Welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 92.7 in Austin, streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our first guest today is the editorial director of antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo.
He writes the column Behind the Headlines three times a week for antiwar.com and is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right, the Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Welcome back to the show, Justin.
Great to be here.
It's good to have you on the show here.
And you've been writing quite a bit about Barack Obama, especially lately, since it looks like John McCain doesn't have a prayer for the election tomorrow, at least according to all the math I've seen.
Right.
Well, behind the headlines, let's get realistic now.
Let's forget all this hope and psychology and emotion surrounding Obama.
What are the facts, Justin?
Where does Barack Obama stand on, well, let's start with the war in Iraq?
Well, I mean, I think you have to look at, you know, like American foreign policy as a continuous stream.
I mean, it doesn't really matter who is the president, basically.
Continuity is the theme and not radical change.
So in spite of the fact that, you know, we're hearing about change this, change that, whatever, we're not going to get a whole lot of change, though we are going to get some change, as I explain in my column this morning.
Well, and you know, I would tend to think that an election like this, John McCain versus Barack Obama, that actually there's much more difference at stake in this election than usual.
I think probably in the same sense that there was in the year 2000, although people didn't really realize that they were actually going to be getting this entirely different faction of foreign policy people in charge, what you call the cult of power, the neoconservative movement.
And Barack Obama isn't bringing them into the administration, is he?
Well, he actually is.
You have to realize that neocons are not a political party.
They're not Democrats.
They're not Republicans.
They are who they are.
And there are neocons in the Democratic Party, there's no question about that.
If you read my column this morning, you can see that one of the leading contenders for National Security Advisor, Dennis Ross, who served under Reagan, Bush II, Clinton, is sort of this hyper-partisan, well, no, I don't really mean hyper-partisan, I mean sort of, kind of the opposite, above-party-type neocon, so he's a registered Democrat and has endorsed Obama.
He's involved with all the usual suspects.
He was a co-founder of AIPAC's think tank, which is called WINAP, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
He's up to be the National Security Advisor, and his views on the Middle East are typically neocon-ish.
But there is a difference, and the difference is this.
Obama wants to listen to all points of view.
I mean, he's the king, he's the messiah, and then we're all sort of surrounding him, saying, well, what about this, and well, what about that, and then, you know, like King Solomon, he sits there and decides whether to cut the baby in half or not.
He apparently wants to hear all views, so it looks like Anthony Zinni, General Zinni, the trenchant critic of neocons, is up also for this post.
Well, and when he's talked about his, the shape of a bipartisan cabinet, he's mentioned people like Richard Lugar and people like that, and these are what we call the realist faction among the Republicans, right?
Right.
And also Chuck Hagel for, I wasn't going to say Minister of Defense, but Secretary of Defense.
Yeah.
He's even talked about keeping Robert Gates on.
Right.
And so, I mean, that just underscores my point, and that is, continuity rather than change is the overarching theme of American foreign policy, and, you know, you can see how each president took, you know, took off where the other one left off.
There hasn't been a whole lot of change, except rhetorically, you know, Clinton intervened all over the world in the name of humanity, Bush, too, intervened all over the world in the name of the war on terrorism, but the effect was the same.
Well, do you think if it had been Al Gore that he would have gone ahead and accepted the next neocon project and invaded Iraq the way Bush Jr. did?
Oh, I think so, yes.
Yeah, I do.
You know, I think that 9-11 was such an unhinging moment that I think, you know, the emotional Al Gore would have certainly been swayed by that, but the one difference is that the neocons had their whole apparatus already ensconced in the GOP.
I mean, it's clear that the neocons have more political influence in the GOP.
After all, John McCain is their candidate.
They now control the Republican Party, or what's left of it.
So after the election, they, of course, there's going to be a bloodbath, and there's going to be some questioning about, well, did they destroy us, and now where are they?
Well, it's funny to see, too, people like David Frum are kind of trying to get out ahead of the pack and argue that the reason that the Republican Party's falling apart is because they haven't embraced neoconservatism.
There's still parts of plain old conservatism in there somewhere, or fiscal conservatism or something that's got to be abandoned, and embrace full-scale neoconism, then we'll love them again.
It's unbelievable.
