04/23/07 – Justin Raimondo – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, you are listening to Antiwar Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, and I'm joined on the phone by Justin Raimondo from antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Justin.
It's great to be back.
Good to have you here, and in case you don't know, folks, Justin wrote the book, The Legacy of the Conservative Movement and Enemy of the State, The Life of Murray N. Rothbard.
He's the editorial director of antiwar.com and writes behind the headlines three times a week, and there's nothing but bad news.
I figure we could just spend this time, Justin, kind of reviewing and commenting on what's been going on here lately.
I'll tell you, Saturday morning, I woke up and I looked at the front page of antiwar.com and I thought, ah, man, now, see, this is why I have to have a radio show seven days a week.
I believe this headline, training Iraqi troops no longer driving force in U.S. policy.
They've completely given up even the pretense that the goal here is to train up the Iraqi army so that our guys can go home.
Right.
But I mean, that was never the real reason anyway.
It's all lies anyway.
I mean, they're just, you know, the lies, they're dropping like flies.
They're in Iraq.
Mission accomplished.
That was the whole goal all along.
All this failure is actually success.
Arabs bad.
Destroy them.
I mean, that is their foreign policy.
So you can see that they are quote unquote succeeding.
And it's just a question of now it's the Persians next.
So now the Republicans are really willing to sacrifice their own power for however many years to come in order to, you know, go on TV every day and pretend they're trying hard to succeed at this mission while actually all along they're deliberately destroying a place in a manner that makes it look like just outright incompetence and the worst sort of use of political power to the rest of us watching on TV.
They try to cooperate.
Of course, they try and take advantage of each other and, you know, score political points over, you know, the specific failures.
Oh, yeah, they're not doing this.
They're not doing that.
They said they're going to do this.
But there's no fundamental difference in the policy.
And that is our interventionist foreign policy.
The Democrats have signed on to it and the Republicans have signed on to it.
And it's just a question of how they carry it out.
And what their style of interventionism or rather imperialism, the old fashioned word, is.
Yeah.
Now, Harry Reid came out and I guess going along with the premise that what they're trying to do in Iraq is succeed in creating peace in a central government there.
Harry Reid said the war is lost, which in political terms, you know, regardless of how deceptive his premise might be, what basically after you admit that you got to end the war, right?
Well, I mean, actually, I, you know, I would interpret that completely differently.
I would say that he was actually speaking in code and saying that he had lost his battle with the Bush administration and so the Democratic Party over Iraq policy, because that very same day, the Democrats announced that they were caving in on the timeline issue.
And that is in their in their supplemental bill to fund the military.
They had put in these timelines saying, well, if you don't do this by this time, then we have to start withdrawing from from from Iraq.
And now they've given up on that.
So it was a little Freudian slip on his part.
That said, you know, if you know the language, you can understand what they're saying.
That's just tough.
And so that is really what happened, right?
He came out.
He said the war is lost, but we're going to keep funding it anyway.
No strings attached.
Yeah, I mean, it's a typical Harry Reid-ism.
You know, the Democratic Party is so incompetent.
I mean, that cannot be an accident.
Yeah, it really is pretty sad.
It kind of brings up, you know, like the old Bill Hicks joke about, well, I prefer the puppet on the left.
Well, I like the puppet on the right a little better.
But wait, there's one guy holding both puppets.
Actually, you know, it sort of speaks to the whole issue of who should libertarians infiltrate?
I mean, let's stop trying to take over the Republican Party.
Those guys are too organized.
Let's go after a Democrat.
We should take that over in a couple of weeks.
Right.
They don't seem to have any idea what they're doing.
No, I don't know.
It might just work.
I definitely agree with you that, you know, sarcastic as you meant that, you know, we have no hope of the whole fusion of libertarian ideas with conservatism.
They're polar opposites.
At least liberalism has liberty as a root word in there somewhere.
I mean, there are many good, you know, conservatives.
I mean, I happen to be, you know, an associate editor of the American Conservative magazine.
So I'm not writing off all conservatives.
What I'm simply saying is that, you know, the people who have state power right now are fascist.
