10/08/07 – Jim Ostrowski – The Scott Horton Show

There ain't no stopping us now.
That's what my next guest says.
It's Jim Ostrowski from LouRockwell.com, your virtual individualist headquarters.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing great.
I loved your article today, and I can't think of what's more important or interesting to talk about than the candidacy of the good Dr. Ron Paul, another contributor to LouRockwell.com and AntiWar.com, by the way.
That's right.
So, let's see here.
Tell me, Jim, seriously, are you telling me that Ron Paul can get this nomination, can win the presidency of the United States, for real?
Well, absolutely.
When you put it that way, he can.
I can't tell the future, and if I tried, I'd really lose all credibility.
But I absolutely think he can, and there's a lot of reasons for that, some of which I've laid out in some of the articles, but just the fact that he has this upward trajectory is certainly consistent with that point of view.
And basically, I just view the other candidates as a bunch of stiffs.
So, it's not just the fact that Ron's a great candidate.
You've got to look at the competition, who are we up against here?
Yeah, the Republicans are pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to the rest of those guys.
Yeah, and they brought in Fred Thompson, just telling somebody today on an email that he reminds me of a boxer who hasn't fought in two years.
I think he just lost it, because I did see a clip of him coming out for the Iraq war.
He just sounded pretty good.
He looked pretty good.
I don't think he wants to run.
I think he got caught up into this thing, and he's 66, and hey, they're offering me the White House.
I think I'll take a shot.
I don't think he wants to run.
I think his lack of enthusiasm spills over onto the stage.
He gave a speech the other day, and when he was done, nobody knew he was done.
Nobody applauded.
It's not looking too good for him, or any of the other four.
To me, it's a five-way race at this point.
You can forget about him.
Yeah, he's off of my chart, too.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, so it's basically down to the five candidates.
If you look at the four people running against Ron, none of them are looking very good.
Romney has been stuck at 10% for six months, and he spent $50 million.
So, he's not looking too good.
Loaning himself a bunch of money out of his own bank account, right?
Yeah, he should talk to his children about that.
I mean, because he's spending their inheritance.
I think that's unfair.
Well, they're sacrificing for their country.
Yeah, well, we know about that.
It's tough to campaign in a Winnebago or whatever you got there, and party all day long.
And then, the other candidates, Giuliani is a train wreck.
I mean, any way you look at it, half of the party is going to form a third party if he gets the nomination.
He's got family problems.
I don't really want to pick on him for that, but it's just the reality that he does.
Well, and you're from New York.
Is it the case, as my last interview was with Michael Hirsch from Newsweek, and he talked about the few southern conservative Christians who are still supporting Giuliani, and the reason for it is that they're certain that he's the only one who can beat Hillary Clinton.
And I would imagine that whoever wins New York State, since they're both, at least Hillary is supposedly from there, and he's from there.
How close is that contest going to be between those two for New York's electoral votes in 2008?
Well, Hillary is a steamroller in a blue state like this.
It's a hugely democratic state, and I don't see Rudy beating her in New York.
He's behind about 10 points nationally.
Frankly, I don't see Rudy getting the nomination, let alone beating anybody in November.
As I've said many times, I think only an anti-war Republican can beat Hillary Clinton, because she runs against McCain or Giuliani.
She looks like the peace candidate, and it's a nation that wants peace in Iraq, and to get out of Iraq.
So the only way to beat her is to outflank her on the war issue, and that's what Ron Paul does, none of the other candidates do.
The other thing is that he makes her family life look normal.
He solves a lot of problems of Hillary Clinton, and I don't think she would mind running against him at all.
Then you get to McCain.
Now I happen to think, and I said so, that McCain is not dead, and he has had a resurgence in the last month and a half.
I really think that as flawed as he is, compared to Romney, Thompson, Giuliani actually looks pretty good to some people.
I kind of expect McCain to hang on for a while, but again, I don't think he's a candidate that Hillary Clinton is afraid of.