I mean, it's kind of reminiscent of communists who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, were saying, well, the reason it fell is because they weren't communistic enough.
It's just, it just is amazing to me that someone can even take themselves seriously and still say that.
But of course, what else can he say?
I mean, here's somebody who purged all kinds of people from the conservative movement in his infamous article on patriotic conservatives, and now today is whining that he's being purged because he isn't following the party line.
Well, who established that tradition?
He's certainly not handing the conservative movement back to you guys that he denounced back then.
Well, I mean, you know, I was mistakenly including him there as a conservative, and of course I'm not.
I'm libertarian.
But whatever.
Accuracy was never a neocon virtue anyway.
Yeah, certainly not one of David Frum's.
No, certainly not.
All right, well, now, so you do mention in this article here, or maybe it was the last one, I think it's this one, the limits of change here today at antiwar.com slash Justin, you talk about, well, look what happened to Colin Powell.
It's a link over to the Washington Post where he tells Bob Woodward that Doug Fyfe and those guys created a separate government, Fyfe's Gestapo office, he called it.
And that was a pretty big split, not that Powell didn't, you know, go on TV and tell every lie that they wanted him to tell, but that really was a pretty big split inside the administration in the first term, right?
Oh, right.
I mean, look, this is the neocon method.
And it's, you know, it's analogous to the method of any parasite.
Actual physical parasite will invade the host, take over all the body functions, and then destroy the host.
So that's what we're going to see tomorrow, destruction of the host.
And of course, we've already seen the parasites leaving the desiccated husk of the GOP.
I mean, here you have Ken Cakewalk Adelman actually endorsing Obama.
These people have no shame.
I mean, here they destroyed the GOP, and yet they're blaming, I don't know who, President Bush, anybody other than themselves.
Of course, anybody who read Antiwar.com, and my column in particular, going back two and three years.
I mean, how many columns did I write saying, GOP, RIP, you know, the end of the GOP, etc., etc.?
We all know what's going to happen tomorrow, and you know, now it's time to drive home the lesson of why it happened.
You know, because of course, now we're going to have Obama is going to be in power.
So this means that, you know, the Democrats are going to be defending interventionism and making excuses for Obama, and saying, well, we have to have a surge in Afghanistan, and blah, blah, blah, and so it's going to be role reversal.
Remember back in the good old days when, you know, all the Republicans in the House of Representatives, you know, were demanding an end to the war?
Yeah.
Right.
Remember, they even sued Bill Clinton for violating the War Powers Act and bombing Serbia.
Right.
Boy, those were, well, they were just kidding.
I mean, really, but still, it seemed like good old days.
Hey, listen, speaking of this whole left-right thing and the neoconservatives, I want to play a little bit of audio for you here.
This one begins with Dr. Ron Paul speaking, and then Michael Ledeen takes over.
This is from the movie World War IV, A Letter to the President.
That's about, runs about half a minute here.
They're not conservative.
Matter of fact, most of those who came over to be called neoconservatives into the Republican Party came from the radical left, from the Democratic side.
The word was invented by Irving Kristol, right, who said a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality.
There are many of us, Richard Perle being the greatest example, and I think basically we still think of ourselves as Scoop Jackson Democrats.
Right.
Why are people who advocate revolution called conservative?
Right.
I don't know.
Beats me.
So it sounds to me, Justin, like Michael Ledeen, Michael Ledeen and Richard Perle and the guys are, well, still card-carrying Democrats.
Maybe they'll be right at home and fit right in the new administration somewhere.
Oh, sure.
Joshua Muravchik, who is a prominent neocon and writes for Commentary Magazine and is with the American Enterprise Institute, is still a registered Democrat.
He supported Clinton in his first term.
You know, the neocons, as Ron Paul said, started out on the left, and many of them stayed in the Democratic Party.
Well, not many, but some.
The Democratic Party is not going to give us anything new, and they're not going to give us a whole lot of change in foreign policy.
But what they are going to do, I think, in an Obama regime, is at least the other side will have some voice.
I mean, you have to realize how Obama came to this position.
And you can make the argument that it was his anti-war position, his opposition to the Iraq war, that really gave him a nomination.
I mean, that is what defeated Hillary.