They're not conservatives.
So we have nothing in common with them.
In fact, they're the enemy.
And I'm willing to unite with people on the left against the main danger, which is from the neoconservatives.
I mean, these guys are authoritarians, they're warmongers, and they're dangerous.
Yeah.
And, you know, Glenn Greenwald pointed out on the show last week that they really detest the founding principles of America, the idea of individual liberty and free markets, people, you know, living their own way, choosing their own destiny and having a rule of law and limited powers is just an anathema to everything they stand for.
I mean, they really are these neocons are revolutionaries, aren't they?
Yeah, I mean, it's basically a European movement.
I mean, they don't seem like an American, you know, phenomenon.
You know, it seems more, you know, European in in in its mindset.
Was it Klaus Rind that called them the neo Jacobins?
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, these guys are basically leftist, gone bad.
Yeah, just like the worst of all possible world.
Because I mean, you know, if you take what they are, and you contrast them with, say, you know, libertarians, or even old right, you know, conservatives, like Pappy can and people like that.
I mean, they are the exact opposite of us in in every way.
And so, you know, the battle lines are drawn.
I mean, anywhere.com was talking about the neoconservatives back in 1995, saying, and I wrote a book about the neoconservatives that was published in 1993, saying, these guys are dangerous, talking about their intellectual history.
And saying that they aim to take over the Republican Party and go to war.
And that is exactly what happened.
By the way, you know, I'm glad you mentioned the book and introduction because ISI books, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Press is bringing out a new edition of Reclaiming the American Right with a new introduction, and essays by two or three scholars.
And that's going to be next year.
Oh, great.
Yeah, that's good news.
So I'm very excited about that.
And ISI books is an excellent outfit.
They, you know, they put out, you know, foundational works by old right, you know, conservative authors.
And I believe they published Tom Woods, one of my favorite writers.
And now in the world of ideas, it seems like this should be able to work because really the paleoconservatives like at the American Conservative magazine, and a lot of the anti-imperialist liberals, they really in a lot of ways in terms of trade policy and that kind of thing, have even more in common with each other than they have with us libertarians.
So we ought to really, it ought to work for us to be able to try to bridge the gap between those two facts.
See, I mean, war always transforms the domestic political landscape.
And that happened in World War I, or after World War I. It happened in the run up to World War II and its aftermath.
And the Cold War, of course, certainly had a devastating effect.
And now this war.
And one of the effects is to sort of switch polarities where right and left become mixed up and they kind of change places.
And you have to remember, during the Clinton years, who were the so-called isolationists?
Well, they were the Republicans.
And if you go back and you read some of the statements that Republican Congressmen were making, I mean, they sound like Susan Sontag.
And so it all depends on who's in power and whose ox is being gored, number one.
But, I mean, war centralizes state power.
And also, I mean, it changes everything so that people begin to realize, well, maybe I'm not what I thought I was.
And they go through changes.
And, like, look at Hegel.
I mean, Hegel is, like, changing before our eyes, you know?
Yeah, and we're here and seeing and writing liberals, not really leftists, but kind of moderate liberal types using the phrase Old Republic.
We have to return to our Old Republic and our Bill of Rights.
There's some room for getting along there, I think.
Well, when they start attacking the Bill of Rights, people start remembering this document, yellowing and ancient as it is, called the Constitution.
And so there's a fight, you know, to save that.
And, I mean, you know, it happened in the run-up to World War II also.
You know, the right back then was isolationist, or rather non-interventionist.
And in fact, that's when the isolationist smear word was invented.
And so, you know, I mean, people switched places, and they came to Cold War, and the right was calling for jailing, you know, people who were against, you know, the war.
Like, whatever war it was, Korea, whatever, Vietnam.
And, you know, the left was, you know, suddenly in favor of, you know, like civil liberties.
But if you look at, you know, the run-up to World War II, the left, and I'm researching this right now, the left was even worse in the run-up to World War II.
And they were much worse than anything Bush or any neocon has said, actually, today.