He makes Hillary look young, he makes Hillary look like the peace candidate, and I think she'd be happy to run against McCain.
So that's the situation, and I think that Ron Paul is the only one who can beat Hillary.
I've been saying that since January.
Now tell me though this, can the Republicans in this country be made to somehow understand that?
That they have to think ahead, they have to not say, well you know, and this is apparently the choice a lot of conservatives are making.
They're saying, well Giuliani or Romney or whichever, you know, pro-abortion and pro-gun control and pro-socialized healthcare, but they promise to slaughter Arabs, and that's very important to me, that America continues to slaughter Arabs.
Can somebody like that be made to understand that they only have one shot at keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House for four or even eight years, and that to do that they're going to have to drop their issue, and instead of voting for the one most likely to kill the most Arabs, they're going to have to vote for the one most likely to kill the very fewest?
Well, I don't think we know the answer to that yet, but I think what you're beginning to see is people, opinion leaders are changing their minds.
George Will, Laura Ingraham, a number of people who you might not have been expected to be pro-Ron Paul are actually saying positive things, and you know, let's face it, most people are followers, not leaders, and I think if enough opinion leaders in the conservative movement of the Republican party start to switch to neutral or to pro-Ron Paul, a lot of the rank and file will get behind them, and I think that obviously Ron is a pro-life position, I don't know all the details of that issue or how people define pro-life, but I think most people would agree that he's a pro-life candidate, so he should be acceptable to that branch of the Republican party if they could just get over their aggressiveness in foreign policy, which is obviously not working.
Well you know, I'm sure you saw the ABC News clip where George Will, who you just mentioned, said that Ron Paul is telling a lot of people what they want to hear and haven't heard this whole time, which is that it's okay to be a conservative and be anti-war, and better, if you really want to be a small government conservative, that you have to be anti-war, and if George Will has finally gotten that message, if we can get him, just repeat that a few dozen times, that ought to really help.
Yeah, I think it's remarkable to see him there.
He was sort of a big government conservative, as I recall, and wrote an article ridiculing Ron Paul just a few months back.
Yeah, I kind of like that article, frankly, just the fact that he mentioned his name.
Yeah, it was kind of nothing at the time.
Yeah, I mean, that story by ABC, I thought was the best piece of coverage in the campaign, and I think that's why I wrote my article.
If you follow Google News, every major news outlet had a fairly positive story about Ron Paul.
It was really the first time he's been covered like a real candidate, and I think once the genie's out of the bottle, it never goes back.
He's now a real candidate.
I think he even became a real candidate before he hit 10% in the polls, which is what I was sort of anticipating would happen.
He's gotten there sooner because he's doing well in the money primary.
Now that he's going to get regular coverage, a lot of people will take him more seriously.
He'll raise more money, and whether it's a snowball effect or a chain reaction effect, as I mentioned in my article, things are going to be looking pretty good at this point.
Nobody knows what that ceiling is of Ron Paul's support.
I don't know.
Nobody really knows.
I think it's a high ceiling, so I expect this momentum to continue, and we'll see what happens in the early primaries.
Yes, I agree with that.
I think that the base of support is relatively narrow right now as a result of the lack of name recognition, but I think that, I don't know, I hope the majority of people, and I think at least somewhere very close to there, who hear Ron Paul and his message understand that he's certainly the most qualified man to be the president at this point.
Obviously I agree.
I think what he's doing is he's winning these various primaries before the real primary.
He's getting a lot of opinion leaders.
Most people in Buffalo who support Ron Paul, many of them have their own blogs and are read by anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 people a day.
So I think as time goes on, those early Ron Paul supporters will be critical in moving mass public opinion.
It's interesting, you mentioned how while there's been this breakthrough, it seems like I hope that you're right, that it's going to be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, but it is true that they're, at least in some news reports, at least dropping Huckabee and including Paul at the tail end of their discussion, that kind of thing.
I thought one example of that, it was kind of funny, apparently Barack Obama said that when it came to the Iraq war, he took the American flag lapel off of his jacket and they asked Ron Paul what he thought about this and he kind of shrugged and said, you know, what do I care or something.
