know the motivation of all the folks involved, but it is fishy as all get out.
My impression is that since 9-11, the defense contractors have not done too badly.
It's interesting.
Congress passes a new ethics law every second year or so, and they claim that it makes the government clean, but there are so many direct ties between the congressmen or their families and these big defense contractors.
That was a huge force behind John McCain's candidacy, and obviously there's some lobbies in favor of foreign countries that have been some of the most effective groups pushing for more war.
We see that right now with Iran, because if it wasn't for the pro-Israel lobby, I don't think I would be on the front burner here, not by a long shot.
Of course, the Israel lobby to a great degree is just a front for Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and all the American arms manufacturers.
I don't know if that's the case, but I would think that perhaps there's more influence there than what I'm aware of.
I know that when I was up there in Reston, Virginia for the Future Freedom Foundation conference, and that's, I don't know, as far as I know, somewhere not too far from Washington D.C.
Anyway, I sure didn't feel too far from it, and all I could see, all the giant buildings everywhere said Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and weird initials for military industrial complex firms I've never heard of, and they're just everywhere.
It sort of seems like there's a hundred square miles or a couple hundred square miles around Washington D.C. where this is just this massive imperial court where everybody just comes to town in order to loot the treasury.
Well, you know, Scott, since you mentioned that Future Freedom Foundation conference, it was great to see you there, but it was a little bit dangerous being around you personally because there were so many groupies who were coming after you.
Every place you turned, they'd say, are you Scott Horton?
Oh my God, the eyes would get big, and females were swooning left and right.
Well, none of them my age, but anyway, yeah, go ahead.
Details, details.
Okay, go ahead.
All right, so no, anyway, yeah, I was just saying, well, you live somewhere near D.C., right?
Yeah, that's true.
And it was great to hang out with you, too, but you live somewhere around there.
Is that really right?
You just have like, you know, the size of Dallas, only none of these people are actually producing anything.
They're all just working off of the state.
Not all of them.
I mean, I think there are some hookers who are doing honest work.
Yeah, well, except they're just turning tricks for the politicians and State Department bureaucrats and the rest of them, too.
Well, yeah, it works out pretty good for the hour, you know, because, you know, with the Elliott Spitzer case, you know, I mean, if you work that out to the minute, but that's another story.
Yeah, yeah.
No, there's a huge amount of corruption here, and people get so accustomed to having the federal money come in and the federal contracts come in.
Homeland Security is spreading like mushroom around here with new offices and every nook and cranny.
And contractors are, you know, throwing money or desperately to get in on the next, you know, big wave and hoping, you know, hoping that the boom goes on forever.
And it's it's profoundly corrupting because it changes how people view government power because because they're surrounded by government beneficiaries.
You know, Harry Brown used to have this maxim.
He would say that the problem really isn't the abuse of power.
It's the power to abuse.
And that, frankly, when you just have a Congress with this much authority, never really mind what's in the Constitution, but the de facto authority that they carry, it's going to be for sale and you're going to have corruption.
It's just like a mathematical equation.
Forget it.
Yeah.
Harry was great on that.
Harry was dead on.
And this is this is what we've seen.
But, you know, it ties back to the devices stuff because you have all this power and then you have a smoking gun on the abuse of power and nobody cares.
People just kind of say, well, yeah, too bad.
What the heck?
You know, and Congress says, you know, there was a lot more enthusiasm for going after the New York Times reporters than there was for punishing the people that broke the law.
Boy, you got that right.
They were calling them traitors, talking about holding sedition trials for them and hanging them from ropes.
Well, it depends on which blogs you're looking at.
But there was some of that.
Oh, yeah.
Well, it wasn't just blogs.
I mean, some of the members of Congress were out for blood on that.
And these it's funny how I almost never hear any member of Congress in his comments on this show any personal culpability for his failure to prevent government lawbreaking.
Right.
And that's their job as the Congress to oversight over the over the executive.
Right.
I think they see it now as part of their job is to try and share the loot.
Yeah.
It sure seems that way.
It sort of seems like the most of the people in Congress don't even really have any idea about this stuff.
Like they're probably not even really as informed as the average reader of antiwar dot com, for example.
Oh, I think you're dead on on that because folks that read antiwar dot com are getting a wide swath of international information as well, because you'll have such great international pickups there and the articles you feature and things like that.
But I mean, my impression is that most of the members of Congress are not even as well informed as people who read the front section of The New York Times.
Yeah.
And that has a lot of flaws.
Am I to understand that this is basically my impression since I was a kid, I learned about Nixon and the break in and breaking into Ellsberg psychiatrist's office and this kind of thing.
And then I sat and watched the Iran-Contra thing unfold in the 1980s when I was a little kid.