They were openly saying, these people have to be jailed, the America First Committee was indicted twice.
I mean, they were spying on people, and it's just incredible.
I mean, you know, it's like living under a, you know, a dictatorship.
I mean, that's the closest we've ever gotten to having a dictatorship was Roosevelt, the great pirate.
You know, I'm researching that now, because I'm writing a new book.
Well, and yeah, I like your point, basically, that kind of through all the confusion of war comes some clarity, and people start to say, well, wait a minute, now, I always thought that to be conservative meant this, or to be liberal meant that, but now I see that maybe the opposite is true.
Clarity.
I mean, that is actually the key word.
War clarifies a lot of things.
I think David Frum said that in a recent tirade.
Well, I'm really glad to be paraphrasing him.
Well, no, but I mean, he's, you know, he's on the other side, but he recognized he's not stupid, very intelligent.
And he's saying that, look, this war is clarifying things.
And, you know, he's on one side, and we're on the other.
Yeah.
And, well, and again, the reason why is because the situation in Iraq is an absolute disaster by any measure, except maybe the people who planned it.
You know, I looked at the front page of antiwar.com today, 78 killed.
I guess that's kind of a slow day.
Right.
And there's a Shia rebellion.
The Patrick Coburn piece on antiwar.com today quotes the poll results as saying that seven out of 10 of the Shia want us out.
And those are the ones who've basically been more or less supporting the occupation, or at least, you know, passively going along with it.
Right.
I mean, I can't wait till the government that we installed declares war on us.
That'll be the ultimate irony.
And, you know, I mean, what are we going to do when they actually vote to kick us out?
So we'll see.
Well, they probably just won't report it here, you know.
No, they'll report it.
You know, I mean, look, you know, the media is waking up.
Oh, yeah, isn't that new documentary coming on on Wednesday?
It's Bill Moyers.
Oh, yeah, the Selling the War?
Yeah, yeah.
And it's going to be very interesting to see that because, of course, as the editorial director of antiwar.com, we were, you know, I was looking at this stuff as it was unfolding and going, look at the, you know, I mean, what's going on?
So like, we've been, you know, challenging the mainstream media for all these years now, finally, you know, people are being made to answer.
These people have to be made to answer.
All the intellectuals, okay, who assured us it was going to be a cakewalk.
All of the armchair, you know, chair, you know, laptop bombardiers.
How about these guys?
Let's let them confess to their sins.
You know, I'm sick of Andrew Sullivan giving us, you know, lectures about what we ought to do now and blah, blah.
Why should we listen to these guys?
When back then, they were cheering on the war.
They were agitating for war.
Many of them now.
I don't know if you saw the Glenn Greenwald piece about the...
Well, none of these pundits have been fired.
But I was going to say, the war bloggers, the Glenn Greenwald piece about the war bloggers now latching on, or again, I guess latching on to this supposed information that the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the reason we can't find them, they're all in Syria.
Oh, I read that.
That's some crackpot, you know, I mean, they talk about, oh, yeah, Justin Romero's a conspiracy theorist.
What about this?
What, that guy Grabout?
What's his name?
Yeah, something like that.
Yeah, you know, I, you know, I read the column and, I mean, did he, you know, like, spend like, what, 2500 words exposing these kind of, I mean, what are these people smoking?
I don't know.
Anyway, it's pretty aromatic, whatever they're smoking.
You know, it's like the Holy Grail.
Where are these weapons of mass?
They're going to go all over the earth, just systematically.
Oh, they're in Iran.
No, they're in Uzbekistan.
Eventually, we're going to wind up in China looking for them.
I mean, you know, you can't make this stuff up.
It's, you know, it's just bizarro world.
Yeah, we better look out, picking a fight with them, because they actually do have weapons of mass destruction.
There you go.
Oh, who, the Chinese?
Don't pick on them?
Yeah.
Actually, they're too busy making money and being capitalistic.
You know, it's interesting that China is now the most capitalistic laissez-faire country in the world, and they have this kind of one-party dictatorship.
It isn't really a dictatorship anymore, unless you really annoy them, and then, of course, they torture you to death.