All the comments in the, in the comment section on the news story said, Oh, you jerks, why don't you ask Ron Paul what he really thinks about something important, et cetera, et cetera.
But I, I took it the entirely the other way.
I mean, if you turn on any, basically any news coverage of the political race, it's all meaningless crap.
It's all a lapel pins.
That's what it all is.
And the fact that they're asking Ron Paul about lapel pins means he's in.
This is what they talk about.
This is what the Chris Matthews show is about.
It's not what Ron Paul believes or what Rudy Giuliani believes.
Freedom is about authority.
You doing what I say.
It's not about that.
It's about who's ahead.
Who said what, what's the latest point.
What's the best spin on the latest little meaningless thing.
And so I just cheered when I saw that they asked Ron Paul about the lapel thing.
They care what Ron Paul thinks about the lapel thing.
Yeah, he's, he's, he's in the club now and you know, obviously he's going to get in all the debates.
I was thinking earlier today, what I think, thank you Nancy Reagan for inviting him into that first debate.
It's almost like once he got on the first one, they couldn't exclude him.
And you know, as I said, one of my articles is, man, wait, wait till you get this guy on stage.
It might take them a while to warm up, but once you see, you know, this man of substance versus, versus the bunch of shallow politicians, it's just going to be startling.
And that, that's exactly what it's been.
And then of course, you know, because of YouTube, people can watch these clips over and over again and the messages is getting out there.
Yeah.
And you know, he's so much different than, well, really any politician, most, most politicians, at least around here in Texas, I think that, you know, the average jerk running for the Republican house seat or what have you, they're all a bunch of Romney lookalikes.
They all have the perfect hair and tee and, and, you know, have the, the tennis club membership at the most exclusive place.
And, and they're all people have nothing to do with the rest of us.
They're not even part of the rest of our society.
Even these people who run for office like that, Romney and Giuliani and these guys completely remind me of that.
The kind of people I would never know or meet anywhere.
And, and Ron Paul's not like that.
He's the kind of guy who would deliver the baby, you know, and someone, someone in my family.
And, and it's funny cause you talk about his presence in the debates and, and what a strong presence he has.
Here's this guy, he's maybe an inch taller than me and that isn't tall.
And, and you know, he doesn't have these broad shoulders.
He doesn't have the perfect hair and teeth and the, and the, the fake thing.
He cleans their clock by simply being humble and at the same time sticking to his, his argument and refusing to let up.
Well, the funny thing is, you know, he's 72 years old.
He's in excellent shape.
But ironically, if you look at the polls, his support is mainly among young people.
In fact, the, the older the voter at this point, the less likely they are to be supporting Ron Paul.
I think that will change.
But it's just one of the great stories of this campaign that a 72 year old, you know, obstetrician from Texas has the support of the, I don't know what they call the children of the baby boomers, but those people are the core of, of the core of this campaign.
It's just, it's an amazing, it's an amazing story.
Yep.
And now another thing here, cause you know, you're a very rubber meets the road guy in terms of all these, you know, electoral politics and, and you know, this much money here, what it means to the campaign there and that kind of thing.
And you talk about in your article about how Rudy Giuliani's donations, for example, are always, you know, near the limit, right?
They're always the highest, the highest number of donations.
So he's raised a lot of money, but from much fewer people here, Ron Paul really has this, this Ron Paul revolution, this grassroots thing from across the country coming in and, and spending their own money in all kinds of ways, besides just donating 40 or 50 bucks to the actual campaign.
Yeah.
You know, he, Giuliani came into Buffalo a few months ago and grabbed all the fat cat money and a lot of those people maxed out 2,300 for them, the wife, the kids and so on.
And now they're, you know, they can't, they can't donate any more, but the average Ron Paul donation I think it's got, got a lot lower in the last quarter.
I heard it was like 40, 50 bucks, something like that, but in any event, a lot smaller.