And then I watched the impeachment of Bill Clinton, which I want everybody who opposed that to remember that because of them, George Bush has been in power all this time.
But anyway, besides that, I think after watching Bush confess to high crimes right there on national TV and dare anybody to do anything about it and get away with it, that basically the lesson here is that a president can do anything he wants.
He can secretly bomb Cambodia.
He can sell missiles to the Iranians, back death squads in South America, all in violation of law, tap phones, whatever, torture people, all in direct violation of statutes.
But the only time that they can actually get impeached or really be held accountable to the law by the Congress would be if they do some kind of private act off the clock, like lie in a sexual harassment deposition in a civil lawsuit, you know, on the weekend or whatever, have some couple of degrees of separation, outsource a job to some criminals to break into the Watergate hotel, that kind of thing.
But if you just, you know, simply mass murder people or, you know, directly violate statutes like FISA, that's okay.
That's simply a policy difference and we don't want to criminalize that.
Yeah.
I mean, it was obscene that Nixon was not charged because of his illegal attacks on Laos and Cambodia.
I mean, these are, you know, it was sad that that was not considered grounds to remove him from power.
And the same with George Bush and a lot of his, you know, with his war in Iraq.
I mean, it's astounding, you've got 4,000 dead Americans of probably over 100,000 dead Iraqis.
And yet that's not an issue.
It's not a legal issue.
And for the vast majority of politicians, it's not a moral issue.
Sure.
I mean, even to this day, the Iraqi deaths go unmentioned when they talk about, you know, even the critics of the war, ah, this war has been terrible.
There have been 4,000 people killed.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
4,000 killed, huh?
And that's the smallest part of it.
And you know, the other thing that bothers me on this FISA case, Jim, is the story of, I forget his name, the CEO of Quest, who told the government, hey, man, come back when you have a warrant.
And then what'd they do to him, Jim?
Charged him with insider trading, made a scapegoat out of him and got him convicted.
And then his conviction was overturned in March by a federal appeals court.
But it was typical.
I mean, there's all kinds of, I assume there's all kinds of inside stuff in that case that we don't know about.
That's just, would probably, you know, even curl my hair.
Yeah, you know, I don't want to jump to too many conclusions without details, but I think it's pretty safe to imagine that somebody said, what, he's standing up to us on this?
Prosecute him.
Yeah.
Well, this is, this is what the feds have done many times in the past.
And it's, you know, it's a hell of a thing that he was prosecuted and the telecom officials who broke the law weren't.
Right.
Well, and it's going to stay like that too.
All right.
Now I want to talk about this capsizing of American democracy that is posted at the Future Freedom Foundation website that you wrote.
You start off by quoting HL Mink and dividing America into those who work for a living and those who vote for a living, a division now truer than ever before.
And I think most conservatives would take that to mean, you know, people who have jobs versus people who are on welfare.
But really a lot of those jobs are voted into existence too, aren't they?
Absolutely.
And it's more so the case than ever before.
And it's sad that there isn't a taint to a lot of these jobs that have been created simply because of a political pull or government mandates or government fear mongering.
Well and so give me some percentages here.
I mean.
37, 52.
Well, I mean specific ones.
How many Americans work for the state or are dependent on state contracts or welfare payments or salaries of one kind or another versus the way it's supposed to be, for example?
The way it's supposed to be.
You know, the number of government employees has grown far faster than the number of private employees.
The number of people on welfare is much greater than what people realize because people think that some people will try and pretend that only things like aid to families with dependent children's welfare.
But there was far more other types of programs out there.
There was there are some studies that have shown that there are more people either working for the government or getting government handouts than are working full time in the private sector.
Wow, really?
Yeah.
Already, we're past that point where the pyramid is upside down.
Well, yeah, but I mean, it works out well for the politicians because with the more people holding their hand now, the easier it is for politicians to buy votes and get reelected.
Right.
That's funny because that's a conservative talking point about the liberals this, the liberals that, buying votes with government money.
But they're the biggest welfare whores of all those Republicans, aren't they?
Well, I don't know if they're the biggest, but they're certainly far larger than what they pretended to be.
And it's sad to see how the hypocrisy has been exposed in the last seven years and almost nobody gave a damn.
Yeah, I mean, most people would think, I guess, if you if you just asked him and they didn't really know details, they would probably think, well, sure, Bush has grown the government, but that's because of the war on terrorism.
And that's not the rest of the government.
He's a fiscal hawk, right?
You know, it's sad that some people would still think that.
But and I guess maybe John McCain is going to be trying to run for his third term as George Bush based on those kind of claims.
Right.
Yeah.
I liked it when John McCain said, I agree with Ron Paul about spending.
And everybody was just like, whatever you do not.
Well, yeah, it's it's sad that he could say that, not have not get hooted down.
Well, I think there actually was some hooting on that one.