Yeah, that's pretty laissez-faire.
Well, I mean, you know, but, you know, as far as the economy is going, I mean, they don't even have labor laws.
And, you know, as far as, you know, like the working conditions, and minimum wage?
I don't think so.
And so there's no more iron rice bowl.
Maybe this is the new model of capitalism, authoritarian capitalism, that the West will learn from.
I hope not.
Anyway.
Hey, let me ask you about the invasion of Africa.
George Bush has announced, let's see, I have it here from...
Oh, he took up Jonah Goldberg on his proposal.
Years ago, Jonah wrote an article about how we ought to invade Africa.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that was our first encounter.
We had a debate over that, and he attacked me in his column, whatever.
And, yeah.
Here's the headline.
The headline is, Bush considering Darfur no-fly zone from theclevelandJewishnews.com.
Really?
Yeah.
Well, how do they know?
I mean, you know, like, it didn't appear in, like, the New York Times or anything?
I mean, is the...
Well, I don't know.
Let's see, the quote is of George Bush from his mouth.
He would push the UN Security Council to prohibit Sudan's government from conducting any offensive military flights over Darfur.
Yeah, well, you know, they're going to give the liberals their intervention.
I mean, look, if I were Bush, that's what I would do.
I'd go, let's shut up, you know, all these people at the Huffington Post for just about five minutes and give them Darfur.
You guys can have Darfur, and we'll take Iraq and maybe Iran.
This seems like a fair trade.
Yeah, I mean, come on.
As long as you're not from any of those countries.
You know, and Bill Maher will shut up.
I mean, that'll be an accomplishment right there.
So, you know, all the Hollywood liberals will, you know, look, I mean, these people think that they can do anything.
They're like gods.
We can solve this crisis.
We can do that.
We can do this.
Meanwhile, the unintended consequences of their actions are just horrific.
You know, like Somalia was devastated by the influx of foreign aid.
It destroyed the economy.
Now they're, you know, at a subsistence level.
I mean, it's just Africa is really a crime.
I mean, if you look at Africa, I mean, look what the Europeans did.
I mean, that is imperialism right there.
That is the product.
Even, you know, like the borders of the countries, I mean, and all the problems it's led to.
It's just a crime against humanity, and now they want to intervene in Darfur to make up for it and cause more trouble.
You know, Joe Giraldi's article that we're running on antiwar.com right now, I guess from last Wednesday, is all about America and Africa and about how the only thing this is going to accomplish is to radicalize more people to Salafist, Wahhabi, crazy, Sunni Islam.
You know, if it could be accepted as a premise that America's foreign policy should somehow be to counter the Al Qaeda types, you know, people who are, you know, as loosely defined as it may be in Bin Laden's network, it seems like everything that we're doing is making them more powerful.
Well, you know, I mean, it seems to me that Somalia is the new Iraq.
And, you know, I read this morning about how many were killed and their bodies rotting in the streets of Mogadishu.
Yeah, a thousand in the last week.
Right.
And so I mean, that seems to be on the same level, and it's really ratcheting up.
So we're escalating the war there.
I mean, the thing is, is that you really can't contain, you know, I've been saying this, you know, I feel like a, you know, a robot on automatic.
But, you know, I'm going to continue to say it is that the great danger of us being in that area of the world in the force that we're, you know, presently engaged in is dangerous because it always spreads.
I mean, you can't, you know, contain it to Iraq.
Now, you can see it, you know, leaking into, you know, like Iran, you know, they're going into Iran, they're going into Somalia.
And what's next, Russia?
Well, and yeah, for people who don't know, America- Oh, yeah, what about Yeltsin?
Well, wait, wait, hang on Russia for a second.
For people who don't know, America backed Ethiopia's, or had Ethiopia basically invade Somalia in late December to install an American United Nations backed government.
And there's been bloody fighting there ever since, that's what we're referring to here.
I mean, look, I don't want to sound, you know, this is going to be not, well, I shouldn't say epic.
I mean, I am just so pessimistic about Africa that I, you know, I mean, nothing surprises me.