He kept hitting her over the head with that, she refused to apologize for her position, so he won.
And that's why.
Of course, after a while, it became more than that.
But that gave him the initial surge.
After that, he was unstoppable.
So there's going to be a lot of his grassroots supporters who are not going to be able to swallow the news that they're hearing from Pakistan, from Afghanistan.
You know, Rachel Maddow, the other day, was interviewing Obama.
It wasn't a softball interview, I have to give her that.
She was kind of fawning sometimes, but she did ask some hard questions.
And one of them was, well, why isn't the Afghan war going to turn into the same thing as the Iraq war?
Certainly on a much bigger scale.
And I mean, he didn't really answer her question.
But I think it's a question that many Obama-ites will be asking in the months and years to come.
That is, if Obama does win.
It's something they should have been asking themselves all this time.
I mean, he's been abundantly clear about his position on these wars.
I mean, even on Iraq, he says, well, we'll get all our combat troops out, but we'll have to leave tens of thousands to protect the new embassy that's bigger than Vatican City.
And we'll have to keep our 58 bases and enough troops to protect them.
And of course, we'll need counterterrorism forces we'll have to leave inside the country.
And then, of course, you know, we'll need enough army troops to provide force protection for our counterterrorism forces.
So yeah, by the end of the day, we're looking at 150,000 troops, what we've got right now.
We just won't call them combat forces anymore.
Yeah.
I mean, most people don't follow the details.
Most voters are just like ordinary people are saying, well, he's against the war.
And plus, people vote against people.
They don't.
I mean, most of the votes, you know, by going for Obama are not really for Obama.
They are against the GOP.
Right.
And the past four years.
And of course, Obama realizes that.
And that's why he's trying to tie Mr. McCain to President Bush.
So let's let's pretend, Justin, for just a moment here and have a little bit of hope.
And let's say, for example, just hypothetically, that Barack Obama actually, you know, I don't know, reads antiwar dot com and he knows better.
And he decides that this guy, Dennis Ross, is going to be the deputy assistant secretary of sitting in the basement and doing nothing.
And he's going to listen to the generals and he's of the world while he's actually the president of the United States.
What difference would that make in terms of the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan, Pakistan, if we count the neocons out and we just stick with your typical run of the mill realist imperialists?
Well, you know, it would make a tremendous difference.
I mean, you have to realize what's going on in the world right now.
There's a tremendous campaign to target Iran.
The Israel lobby and, you know, the other sections of the war party.with the Israel lobby taking the lead is, you know, are making a tremendous effort to drag us into war with Iran.
I mean, that was the whole point, the whole Iraq intervention.
And they want to get rid of Syria also.
They want to complete this operation with a lot of political pressure on Obama, on Democrats.
If he resists, it'll be a tremendous defeat for the war party.
I mean, this is really an opening.
You know, you talk about hope and hope.
I mean, hope is really important to people, especially to Americans.
I mean, they really believe that we live in a democracy.
They really believe that they can actually personally have an impact on what their country does in their name or they want to believe that they have to believe that because if they don't believe that, then they because then they'd have to do something about it.
But what could they do aside from vote and write their congressman, start a revolution?
I don't know what in their spare time.
Look, people need some kind of a hope.
That's why Obama is going to score, in my view, a landslide tomorrow.
You know, it's going to be like 1964, you know, when Barry Goldwater was buried and LBJ triumphs.
And of course, it could be like LBJ, whereas, you know, since he won, he did what he accused Goldwater of plotting to do, and that is escalating the Vietnam War.
Presidents often campaign, you know, one way and then they turn around and do the opposite, like George W. Bush, who pledged a humble foreign policy and then led us to the very heights of hubris.
Right.
And now, you know, go back to 1964.
That wasn't the neocons.
That was the good old fashioned realist imperialists running that disaster.
Well, actually, that's not true.
But yeah, yeah.
I mean, you have the same people.
It's the same people.
Scoop Jackson and all the Scoop Jackson Democrats and Hubert Humphrey, you're too young to remember that.
But all these people, I mean, that's where the neocons came from.
And then as the Democrats became the antiwar party, the Scoop Jackson wing emigrated to the right.
So that that's where we get them.