It was just like, oh, please, you know, here's a guy wants to take an axe to the whole government.
You're talking about the few million dollar bridge to nowhere that counts for nothing compared to the rest of this.
Well, and the thing about John McCain and most of the GOP establishment is they have favored unlimited spending for the so-called war on terror and for Bush's foreign invasions.
And that has destroyed any hope of having a federal spending under control.
Yeah.
Hey, tell us about FEMA.
I like this story about during 2004, when there were some hurricanes, FEMA came out and just started writing checks to everybody.
And it basically said for vote in the corner of the check there at the bottom.
Yeah, Florida was a key swing state back in the 2004 election.
And thanks to FEMA and four hurricanes and storms, Florida residents got more FEMA handouts than any state in history.
Now, back in 2005, the FEMA inspector general went in there and found FEMA had used a standard that would make a drunken sailor blush.
Basically, if someone called in and claimed his bed was damaged by FEMA recognized adverse weather incident, FEMA insisted on sending that person a check to buy an entire new large bedroom suite.
Nice.
Free money, right?
Well, that's true.
And they were saying that they were, you know, they had all this terrible, these terrible storms.
But there was one case where the storms never exceeded 45 miles per hour.
But FEMA still went in there and threw money around.
There was a there was a case 4,000 people received more than $8 million to rent temporary housing, even though none of them had asked for aid and had had little or no home damage.
This is not the same standard the IRS uses if they're going after somebody.
No, it's not.
What's the difference there?
Well, the IRS assumes that you're guilty and the FEMA assumed that, you know, since you were living and breathing, that you deserve money.
Yeah, like you had a line in here somewhere about you can't just, you know, call an 800 number and tell them, oh, no, don't worry, I don't have any taxable income.
They won't quite let you get away with that.
Well, it's never worked for me.
Yeah, no.
I'm afraid not.
All right.
So there's a couple of other pieces of police state news I wanted to get to here.
I don't know if you saw this.
New Jersey court upholds extreme force in DUI blood draws.
And so apparently there was already a law that said that the cops could take your blood on the side of the road.
But now in this court ruling, New Jersey Superior Court decision, they've decided that if the cops give you permanent nerve damage in your arm because of the brute force that they use in, you know, getting that blood sample from you, then that's perfectly fine as long as they're on the clock and, you know, tough for you.
They can commit any crime against you, apparently, that they feel like on the side of the road.
Well, this is one more reason why I'm not a big fan of New Jersey.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, if you mean there are other reasons besides that.
Well, you know, Scott, I don't know how much time you spend hitchhiking on the Jersey Turnpike, but, you know, I don't recommend it.
See, man, I'm just I'm just bummed because I haven't figured out something funny enough to say yet to make you do your laugh, man.
I'm trying to find something and that worked a little bit.
Well, yeah.
Well, you know, I reckon the laugh will come back later.
What the hell?
All right.
There you go.
Well, this is funny.
This is hilarious, Jim.
No evidence needed under terror profiling plan.
Who you are, where you travel could make you FBI target.
Here goes official policy fishing expedition.
Everybody's guilty until you're cleared.
Where's this story from?
This is the Associated Press.
Lara Jakes, Jordan, July 3rd, 2008.
Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate America's evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups.
There was a follow up two days later to that story.
Did you see it?
No, I missed it.
It turns out skateboarders are also on the list.
Oh, no, not skateboarders.
They're coming after you, dude.
That's right in my profile.
Yeah.
People who never go anywhere or do anything.
Yeah.
Well, it's just it's just surprising.
You know, the feds have found so few real terrorists during the last seven years.
And so basically what they keep doing is stretching the definition.
I think, ah, you know, paintballers or the boneheads in Miami or whatever.
Yeah.
You know, there's a brand new one like that.
Paintball was practice, says Terrace Mole.
And this is in Canada.
But same difference anyway.
The key player in the terrorist group turns out he worked for the government and and swears that whenever they all went to play paintball, that was all practice for murdering civilians later.
Well, you know, some days I almost doubt some of these government informants.
I know.
I wonder why they would ever lie.
Well, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000, whatever it was that, you know, doesn't matter.
The government's got the money, you know, pay whatever it takes to get the testimony.
Yeah.
Hey, back to the war here for a minute, Jim.
How bad is this or how much do you think that the war has to do with the state of the American economy?
And I guess the fear is that it's only getting worse.
I don't really know how those things work that well.
Well, I think it's a huge factor.
I mean, people have a lot of people lost confidence.
Bush's Middle East policies added a huge amount to the price of gasoline.
Too bad the media almost never mentions that the government spending has driven down the dollar.
And there's there's other factors that have just simply, you know, Bush's wars have destroyed a lot of the world's confidence in the U.S. government and the U.S. dollar.