I mean, and they are going to use Africa in the most cynical way.
And in fact, you know, if and when the Democrats get back in the White House, I mean, that is going to be the new theater.
Oh, yeah, because they're so caring.
Right, yeah, they're so caring.
I mean, that is really why, right?
Their moms are just as caring as George Bush's.
Yeah, it'll be Hillary Clinton in her pink dress talking about how out of love for the people of Africa, America is dispatching the Marine Corps.
Yeah.
I can see it now, standing right there at George Bush's podium.
So what about Yeltsin?
Yeah, what about Yeltsin?
Yeah, Yeltsin.
Oh, Yeltsin, Putin.
He lived to be 76 years old.
I'm actually surprised because, you know, I mean, he's been drunk since he was like maybe, you know, in the 30s.
I haven't heard any news of him in years.
Is there new news about Yeltsin?
He doesn't.
Oh.
Yeah, Yeltsin, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I had no idea.
Oh, yeah, Yeltsin died.
Probably the news came on about maybe 15 minutes ago, 20 minutes ago.
And his obituaries are already being written.
I'm actually writing a blog entry for Anywhere.com right now about it.
And the thing about Yeltsin is that, you know, because there's all this stuff about Russia.
Russia is evil.
Russia is the new Hitler.
You know, that's what they're implying.
You know, Putin is, I mean, Russia.
You know, the neo-cons hate Arabs, but you know what?
They hate Putin even more.
And so they, I mean, he's a new target.
And Yeltsin's death really kind of underscores the whole roots of even where Putin came from.
Because Yeltsin, who was totally drunk the whole time that he was in charge over there, his clique really looted that country, totally.
I mean, you know, if you talk about the transition from socialism to capitalism being really messed up, I mean, this, and they sort of handed the country to these oligarchs who are nothing but like mafia people.
And so, you know, you've got people like, you know, Berezovsky and this guy, you know, Khodorkovsky.
And they're all, you know, with their private armies.
And it's just, you know, it's very Sopranos.
So rather than trying to invite Russia into the fold and have them join NATO, give them a bunch of welfare to buy a bunch of Lockheed products, and the way they played the game with the rest of the former Soviet states, they decided instead they would just kick Russia while they're down and loot them for as much as they could, all the shock therapy and all that.
And all the money that fled, you know, that they put away in these foreign bank accounts is all very murky.
And this Litvinenko thing, what's that about?
The poisoning, the this, the that?
And it's, I mean, that is just sort of a show of character.
Well, yeah, but now let me stop you there, because regardless of whether it was Berezovsky or Putin's guys or whichever mafia guys were the ones who did that hit on Litvinenko.
I'm not saying you did it.
I'm just saying, look at the story.
Look at this narrative that's being constructed.
Yeah.
Well, but I'm just trying to say, isn't Putin just as much a former KGB gangster as the rest of these guys?
Well, I mean, Putin is kind of like Franco.
It's kind of, you know...
That's not like Putin.
...that you have in Russia, OK?
So you had Yeltsin.
OK, let's go back to Yeltsin.
Yeltsin basically handed the country over to neo-communists, basically, the people who were friendly, you know, with the Communist Party.
They basically took the party property, because, you know, the party owned a lot of property, OK?
It was quote unquote privatized, meaning various gangs seized it or were handed it by the communists, by their friends in the Communist Party, so that the oligarchy is kind of the successor to the Communist Party or would-be successor.
And then there's another would-be successor, and that's the kind of clean-up things, you know, the czarist faction.
And so, you know, Putin won out.
Actually, Putin was the, you know, was handed power by Yeltsin.
And so, but then he turned against those guys anyway.
I mean, if you want to get into the Byzantine, literally, Byzantine politics of Russia.
But I mean, you know, the point is that they're going...
Why are they picking on Putin?
I mean, look at Soviet history, OK?
I mean, how many years ago they were a communist one-party state?
This is where Lenin took power.
What are they now?
They, I mean, there's definitely an improvement there.
And so, and, you know, pressure from the United States does not work.
