04/27/07 – Scott McConnell – The Scott Horton Show

All right, everybody, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our first guest today is Scott McConnell.
He's the editor of the American Conservative magazine.
Welcome to the show, Scott.
Well, thanks for having me.
It's good to talk to you.
I'm a big fan of your magazine.
I'm not a conservative myself, more of a libertarian.
But your magazine, the American Conservative, has been anti-war since 2002, is that right?
Well, it's essentially the reason why we started the magazine is we could see that this war was coming and knew that there were a fair number of conservatives who were opposed to it before it started, and we wanted to be able to give them a voice.
Well, now, everybody knows that conservatives, or maybe even conservatism, just means support for the Republican Party.
So why would a conservative be opposed to the war in Iraq?
Well, I have to admit that that's a little bit what the Republican Party has come and what conservatism has become in the age of Bush.
But there were conservative tendencies before that were not crazy.
I think I'll point to Dwight Eisenhower, who's probably my favorite president of the post-war era, and Ronald Reagan, who won a great bloodless victory.
And I think that you can find a good thing to say about Richard Nixon.
And so there are a lot of people who are conservative on most domestic issues who don't have insane foreign policy ideas, and our magazine has, in a way, started to represent them.
I see.
When I spoke with William S. Linde, he said that all the real conservatives opposed the war.
It was only the neo-cons and the people who didn't really know any better who had followed them.
I think that's essentially correct.
But I struggle with this myself as to whether to acknowledge that our Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and all the tub thumpers of the Republican Party who are for perpetual war are they conservatives, because most of the people in the country, they have the label now.
And I think people who have real conservative sentiments or sensibilities know that if you invade another country, you're probably going to have a nationalistic reaction against it.
And the idea that you can just go into another completely distant culture and remake the society according to maybe some desirable model of Western democracy is just sociologically unrealistic.
And I think that realism about human society and human nature is a core conservative concept.
And it's pretty far removed from neo-conservatism and the sort of Bushite, neo-conservative cheerleading type.
Now a few years ago, I guess a couple of different times, I spoke with Jude Wanniski.
And he told me he was a neo-paleocon.
He was actually originally a neo-con, a left winger who had become a conservative supply sider type, and yet at the end of the Cold War, he broke his allegiance or had a falling out I guess with the rest of the neo-cons and sided with Pat Buchanan and the paleo-conservatives, making him a neo-paleocon.
Is that the same case with you?
That's pretty close.
I was not, I'm not a supply sider or not an anti-supply sider, but I was a neo-con.
I was an ex-liberal, I voted for George McGovern, I worked for Jimmy Carter.
And then sometime in the late 70s when I was in my 20s, commentary magazine began to speak to me.
And within a few years I was writing for it and I had probably a 15-year kind of career in neo-conservative institutions and I was a Cold Warrior.
And I supported more, I'd lived in New York City and I supported more conservative domestic policies which meant supporting Giuliani and I don't actually regret that as a New Yorker.
But to the end of the Cold War, there was sort of a time to say to pause and as Gene Kirkpatrick, who was also a neo-conservative, said, well, you know, now we can become a normal country again.
And the thing is that the hardcore neo-cons did not want to become a normal country again and for a variety of reasons, you know, wanted the United States to be the world's only superpower and the world's hegemony and, you know, thinking that nothing that goes on in the whole world is outside of its domain.
Now, for the average person driving around who, you know, perhaps doesn't read National Review and Commentary and American Conservative and keep track of all these debates inside, you know, the conservative thinkers but are just, you know, regular folks, what would you tell them in terms of the importance of the paleo-conservative movement?
You know, how big is it overall compared to the Sean Hannity followers out there?
I think it's potentially much bigger than it is and it requires political or electoral leadership to put it on the map and there's no figure right now.
I mean, Pat Buchanan, who I think raised this flag almost a little bit before the time was right, that was right for him, but he did quite well in the Republican primaries in the 90s.
I think always coming in second and getting that 30, 35% of the votes.
If there's no figure like that, I mean, I have a great regard for Ron Paul, but there's no figure right now who seems to be able to draw well in the Republican Party.
As an intellectual tendency, I think paleoconservatism is potentially very popular.
I think it makes a lot of sense.
I think it corresponds to a lot of people's instincts who don't want rapid change, don't want America to try to rule the world, are okay with, are pro-capitalists, but maybe have a full feeling that their lives are too much run by or that sort of hedge funds, Wall Street, are like two dominant forces in the economy.
There's a lot of things that feed into it.
Are fine with a modest degree of immigration, but think that maybe we're transforming ourselves too rapidly.
I mean, those are all paleoconservative and don't like political correctness or the kind of national breastfeeding that follows like Don Imus' thing any more than anybody else.
Those are sort of paleoconservative instincts, and I think that's a pretty big slice of American opinion.