So that means there's more warm bodies behind that, that money.
And there's also room for expansion.
You know, they can maybe give another 50 later on in the campaign.
The broad, the broad appeal that he has among the population, any way you split it.
People are amazed to find out that there's African American supporters of Ron Paul and you know, just every different group, he's strong throughout the country, which has strategic implications because like up in New York here, people would not normally think of this as Ron Paul country.
Well, it really is.
He's got people all over the place.
There's fanatic Ron Paul people in Buffalo, down in Manhattan, everywhere in between.
And what that means is that he doesn't have to spend as much money because he's already sort of has an organization on the ground here.
He doesn't necessarily have to hire as many staffers, open, open as many offices.
A lot of the campaign is virtual, obviously on the internet.
So he, I kind of compare his campaign to a guerrilla army, which is pretty much present everywhere.
And he's up against like Giuliani's standing army, this very expensive, top heavy, overpaid bunch of consultants, very slow, cumbersome.
They're kind of like, you know, like one of the standing armies in the civil war.
They're very expensive.
You got to have the, the, the feed truck and and all the ammunition and so on.
And they move slowly to cumbersome and very expensive.
So Ron has that advantage.
I think he's going to get more mileage out of every dollar that he brings in.
So I think that's the story that the media, you know, perhaps didn't quite catch.
And that's why I wrote my article.
And now also, is it the case, is it not the case that all summer long, the rest of these candidates, their numbers all went down while Ron Paul's donations went up 140%?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Republicans are running out of steam.
Democrats across the board.
Huh?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they're spending, again, they're spending as McCain is, you know, I guess essentially in the red.
Now, the thing about McCain is I don't think he needs that much money.
He's so well known.
He can draw a crowd.
He can draw a press conference anytime he wants, but guys like Romney, I mean, nobody's nobody's out there, you know, dying to have Romney president.
He's basically trying to buy it.
So when his money starts to run out and his children start to object that they're spending, he's spending their inheritance, I think he'll begin to fade out.
And I don't know about Fred Thompson, I guess he raised eight, but again, he's one of these top heavy, I'm sure he's hiring, you know, wealthy, you know, old cronies from Washington to run his campaign for a couple hundred thousand here and there.
So again, it's going to be one of these top heavy, nobody's, very little grassroots support.
So the nature of the Ron Paul campaign is quite different from that of his opponents, as I pointed out in the article.
Well, tell me about Mike Huckabee, because he is the leader of the second tier candidates.
He's just doing great, TV keeps telling me.
Yeah, well, you know, he got a bump out of Iowa and he's very, he's very glib.
He's a very good, he's a very good communicator, but the bottom line is he didn't, he didn't turn that bump into money.
And so I think he raised like a million bucks.
Even if you run a lean campaign, I mean, that's, that's the kind of money where you have to wonder, can I fly to New Hampshire this weekend or should I not, or, you know, stay home and stay on the phone?
So he's, he's basically running out of money.
I don't think he's a national candidate.
I mean, he does well in a few States, but, you know, Ron basically, you know, is consistently strong throughout the country.
And I just don't, I don't see how it could be going anywhere.
Frankly, he got, he got a bump and he's got some charisma, which is in short supply, you know, among some of these other candidates, but he just doesn't have enough money to, to go on.
You know, somebody commented on my blog about Ron Paul writing all of his own articles, which to me is just kind of a, well, yeah, of course he does.
But this guy pointed out that night, I mean, can you imagine that Rudy Giuliani would really sit down and write his own articles and you know, have vinyl approval over the mall and all that kind of thing?
Course not, none of these guys.
Yeah, here we have Ron Paul, who's been writing articles explaining exactly what he believes and why, and, and proving himself right over and over again for what, 30 years, something like that.
Yeah.
People, I don't think realize the depth of his, you know, scholarship, his knowledge of history, his command of a number of disciplines.
That's why I knew he was going to do well in the debates.
My only concern was would he be able to talk in soundbites, any, any, you know, he, he's, he has developed that ability.