The reason they're apt to Putin is because he opposes American foreign policy and the whole doctrine of hegemonism, as he made clear in a speech at Munich and, you know, spoke to the Europeans and said that the whole idea of this hyperpower, you know, dominating the world is A, impossible, B, insulting, and it's not going to work.
So that is an open challenge.
So they're after him.
And all these color revolutions, I mean, these guys are getting money from the U.S.
Why is the United States surrounding Putin?
Why are they encircling Russia?
What is this missile defense thing?
Who are they defending against?
What?
You know, like the wounded Russian bear is reeling backward?
No.
They are provoking a conflict deliberately.
And so, I mean, I am not going to, you know, I don't endorse any foreign government or, you know, but I am saying that we ought to stay out of it, well out of it.
And it seems to me that, you know, if we can cooperate with, you know, China, you know, or whatever, I mean, why can't we, you know, just leave the Russians alone?
Yeah, it's not just the morality of dictatorship.
We support dictators everywhere.
There's blowback.
There's political blowback.
If we provoke Russia, there's a nationalist reaction.
Just as there is in Iraq, if we occupy their country, there's a nationalist reaction.
So to stand up against these nationalist tribes is a fool's errand.
Why should we do that?
It's not in our national interest.
And I don't see who it benefits except for, you know, Russian exiles like Boris Berezovsky and, you know, these mafioso, Russian mafioso who have a lot of influence in the West because they have lots of money.
And, you know, they buy media and, anyway.
Let me ask you about Iran.
Lately, the Bush government has been accusing them of supplying sophisticated bombs to Iraqis, even though Reuters reported that the U.S. military found an EFP, you know, fancy IED factory in Iraq.
Never mind that.
They must be coming from Iran.
And by the way, we've been finding Iranian munitions in Afghanistan, too.
And so, therefore, they must have come from the Iranian government to the Taliban sometime very recently somehow.
And it just seems like the rhetoric, perhaps the nuclear threat rhetoric has been wearing off because every time he gets a chance, Mohammed ElBaradei says, ah, come on, they're a decade away from a bomb.
They're just getting started.
They don't know what the hell they're doing.
And so maybe that's wearing off and they've got to try to change the argument that the reason we got to bomb Iran is because they're killing our guys in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What do you think?
Well, I mean, this just underscores the whole point about how, you know, you can't really contain these conflicts.
I mean, we're talking about the war in Iraq.
But there is no war in Iraq.
There's a war in the Middle East.
So we don't just own Iraq.
We are, I mean, either we take the whole thing or we have to get out.
So, I mean, you know, the neocons are saying, you know, the former, that, you know, we ought to take the whole thing.
People like Michael would be.
And we are saying, no, we need to get out.
And then you have the Democrats saying, well, you know, somewhere midway between these two points is what, you know.
But, of course, you know, we're talking about a military conflict.
So you're either in the conflict or you're not in the conflict.
And so either I am right or Michael Levine is right.
And there's no in between.
War is not a halfway thing.
I mean, you know, unless, you know, you want to have a cold war, you know, you could have, you know, sort of a Kennan doctrine.
But no one has yet proposed that.
Now, Ledeen is one thing, but he doesn't really have any police power.
What about John McCain?
He seems to be really the best example of people who want to go ahead and expand the war and make it right.
And I know that you know a lot about John McCain, and I've had a certain antipathy for him for a long time.
So why don't you give us some background?
Most people know John McCain as Mr. Straight Talk.
He's the guy that even if he disagrees with you and even if he knows what he's going to say is unpopular, he tells the truth by golly and he's Straight Talk Express guy.
What about that?
Well, I mean, the Straight Talk Express, you know, is actually true because he, you know, on foreign policy at least, has always been very consistent and he's always said what he would do.
I mean, he is, you know, the original, you know, regime change guy.
I mean, he has said that, and he's spoken out on, I mean, he was in Armenia.
No, he was in Georgia, you know, like attacking the Russians, saying they're expansionists, we need to aid, you know, Georgia.
I mean, there is not one single region of the world that he does not want to intervene in.