So as far as the difference goes, then, in terms of regime change in Syria and Iran and that kind of thing, you think that if Obama's listening to Zinni and people like that, that won't happen?
Yes, it won't happen if you listen to people like Zinni.
But, you know, I think the chances of that are minuscule to non-existent.
There is an anti-interventionist faction, but I think that that they don't have a lot of leverage.
One thing about Obama is that he's very indecisive.
He's calm, he's cool, he's collected, but I think he's just very, very cautious to a fault and he doesn't want to make the wrong move.
And so for long periods of time, he's going to be immobile.
But certainly he's not going to take a radical stance.
You know, in today's context, radical means let's start minding our own business.
I mean, that's a radical proposition right there.
Yeah.
Well, and in terms of domestic politics, with the skin color and his name and all the smears about him being a Muslim and all these things.
So why is Muslim being a smear anyway?
I'm sorry.
Why is being a Muslim?
You know, I mean, what if he is a Muslim?
Oh, why is that?
OK, I don't know.
I'm just saying, you know, this is the kind of thing that it's supposed to amount to a smear anyway.
It's being used against him.
And and the thing is that what it what it amounts to is once he's in power, assuming he wins tomorrow, once he's in power come next year, all the pressure will be on him to prove what a hawk he is rather than to take that anti-war mandate that you spoke of earlier.
Well, right.
And then there's also this he's not going to be in power if he wins after tomorrow.
He's only going to be in power after he is sworn in, which is in January.
Right.
So Bush still has, you know, we could have a December surprise.
Well, this is something that was talked about actually earlier in the summer, wasn't it, that perhaps Bush would wait to see whether Obama or McCain would win and if McCain won, he would put off the war because he could trust McCain to do it.
But if Obama won, then maybe Bush would go ahead and start bombing Iran in order to make sure.
Right.
And you see, this whole Afghan surge thing is all very suspicious.
I think that, you know, Obama has already made the decision to go along with the program that is the war party's program.
If you look at my column today where I talk about how Dennis Ross has signed on to this new plan being put out by something called the Bipartisan Policy Group or something like that, which talks about it's written in the form of recommendations to the incoming president.
And it talks about how we could bring in more troops into the region under the rubric of an Afghan Pakistani surge, while actually meaning to put pressure on Iran.
And we could outflank them that way and attack from the east.
So, I mean, that is actually talked about and Ross has signed on to this.
And then they even talk about putting U.S. troops in Georgia.
I was astonished to read that.
I think, yes, you know, we can put troops in Georgia and attack from the north.
Well, that was something that Arnaud de Burgrave had written about a few months back in August, where he said that they were that the Israelis had been working on airstrips there in hopes of launching an attack on Iran from Georgia.
It's just right there to the north.
If people picture the Caspian Basin, I know everybody has really detailed geography in their head of that region of the world, right?
It's just a hop, skip and a jump from north Iran.
Right.
And also Azerbaijan, which is next door and is also a U.S. ally, could also be used.
I'm not sure how many troops we actually even have there.
I know there are U.S. troops in Georgia.
I don't know about Azerbaijan, but I mean, it looks like something is going to happen.
Of course, Obama has already promised that something is going to happen in Afghanistan.
And in Pakistan, which he wants to invade.
Well, here's one thing, though, just, you know, we've been talking about how the war party wants to bomb Iran for years now.
And the last story in The Guardian, the one after the amber light where Bush told the Israelis get ready and then maybe after the election kind of thing, the next one that came out in The Guardian said that Bush had told the Israelis no.
And there was one overriding reason, the danger to our soldiers in Iraq.
And this is something that we've been talking about at antiwar.com for years now, that if America bombs Iran, all our guys are surrounded by the bottom brigade in Iraq who were created by the Quds Force and they will be surrounded by people who will immediately become enemies.
And we could have some kind of massive slaughter.
William S. Lind wrote how to lose an army, dig into Iraq and then attack Iran.
And this was the reason that George Bush, apparently in The Guardian, told the Israelis, no, that's it, you know, veto.
And so that hasn't changed.
That's not going to change.
It seems like that is a deal breaker unless President Bush or Obama are willing to lose maybe 10,000 Americans, maybe more.