And that have that's having a cascading impact on the economy.
And plus, well, it's kind of hard to separate from all the other dumb things the government has done, like the, you know, all the mortgage guarantees and all the encouragements to give, you know, to make bad loans as a communist boomerang.
So, you know, it's kind of hard to separate all the different types of damage the government has done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It really is hard.
The problem is this is the libertarian lesson that everybody else seems to miss or whatever that when government does something that there will be unintended consequences, maybe intended ones to and what have you, but that there's always a further ripple effect that usually is a problem which can only be fixed by another government program or an expansion of the first one.
Yep.
Yep.
It's, you know, and yet people don't seem to learn.
People don't seem to learn from the government waste, from the government disruptions and from the government crimes.
Yeah.
Well, help, help explain it to him, Jim.
What's the difference between government being able to act with such impunity and people in private business?
I mean, it's not like they're all a bunch of saints or anything, but is there, is it something about the built-in incentive structure there somehow where government just does nothing but succeed from failure or what?
Government is the final judge of its own action.
Government's got sovereign immunity.
Government can, government can hide its own victims.
And that's a large part of the difference.
Yeah.
That sovereign immunity.
Isn't, I thought there was a story from history where King Charles the first, I think it was in England, said, I have sovereign immunity and they said, yeah, that's great.
And then they cut his head off.
Well, yeah.
But, but first he was given a fair trial.
You know, he was given a trial and probably at least as fair as what Saddam got.
And it was interesting.
There were some statements around the execution of Charles the first, which I used in the final chapter of Bush Betrayal, which came out back in September of 2004, but it didn't seem to resonate with people at that point.
Well, you know, the masterpiece and the Bush Betrayal is great.
It is absolutely great, especially for anybody who thought they ever liked this schmuck to see just really, frankly, what a commie he is and not a conservative at all, a radical really in a lot of ways.
But the masterpiece, Jim, is attention deficit democracy, because this book, it's about the politicians, but it's about Americans.
It's about who we are in this society, that we let the government be this monster.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Well, I certainly try to cover a lot of the bases and, you know, so many targets, so little time.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we can see that, you know, good news, the opposition to the war right now is at all time highs.
Sixty eight percent want to begin getting out of there, you know, in some way or another.
That's great.
That's great.
And I just hope that's enough to leash Bush from starting another war.
Yeah.
Hey, can you tell us about what you're working on for your next book?
I'm kind of muzzled on that right now, but thanks for the question and I'll be able to say a lot more soon.
All right.
Good.
Now, everybody, you can go to, is it, I forgot if it's James or Jim Bovar dot com, Jim Bovar dot com, and there's the Bovar blog there.
And sometimes he blogs at the Antiwar dot com blog as well.
You can read what he writes there and at the Future Freedom Foundation and the books, The Fair Trade Fraud, The Farm Fiasco, Feeling Your Pain, Freedom in Chains, Lost Rights, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, and yeah, and then Attention Deficit Democracy, The Masterpiece.
And I have attention deficit problems myself here.
And then did I leave any out there?
You know, it's close enough for government work.
Well, good, because it was just from memory, although I've never been a government employee, nor will I. Although I'll tell you one time, Jim, I worked at a survey company doing land surveying.
I was the goofball holding the prism, you know, doing nothing.
And and one of our contracts was doing the Highway 130 that they're stealing everybody's land at gunpoint and building the giant new freeways around here.
And boy, that was the job in which we did the least work and for the least amount of time a day to take our lazy ass time driving out there, take our lazy ass time walking around doing our job.
And then quitting time was about, you know, after lunch and then take our lazy time driving on back.
And that was just fine as far as everybody was concerned.
It didn't seem like anybody at the company thought that they might lose their contract if they dragged it out like that at all.
That was the policy.
And it wasn't like that on any other job that I did.
Well, I'm glad I didn't make a cynical.
Yeah, no, no.
I didn't learn a single thing from it at all.
You know, a brief amount of job I had with the highway department in high school one summer.
You know, I did a bunch of little jobs for them and one of them was I was a flagman.
And that was just, you know, it was kind of standing around with that flag.
About the only fringe benefit was people would drive by and give me free beer.
Which that's a pretty good fringe benefit, I know, from your point of view, right?
It was certainly great when I was 17.
I certainly appreciated that because I traveled by it sometimes then.
There you go.
Well, I sure appreciate you waiting to get drunk until after the show today, John.
Well, you know, it was a sacrifice, but for antiwar.com, I'll do it.
All right.
Hey, thanks a lot, everybody.
That's Jim Bovard.
He's the author of all those books I said a minute ago.
You can read what he writes at the Future Freedom Foundation and at his website, jimbovard.com.
Thanks a lot for your time today, Jim.
Hey, thanks for having me on, Scott.