You know, when he says, get rid of the IRS immediately, or just come home, he's, he's mastered the soundbite.
And I haven't, didn't watch his congressional campaigns, but there's no way you can compare it, compare a congressional campaign to a live nationally televised debate.
And so he really has mastered the art of that.
And then as the debates go on and there's fewer and fewer candidates, particularly, you know, if he gets the nomination in November and he's one-on-one or one-on-two, he's really going to have time to explain his positions.
And the more time he has, the more you'll see that difference between somebody like Hillary, who's kind of telling you what you want to hear in a very glib way, and then Ron actually, you know, with the substance.
And I think people will get more of that impact as time goes on.
You know, in that debate on September 5th, history went toe to toe with Huckabee over the war.
I read a blog where the guy said he was a Huckabee supporter.
And he was saying, you know, advice to the Huckabee campaign.
Don't go toe to toe with Ron Paul on the facts.
You cannot win.
He knows what he's talking about.
He's a serious historian and you're not.
So don't even try it.
Yeah, he'll consistently pull out some, you know, little known fact of history just below his opponent away.
And it's just been great fun watching that, and particularly the journalists who are often very shallow and know very little about history.
It's fun to watch them go at those people as well, because he always blows them away.
It's like watching a Clint Eastwood movie.
Yeah, they're always so surprised, not sure exactly what to make of them.
I remember the I think it was a CNN interview where it was I don't think it was Wolf Blitzer.
I think it was one of the one of the hairdos who was saying I'm I'm confused.
Why aren't you running as a Democrat?
Well, you know, somebody posted on Lou's site today a funny video about how they're every time they mention Ron Paul's name, they smile.
And and one of them said, accused Ron of being an isolationist.
And I just had to respond.
I said, it's funny, somebody in the mainstream media calling anybody else an isolationist.
I mean, look at these people.
They're, you know, the most of them went to some elite school and they're millionaires and they live in exclusive neighborhoods in New York and Washington or wherever.
They don't talk to any real people and they're accusing Ron Paul of being isolated.
It's just hysterical.
That's why that's why some of these people have missed the story.
I mean, they never talk to anybody who's net worth is less than a million dollars.
People are people are angry out there.
People are not happy about how the country is going, either, you know, foreign policy wise or domestically.
And those people are hitting the streets for Ron Paul and people like George Stephanopoulos.
They don't know anybody like that.
Maybe the doorman, you know, in his apartment building perhaps.
But does he speak to them?
Who knows?
That reminds me of Dewey defeats Truman, right?
They called everybody with a telephone and they were all voting for Dewey.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, and the other story of the campaign is the battle between the mainstream media and the Internet.
And so far, the Internet is winning.
And they basically they've almost thrown up the white flag by starting to cover Ron Paul.
They're basically saying, yeah, the Internet's candidate, the real candidate.
But we'll continue to you know, the Web will continue to beat him to the punch, hopefully for the rest of the campaign.
But it's fun to see them finally on board covering it.
Well, you know, the more they talk about it, I have to wonder, you know, we see how deep the support is.
I'm not certain how narrow it is.
But, you know, apparently all these new volunteers who have come across Ron just in this campaign, you know, the ones who've come over to his side all apparently love him as much as you and I do from way back.
And it's very deep support.
People are, you know, when when they agree with Ron, they go ahead and agree with him pretty much on.
Well, I mean, I only have, I think, two issues I disagree with him about and I just throw him in the trash.
I don't even care.
He's so great on everything else.
It doesn't even matter.
But I wonder if his name is really going to be on TV all the time now.
And this is not just, you know, centered on people who already read the Internet to find out what's going on in the world every day.
And this does, you know, start landing in people's living rooms during sitcoms and that sort of stuff.
How deep and really how broad can this deep support get?
You know, I wonder, I guess you talked about it before.
You don't know exactly where the ceiling is, but I have to tell you, my gut is that, you know, if you could get the name recognition, that the ceiling for Ron Paul support is very, very high.
I do.