Now, besides Ron Paul, is there anyone else running for president for the Republican nomination that you see anything to appreciate about?
I would like Chuck Hagel to run.
He's certainly not a perfect fit on all my issues, but he's a pretty good one and I think a pretty compelling figure, but I also recognize that right now, Republicans are almost defining themselves by support for the war in Iraq, and so Hagel doesn't show particularly well on the polls.
What's your cover story in this month's American Conservative magazine, War Party?
Yes.
It's, I think, a pretty terrific piece by Jim Antle, who points out that the current Republican Party is willing to give up almost all the traditionally Republican issues, whether about small government or about abortion or about cultural conservatism in support.
It doesn't matter your position, any of those, as long as you're pro-war, and it's sad but true.
It's almost a madness of crowds kind of phenomenon.
And to get to the war that they're supporting at all costs, in your article, Algeria, the model in this month's American Conservative magazine, it's available at amconmag.com, you say that the situation in Iraq has been compared to Germany, right, it's always 1939 to the neo-cons in the run-up to war, and it's also compared by them when they talk about Islamofascism, it becomes a metaphor for the Soviet Union, this eternal power that must be contained forever, and of course you say the American people, their easiest comparison, my easiest comparison, is the Vietnam War.
But you say that there's another model for what's happening in Iraq that should be taken into account, and that's the experience of the French in Algeria.
Well, I think there's a lot of parallels to America and Iraq.
Mostly it has a Christian country trying to occupy a Muslim country phenomenon, and you have a war, a really dirty war, in which terrorism is a central component of the way it is fought.
And the debate, a lot of the internal debate in France is sort of similar to what goes in on the United States, particularly the way the French talked themselves into believing that staying in Algeria was closer to France than Iraq is to the United States, and it was a colony of France, and there were a million Frenchmen who were a resident there.
But they sort of talked themselves into believing that staying in Algeria was a matter of national survival, and of course it wasn't, because France left Algeria and survived just fine, thank you very much.
That's the line in the article that I underlined, about them convincing themselves that somehow they were actually internally going to fall apart as somehow they lost this territory overseas.
And a lot of the same, I mean, then as now, we're talking about the 1950s, if you talk about something as Hitlerian, it's like the gold standard in evil, for quite understandable reasons.
So there was the same, it's almost they developed the concept of Islamofascism as a justification for their maintaining colonial control over Algeria.
That really is what they called it.
Yeah, well, they called it fascist and Hitlerite.
I think the actual term Islamofascism is a new coinage, but clearly they were using that direction, and it was a drama of worldwide significance.
And probably, if you looked in 1955, 1956, three-fourths of the French people who wrote and thought about politics in a serious way, were completely agreed with that rendition of what was going on.
Which is not to say that the Algerian nationalists were really great guys or democrats or anything like that, but they didn't pose any cosmic threat to France.
You even write about it, part of this was reminiscent of the situation in the West Bank and Gaza, I think, or at least from 20 years ago or something, where all these people are basically living under apartheid and the assumption is that, oh, they don't mind it, it's fine, and there's not going to be any consequences, and then lo and behold, here comes the Intifada.
Yes.
It's very similar, I mean, in fact, more similar than the Americans, because they're about the same percentage of Israelis living on the West Bank, as there may have been French in Algeria, with a population of about 10%, and with their own special schools and roads and living in a sort of an apartheid situation and thinking that this was the natural order of things.
And they posed, I mean, in the same way that the settlers in Israel are an important electoral block in Israeli politics that seems to be able to affect veto power over any peace negotiations, the French Algerian settlers in France were like an important lobby in French politics and were always able to stymie any French governmental move to negotiate its way out of Algeria, at least until the end.
Now, that's an interesting parallel there.
And also, you say in your article that George Bush has been seen with this book under his arm, now nobody knows if he really reads books or not, but at least he's been seen posing with one at Photo Opportunities, and you say also that Ariel Sharon was a big fan of reading about this experience of the French.
Yeah, there's several books.
The one book I mentioned was Alistair Horne's Savage War of Peace, which is like a very long and exhaustive and very good description of the Algerian war.
It's actually not the only, I read quite a bit in the piece and I probably should have referenced other books, because there's a lot of interesting Algerian war scholarship.
But Alistair Horne's book, which was really written in the mid-70s, I think has been reissued twice and most recently in a new edition that came out just in the last several months, and it's on George Bush's reading list.
And he talks about reading it and he actually had at some White House book event, he talked about it recently and it was reported in the Weekly Standard that he said, well, he had read Alistair Horne's book and he realized that the French problem is they didn't stay in Algeria long enough, and if they had, everything would have been fine, which shows you that from almost any historical analogy, you can kind of find what you want to find in them.
That's certainly true.