I mean, if you go into Google and you type in the phrase, boots on the ground, and then you type in McCain, okay, then what you get is like a lot of stuff because he from Kosovo, he was for Kosovo, there's only a few Republicans.
Not only was he for Kosovo, but he was more for Kosovo than Clinton was, even more than Hillary.
He was the opposition.
I mean, when they reported on it in 1999 on the TV news, they say, well, Clinton says, you know, we have to continue these airstrikes until Milosevic capitulates and yet on the other side of the aisle, some bitter dissent today as John McCain demanded a full scale invasion.
Yeah.
And apparently nobody wanted just to stop intervening over there at all.
But also, you know, Bill Kristol and the neocon.
I mean, you know, Bill Kristol infamously talked about crushing Serb's skull.
Remember that one?
And I'm quoting him that that's what we needed to do.
And so, you know, it was Kristol and, you know, McCain.
Now there's an internal fight, you know, within the neocons over who to support for president.
And of course, the two main contenders are, you know, McCain and Giuliani.
Oh, and by the way, you know, I wrote an article about Giuliani for the new website of Taki Theodoropoulos called Top Drawer.
It's a conservative, anti-diventionist website.
You should go check it out.
TakiMag.com.
And I write, you know, like a column for them twice a month about.
And I did do a thing on Giuliani.
No, I actually did it on his sex life or reported marriages, whatever.
His interesting personal life called Giuliani's Closet.
Did you talk to him in drag?
Did you talk about his marriage to a woman who murders puppies for a living?
I didn't get into the murdering puppy thing.
No, no.
What's that about?
Oh, yeah.
Well, yeah.
If you didn't hear this, I just think this is the greatest that Rudolph Giuliani is the loving, doting husband to a woman whose job it is to experiment or not experiment, but demonstrate medical appliances on puppy dogs.
And then murder them.
She's a saleswoman.
It's not like she's trying to cure cancer or anything.
She's selling medical equipment.
She says, yeah, this is how you, you know, cut the puppy apart with it or whatever.
And then they just throw them all away at the end.
So it's kind of like an Abu Ghraib for pets.
Yeah, exactly.
The whole thing about it in the New York Post.
You have to check it out.
The New York Post.
How would you like that to happen?
Yeah, I know.
But how would you like to have a first lady who murders puppies for a living?
Yeah.
Wow.
She'd make a good vice president.
Yeah, she probably would be a good replacement for Dick Cheney.
The new Cheney.
Also, there was the whole thing about, he was asked whether he thinks if he does become president, whether he thinks he has the power to abduct Americans and hold them indefinitely.
And he said, well, I'm not going to comment on that.
And then he went on to comment on that and said that, yes, in fact, he does reserve the power to abduct Americans and hold them indefinitely.
And he also thinks that even if Congress tries to defund the war, that the president can just go ahead and keep funding the war anyway.
Yeah.
So there's Rudolph Giuliani for you.
He's already declared his openly fascist doctrines before the primaries, even.
Right.
Yeah, it's very Mussolini.
I mean, he's eventually going to be compared to Mussolini, inevitably.
And I mean, he's got the kind of Roman imperial kind of concept of the presidency that's probably, you know, I mean, you know, the first of the American Caesars is going to be, you know, like the first Italian president.
I'm not in favor of that.
Well, you know, I think there's a lot of people, Justin, who are probably thinking that they miss the good old days of Bill and Hillary Clinton and that maybe we'll be better off with them.
Oh, boy.
No, don't say that.
Look, I mean, they are just as authoritarian.
They were going after their political opponents.
They were doing all kinds of sleazy stuff.
These guys, they're all a bunch of crooks.
And so, I mean, I am nostalgic for, say, the days of, I don't know, Eisenhower.
Give me Bob Taft.
Let's go back to that.
I'd settle for Eisenhower.
Yeah, that's a decent compromise, I guess.
And, you know, I think and this kind of goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning about the kind of new realignment going on.