I do think that George will said it the other day that, you know, it's basically it's basically a libertarian country.
In fact, George, well, years ago, made a comment that I like to quote.
He said, you know, Americans talk like Jefferson, but but act like Hamilton.
In other words, we we talk about limited government, individual freedom and so on.
And but we sort of vote for people who who do enact big government policies.
So there is a kind of a split personality.
But the ideology of the country is basically libertarian.
And so I think I think what people are going to hear and Ron Paul are going to hear, you know, that's I read that in my high school civics textbook or that's that's what I kind of heard growing up.
I mean, that's how I that's how I became a libertarian.
I mean, I read the Declaration of Independence in school and found out that Jesus, the world really isn't run according to those principles.
But that there is this philosophy called libertarianism that wants to, you know, kind of do that.
And so, you know, the basic ideology of the country all the way back to, you know, 1776 has been has been libertarian.
I mean, the word wasn't around that.
But so I, I think that if he can, if he can explain the mechanics of how we go from Hamiltonian big government to Jeffersonian smaller decentralized government, and I think that he can persuade the masses to support him.
And he's been very moderate about that.
He says, I'm not gonna throw anybody on the streets, this is going to be a transitional thing, which is fine.
I think that's the only way.
It's the only way you can really do it in a democracy.
But if he can get the mechanics down and explain how this is going to work in actual fact, I think the support will be there.
Yeah, you know, in that Wolf Blitzer interview, he said, Well, you you're a libertarian, which I guess he said it in a way like, you know, trying to get the people in the audience to react like, well, that's a strange word.
I've never heard.
Oh, no, or something.
And he said, and you want a really small government much leaner.
And Ron Paul said, Well, you know, the Constitution backs up my libertarian position, which I thought was funny, you know?
Well, you know, because, you know, I'm teaching a course in constitutional law now at Canisius, you know, the Constitution, as Ron Paul understands it, is basically a result of a battle between the federalists and the anti federalists.
And it wasn't a pure libertarian document, but the document that it was that it was understood to be at that time was, you know, fairly libertarian compared to what compared to what we have now.
I mean, the New Deal Court kind of redefined what the Constitution meant.
So there's no question if we like in the Clarence Thomas's dissent in the medical marijuana case, the Commerce Clause and give the damn federal government the right to regulate medical marijuana, you know, so just applying the Constitution as it was understood when it was ratified, we would have a lot more of a libertarian country and you'd have the sort of ability to experiment at the state level or at the local level and try out even greater forms of libertarian, you know, organized way of organizing society and government.
So there's no question there's, you know, Bernard Bailyn's book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
This is a libertarian country.
I always remind my neoconservative friends when they talk about the libertarians as this crazy alien idea.
Well, not really.
It's basically the original American idea as expressed by Jefferson.
So, you know, Ron Paul should be right at home talking to those people on TV.
This is a country that libertarians helped create, helped invent.
We had some help from some other people, too.
So there's that ongoing debate about what the country should be like.
But the notion that he's coming in with some foreign alien philosophy, absolutely not.
No, no, there's nothing more American than the ideas of Ron Paul.
Well, and you know, I think maybe this is just, you know, the odometer effect, like we were all so excited when it flipped over from 1999 to 2000 and that kind of thing.
But somewhere in me, I think there's a Ron Paul speech about, you know, we kind of got off on the wrong foot here, but it's not too late to be on the right track for the next 100 years.
There's a good measure.
Do we want to head down the path of empire and destruction and ruin, or do we want to preserve our limited constitutional republic and our Bill of Rights for at least the next 100 years?
Do we want the whole world to hate us and be in never-ending conflict with them, or do we want to get back on the right track?
Now's our chance.
It's still only 2007.
It's not too late to make that U-turn that Garrett said we couldn't make.
Well, you know, it's like I tell my class, the people who wrote the Federalist Papers were very smart, but we have one advantage over them.
We kind of know, we know how things turned out in history.