See, but what you're missing is that maybe Obama is actually going to carry out a campaign pledge to get us out of Iraq as a prelude to war with Iran.
What about that?
It's possible.
Well, it's not just possible, it makes perfect sense.
You know, the big debate, you know, between John McCain and Obama in terms of foreign policy is, which battlefield are we going to fight on?
McCain says, Iraq.
And Obama says, well, let's go eastward.
It looks like we're sort of drawing down in Iraq anyway.
And it, you know, it looks like the Iraqis are sick of us anyway.
And they're saying, well, it's time for you to go.
And so how convenient.
It looks like those soldiers are not going to be that endangered.
Perhaps they'll, you know, like they'll just move them eastward, you know, into Afghanistan rather than even bringing them home.
Do you think that the realists are any less obsessed with Russia than the neocons?
It seems like the Brzezinski faction has kind of criticized the Iraq war all along from the point of view that, no, the war was in Central Asia, taking over all the stands and encircling Russia.
This Iraq war is a big distraction from what we're supposed to be doing here.
There's the realists and then there's Brzezinski.
I mean, he's Polish.
He's a Polish nationalist.
He hates Russia.
And yet you have the people over at the National Interest who are not anti-Russian and they're realists.
So realist is a very vague term.
You know, neocon is much more precise.
So it depends on who you're talking about.
You know, I think a lot of Republican realists do not want a confrontation with Russia.
And I think that, you know, you're going to see that, you know, Obama is going to be much more confrontational with Russia than Bush was.
After all, there's a reason why George Soros is supporting Obama.
And all those millions coming into the Obama campaign, you know, I wonder how much of it is coming from Russian exiles who are giving to the Obama campaign in the hopes that they'll get something out of it.
Is there any real reason that you think that George Bush has been less bad than possible on this issue?
Is it just because of how badly he's faring politically that he can only screw up so much at a time?
Well, I think that he's got his plate full right now in, you know, Iraq.
And of course, it has been full for, you know, for quite some time.
So we did support Georgia.
You know, I think that he was waiting for the next administration to really take on Russia.
And of course, Dick Cheney was not very shy about this.
I mean, he was very out in the open.
Russia must be confronted.
Russia's an aggressor.
I mean, he even gave a whole speech about it.
Talked about blackmailing through, you know, the use of oil when actually the Russians were just, you know, like reverting to the market price of oil rather than on the old Soviet system where they had subsidized oil prices for their Ukrainian and other Eastern European satellites.
And then they went back to the market price.
So this was blackmail instead of just capitalism.
It's funny.
Yeah, well, conservatives don't know anything about economics, obviously.
All right.
So you wrote this thing in Talkies Top Drawer, Talkies Magazine, endorsing Nader.
I like the title.
Naderism in defense of liberty is no vice.
So why would an old right libertarian like yourself endorse Ralph Nader for president, Justin?
Two elections in a row, no doubt.
Two elections, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
I did endorse him last time also.
Well, the reason, as I explain in my article, is to really, well, it's a forward looking kind of a stance because, I mean, look who the new enemy is.
It's the interventionists of the left.
And we're going to be seeing a lot more of this, you know, the tough Democratic realists, whatever.
And then, of course, you've got Obama, you know, endorsing the bailout and then, you know, saying, well, you know, I'm the candidate of a common man, blah, blah, blah, blah.
When actually he's the candidate of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street, which is subsidizing his campaign to an unprecedented extent.
Millions upon millions of dollars being funneled into the Obama campaign by Wall Street.
And, of course, they're getting something for their money.
Now, who is the one candidate who is talking about the bailout and saying that, quote, small business is the only capital with the left in America because it's the only business that's allowed to fail?
It's Nader.
And there's another reason for the Nader vote.
And that is that Nader makes the Democrats apoplectic.
I mean, you mentioned Ralph Nader to a partisan Democrat and their eyes roll back in their head and steam comes out their ears.
That's because he reminds Democrats that they're really, you know, the party of the elite rather than the party of of the people, as they claim to be.
You know, in 2004, you called him old right Nader.
How's that?
Well, I mean, you have to remember, well, actually, you may not remember it because you probably don't know it or actually your your listeners don't know it.