There are a lot of, you know, decent people who are kind of lifelong Republicans who are looking at the current GOP and saying, you know, whatever happened to Ike, who are dying to find a candidate like that, who, you know, to me, obviously, and I'm sure you preferred Bob Taft in the primaries, too, but...
Well, some of my best friends think that Eisenhower was a communist, but I'm kind of neutral on that question.
I'm just kidding.
Is it Ike the Politician by Robert Welch?
Whatever.
Yeah.
Let me ask you one more thing.
What are you looking at this week?
Like, have the AIPAC trial coming up?
More trouble in Iraq?
I have an article in the upcoming American conservative about the AIPAC trial.
And I just want to say one thing about the AIPAC trial.
I didn't put in my American conservative article because it happened after it was actually finished and types that, but that actually, I wouldn't be surprised if the government dropped the whole matter because now the judge has ruled that they cannot have a secret testimony.
Right.
And they cannot have this kind of language where they didn't want to talk about classified information openly.
So they talk about country A, country B, foreign official one, foreign official two, as they did in the original indictment.
Remember, where they didn't even mention Israel.
They talked about, you know, foreign country, you know, one or whatever.
You know, they talked about it in code.
They talked about it during the trial as far as the public access and restrict public access, the government was saying, because it's highly classified information.
And the national security of the United States will be endangered if this stuff comes, you know, like, is public knowledge.
So, but they lost that.
So the government has now got to come out.
Gray mail.
And so now the government's bluff is being called.
Go ahead.
Prosecute us.
And you're going to reveal secrets that you're going to be sorry you revealed.
That is what the defense is saying in May 1.
So I would not be surprised if the government said, okay, forget it.
Now, I'm not for any secret trials.
It says right there in Amendment No.
5, you can't give a man a secret trial and then deprive him of life, liberty, property.
But it's worthy of note that a gag order and a state secret's privilege is perfectly fine for a whistleblower like Sebelle Edmonds, who Philip Giraldi writes about in the newest American Conservative magazine.
But when you're talking about Israeli spies turning over documents about the debate inside the administration about when or whether to bomb Iran, then no, I'm sorry.
And it's the very same judge, of course, Judge Walton.
Right.
But it's I mean, look, so if but there's other I mean, they have this is this is part of a bigger investigation.
And they have all kinds of information on other people, you know, like the Justice Department and these investigators.
So I would not be surprised if they if if the government came back with more indictment of a far wider range of people.
Like, why did Doug Feith resign suddenly?
What was that about?
Key neoconservative head of the Defense Department policy section.
Larry Franklin works for him.
Right.
Larry Franklin worked for him.
And there's a whole group of people who are in there who have been implicated in various stories and in the media, the mainstream media.
And there's been an investigation.
This whole Chalabi thing, Chalabi and Iran espionage and who was, you know, so it's it's all kinds of stuff is going to come out.
Now, if the Justice Department is going to just take their ball and go home, do you have any hope for Henry Waxman and some of the Democrats in Congress getting to the bottom of any of these things?
No, I mean, you know, it's all going to come from the people in the Justice Department and the law enforcement who are saying, look, why are the Israelis being allowed to get away with this?
And so is this a matter of policy or, you know, what?
What's going on here?
And when it's a faction fight within the establishment, too, isn't it?
Well, it's the people whose job it is to protect American national security interests are here in America.
Right.
And so, you know, protecting the soil of the United States from foreign invasion, basically.
I mean, you know, so they're seeing this espionage going on and they want to put a stop to it.
And so, you know, and other people in the government don't, apparently, or, you know, whatever.
And or, you know, they want in court.
I mean, you know, all this stuff is going to come out.
So or maybe not, you know, if the government just, you know, goes home.
But, I mean, I don't think that, you know, the law enforcement professionals are going to, I mean, they will strike back with more indictment.
Well, we'll see.
I'm not holding my breath for that.
I think this whole thing is going to go away.
And I don't think Scooter Libby is going to serve a day in jail for his conviction either.
Well, we can talk about Scooter Libby next time.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah, we've got to leave it there.
We're all out of time.
Thanks very much.
We'll see you next time.
Thanks.