And if you look at a graph of federal spending in American history, it tracks perfectly with the periods where this Hamiltonian big government in Washington concept prevailed.
And basically the whole 20th century, compared to the 19th century, there's enormous federal spending.
And also, leaving aside the Civil War of the 19th century relatively peaceful, the 20th century, the century of constant warfare.
So I think people should look back at the last numerous, the last several decades and even the last century and say, okay, this Hamiltonian idea, has it really worked out well?
You know, as Ron Paul says, you've got a bunch of super-rich people running banks in Wall Street.
They're doing extremely well.
Much of the country is struggling.
We're not popular around the world.
People who have the money don't even want to travel around anymore.
They pretend they're not even American.
So I think that there's a lot of potential there to actually have another velvet revolution like Jefferson had in 1800 when he kicked the Federalists out.
And the guy actually did make government smaller.
He shrunk the size of the Navy.
He shrunk the size of the Army.
He paid off a lot of debts.
And even with the Louisiana Purchase, he was able to keep government spending down.
So this is a very interesting, important historical election.
I think it's going to be a great way for us Jeffersonians to educate the public on getting back to the original idea of America.
You're right.
I certainly wouldn't argue that America has been headed down the road to empire for at least 50, if not 100, if not the whole time since Hamilton wrote the damn Constitution in the first place.
But I do think that September 11th, I hate to paraphrase Condoleezza Rice, but what a great opportunity September 11th was to make a clean break with the past, even though it would have been disingenuous.
To basically say to the world, hey look, we never meant to be an empire.
We were just trying to protect you from the reds.
And you're right, we should have brought our troops home a few years back.
But we'll go ahead and do it now.
We're the land of liberty.
We're the statue of liberty.
We're the American republic that you all wish your country was like.
And let's all be friends.
If George Bush had believed in that humble foreign policy that he pretended to believe in in the year 2000, we could have really taken the 20th century and said, yes, sorry about that, put that aside and really taken the Jeffersonian tract then.
And instead we went the exact opposite.
But even there you can say, a lot of people think Ron is an ideological candidate.
His positions aren't based on experience.
Well, we've had the experience.
We've responded to 9-11 with an aggressive foreign policy.
And where has it gotten us?
More war, threats of war, rumors of war, the federal budget is out of control.
And so I think a lot of people are going to say, you know, I was willing to kick a little ass after 9-11, but it's over.
Let's terminate.
We did what we could here and there and let's get out and get the troops home.
Sounds like true American principles to me.
I saw a Thomas Jefferson quote where he said, a large standing military force is completely inconsistent with the principles of our government.
Absolutely.
Even Hamilton in one of the Federalist papers argued from that standpoint that the standing army is not a good idea.
And the problem with standing armies is they don't stand.
They march and they get you into wars.
And of course, the big irony of our time is that, well, I don't know about you, but I'm relying on some of these uniformed military guys to keep the reins on Bush and Cheney.
As Admiral Fallon said, we're trying to put some of these crazies back in the box.
If Cheney and Bush want to start another war, it's the soldiers saying, no, we really can't do it.
It's amazing.
Yeah, a lot of them are donating to Ron's campaign.
I guess there's somebody in the green zone is in a Ron Paul meetup.
Yeah, they have them in Afghanistan, too, I read.
Yeah, that's what I hear, too, from people I know in the military.
People are fed up with this guy.
You never hear it on talk on Rush Limbaugh and places like that, but a lot of the soldiers are absolutely fed up with this guy in the White House and all of his policies and they're ready for a change.
All right.
Well, I sure appreciate your time today on the show, everybody.
Jim Ostrowski, he writes for LewRockwell.com.
His website is FreeBuffalo.com.
He's the author of Political Class Dismissed, Essays Against Politics.
FreeBuffalo.org.
Oh, what?
FreeBuffalo.org.
FreeBuffalo.org.
Sorry, I got the com wrong.
It's org.
Yeah, thanks a lot for having me, Scott.
It was a lot of fun.
Hey, thanks a lot, Jim.
Okay, bye.