But Ralph Nader's first published article appeared in The Freeman, which was the magazine and is the magazine of the Foundation for Economic Education, which is today edited by my friend Shelton Richmond.
In the article, he attacked a public housing project that was being erected in his hometown of Winstead, Connecticut.
And he was talking about, you know, how the people of Winstead didn't want it there.
And yet the federal bureaucrats were imposing it on them.
And he talks about the struggle against the housing project and how it took three referenda to stop this project.
Three.
The bureaucrats were kind of relentless, but the people were even more relentless and they won in the end.
Nader has always been this little guy versus the big guy kind of a guy, right?
And not always business.
Sometimes the state as well.
Well, but yeah, I mean, Scott, today, where is the line between big business and the state?
Show me.
We've nationalized the banks.
Yeah, well, I think the oil industry.
So what's left?
Yeah, well, if you're small enough, you're still allowed to fail.
I mean, I think he's got it exactly right there.
Yeah.
And he does call it he doesn't just call it capitalism.
He calls it corporatism and state capitalism and all these things and seems to identify the mix of those two things as the biggest danger.
You see, I'm for Nader because he understands who the enemy is.
I don't necessarily, you know, endorse his his programs, but he's he's never going to get in there anyway and implement them.
His value is that he underscores who the bad guys are and who the good guys are.
And that's the important thing in politics to know your enemies and also your friends.
Well, and as you say in this article, too, this guy has integrity and he's proven it.
He's not just some Barack Obama rock star sold to us.
He's he's a man of principle, even where you disagree with him.
You disagree with him.
It's clear that he's not, you know, BS in us.
He says exactly what it is he thinks.
Hell, he called out John McCain for helping to his dad and then helping endorse a book covering up the attack on the USS Liberty last week.
Did you see that?
Yes.
Yes, I did.
I did.
And what's the last time that was brought up in a presidential election?
Never, I guess.
Oh, it's charming.
You know, I thought his open letter to the media was kind of interesting, where he's saying, well, how can we not covering my campaign?
But what he didn't mention in his letter was that, well, of course, the reason that, you know, the media is not covering his campaign at all, although he may get over a million votes, is due to the fact that they are in the tank for Obama.
Yeah.
I mean, this is really the dangerous thing with the new Obama administration coming in.
And that is that you have the media which loves him and you have Chris Matthews going, oh, this is historic.
Oh, blah, blah, blah.
You know, a black man is in there and blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, and and they're looking at the typical white people only at the color of his skin.
But they aren't looking at what he's going to be doing or they aren't thinking about it thinking, well, he's going to do all the Democratic thing.
I mean, well, correctness rings so hollow when they completely ignore Cynthia McKinney, the first black woman to be on enough ballots that she could conceivably win in the electoral college.
They give her no coverage whatsoever.
Not that I'm a big McKinney fan, but if this is all about political correctness, where's the McKinney coverage?
Well, but see, it's fun about that.
And of course, I think that she's being ignored rightly, rightly.
So she's a major flake.
You know, she's talking about how, you know, who is really behind the 9-11 terrorist attacks and she's kind of strange.
And plus, she won't debate anybody.
She was invited to the third party debate.
She refused to show up, which is kind of odd.
And even among the third party folks, her stock is quite low.
I'm going to come in behind Chuck Baldwin.
Yeah, well, tell us, by the way, what do you think of Chuck Baldwin and of Bob Barr here real quick to wrap up, Justin?
Well, you know, I think the whole tiff between them is the reason that I didn't endorse either of them.
I think the Constitution Party, which is Chuck Baldwin's party, is a little too eccentric to be the vehicle for liberty.
I mean, you have to be a Christian, a Bible-believing Christian.
To, you know, be a candidate or a member, which I, you know, and there was a big debate in the party over whether Mormons qualify.
I mean, that is the discussion that I'd rather not get involved in.
Yeah, I understand that.
And, you know, what they'd make of me, I don't know.
Well, there is really something charming, though, isn't there, about a right-wing Christianist party that is anti-war?
Well, there is, but only for about three minutes.
And then, look, you know, the War Party and, you know, the power elite love the fact that there is no party on the right that is anti-interventionist and has any kind of credibility.
And, of course, you know, divisions are celebrated.
This whole idea, I mean, why there's a separate Constitution Party and a separate Libertarian Party is totally beyond me.
I just do not understand it.
That's another reason I, you know, endorsed Nader, because, of course, you know, the anti-war right is totally ineffective politically.
I mean, I'm a great supporter of Ron Paul, but he's not running except in Montana for some odd reason.
And so I'm driven into the arms of Ralph Nader, what can I say?
So to finish up this interview here, we're already a couple minutes over time.
I want to get kind of back to this whole thing about the idea of Barack Obama versus who he really is.
You know, I was introduced to this guy.
I don't watch political conventions.
I miss the whole thing in 2004 where he did so well or whatever.
I was introduced to this guy in, I guess, 2005, 2006 by the TV telling me that he was a rock star, that I loved him, that I didn't care what he said.
I only cared that he was saying something.
And boy, let's all swoon together and just fall in love with this Obama character.
That was how I first heard his name, that he was supposed to be this beacon of light in the sky or something, as opposed to just some politician.
Well, I think you have to understand, you know, the appeal of Barack Obama is entirely personal.
The guy already acts like he hasn't been the president of the United States for the past year.
I'm sure he acted that way in high school.
You know, he's yeah, you know, he's one of those guys.
His whole demeanor seems, you know, like created for the presidential persona.
You could tell early on that he was going to be the Democratic candidate.
I wrote about this, I think, over a year ago in a column called The Year of the Insurgent, when everyone was saying, oh, yes, Hillary Clinton has it in the bag, blah, blah, blah.
Well, no, she doesn't have it in the bag.
And you could tell that there was this current of power in him.
And he does.
He's a very charismatic, you know, he's a great speaker and a very dangerous man.
Yeah, see, I think that's really dangerous, too.
I keep reading these articles about all the hope that's been inspired in all these regular people and all these folks who haven't voted in decades, and now they're going to vote again and they finally believe again.
Oh, no, we're going to have a bunch of people fall back in love with the U.S. government just because the guy in the chair.
Well, you're going to have a lot of liberals making all these apologies for whatever he does and overlooking what he's doing overseas.
You have a media that he's going to have in the palm of his hand and they're not going to be looking for bad stuff.
So that means that our job at Antiwar.com is going to be doubly hard because the liberals will desert us and the mainstream media will also desert us.
So that we'll have to look all that harder for the truth about American foreign policy.
And so it's going to be a very, very tough road to hoe and I am not looking forward to it at all.
Yeah, you know, the worst part, too, is going to be all the right wingers coming around and pretending they're our friends again.
Well, no, no, that's fine.
Anybody who comes around is our friend.
The thing is, is that we talk to them and they talk back and it's, you know, I'm for it.
I wonder, you know, for the conservatives out there, since the philosophy has been reduced basically simply to leader worship at this point, who are they going to set up as their new demigod?
There's going to be a day of reckoning and it's going to be the day after tomorrow.
And the thing is, is that there's going to be my book is going to sell thousands of, God, no kidding.
But, you know, the message in reclaiming the American right, the lost legacy of the conservative movement, which was just reissued, is even more important and relevant.
People are going to be examining the foreign policy of interventionism as a necessarily conservative idea.
There's going to be a lot of debate and the neocons are going to get theirs.
So that is actually the silver lining in this dark cloud of an election.
And that is that, you know, the neocons are going to get their comeuppance.
Yeah.
It seems like every time they switch back and forth from conservative to liberal party in power and the people switch off back and forth between being pleased and displeased, we get the few refugees that get shaken out and stick by their principle when the change comes.
So hopefully we'll get some good ones this time.
Eventually we'll have a majority.
Yeah.
Sooner or later.
Well, we got Glenn Greenwald on our side.
We know he's going to stay good.
Well, we'll see.
Oh, come on.
Have a little faith.
No, no.
Glenn is great.
I like Glenn.
All right, everybody.
That's Justin Raimondo.
He is the editorial director of Antiwar.com.
It's Antiwar.com slash Justin for behind the headlines.
The book is Reclaiming the American Right, the Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Thanks for your time today on the show.
Thanks.
Bye.