And I think Ariel Sharon, who never wanted to withdraw from the West Bank, I probably liked the book too, because there's a lot about counterinsurgency stuff and what works and what didn't.
And the French tried a lot of stuff and a lot of it succeeded, but they could win a lot of battles, but not win the war because they weren't really, you know, weren't going to stay in Algeria.
Yeah.
Well, and you make analogies too about how the war escalated, it parallels somewhat to the war in Iraq.
In terms of, I guess, each time that there's a demonstration or a violent riot or something like that, then comes the clamp down and every time the clamp down comes, then that just breeds a bigger insurgency for later.
I mean, the French were never able to, the Algerians were willing to die, or a lot of them were willing to die to fight the French.
And so the guerrillas would do something knowing that there would be a big, brutal French counter-reaction and the counter-reaction bred more recruits for the FLN.
And that happened, I mean, as the war was ramping up from the early 50s.
And it was, you know, once the war got going, I guess the FLN was just trying to kind of hang on and they did pretty much hang on.
But they, to a kind of remarkable extent, the Algerians were willing to die for independence.
And it's, I mean, it's interesting enough because I'm not sure that Algeria's life is like great separated from France, but it's, you know, there's a human nature to want the French out and they did.
And they were willing to undergo great sacrifices to do so.
And now, all during, while this is happening, there's all kinds of turmoil back in France and coup attempts and de Gaulle returning to power.
Why don't you kind of give us some background on- Well, de Gaulle's return to power was the way France got itself out of the war.
Because there was a, there was this considerable anti-war movement in France and it was, you know, it was both leftist and liberal.
And it could, it probably had a majority in say the, you know, the Parisian Left Bank or, you know, among the Sartre de Beauvoir circle.
And you know, they could, you know, write advertisements of, you know, big name intellectuals in the major French papers.
But it couldn't really come, it couldn't get too far as a political majority.
And de Gaulle was perceived as a man of the center right, essentially.
I mean, he was the conservative figure who didn't accept the, who rallied the French against German occupation in the 40s.
And who was also, you know, built a post-war government that kept the communists out of power, which was an open question in the late 40s.
And then he kind of retired and he wrote his memoirs.
And he was, and he was a military man, he was a Catholic, he's, you know, considered to be authoritarian, though he certainly, you know, and there was always, the people on the left were suspicious of him that he would be some sort of Franco type of dictator, which he wasn't.
But he had that reputation as, you know, a man on horseback.
And he, his followers were a mixture of people of the center left and center right who were a, I think he had extraordinary personal charisma and that, you know, very, very able men were willing to like, to say, I am a Gaullist and follow what he wanted to do.
That's why his power came.
So and then in various times where the Algerian war was producing sort of chaos in France and chaos in the Algerian government, he was, he was sort of available.
And finally, when there seemed to be a possibility of a military coup overthrowing the Fourth Republic, he was like the third option, like he was in which he would be asked to form a government in order to forestall a coup.
And probably most of the people who pushed him into power wanted to keep French Algeria and were, you know, made generally, you know, conservative, pro-military types and thought that France could win the war.
And the Gaull, you know, he may have entertained the idea that French could win the war, but he was very much a realist.
And he pretty soon realized, I mean, he took the Algerian popular sentiment seriously, and he didn't, he, and he really wanted to see for what it was.
And I think if there was an option for an Algerian third force that was, wanted to be attached to France, he would have grasped it.
But within a year in power, he realized that there just wasn't any chance of that.
So he thought, well, he's just going to get France out of the war and make it seem as if it was France's choice, because he didn't want France to be defeated, but he wanted France out of the war.
And so he, that was the, what he did kind of extraordinarily well was sort of squaring the circle and bringing enough of the French right to realize that it was in France's national interest to not be trying to control Algeria anymore.
And there was a lot of resistance to him.
I mean, France, there were powerful assassination attempts and coup attempts, you know, not by low nuts, but by high ranking military officers for years, you know, well into the, well into the sixties, but he survived them and France survived and Algeria survived and it was a bloody mess, but kind of a good ending.
And you made the comparison, I guess, to Richard Nixon.
Only Nixon could go to China because he was the guy who outed Alger Hiss and all that kind of thing.
Only Reagan could go and sit down at the table with Gorbachev and make this deal.
So that's what we need is a right wing guy with a warmonger personality to end this war.
Well, I think we need him.
We don't have one.
I think we need a conservative with a realist personality.
And Ian, I have no, I don't doubt it myself that if Richard Nixon were a figure in Republican politics today, I don't know how he might campaign, but he would, he would realize that it was an America's national interest to disengage from the Iraq war and do so in a way that it didn't seem like a big defeat and he would, and a lot of the right would follow him because you have a history of being on the right.
And so, but there doesn't seem to be anybody like that on the horizon.
I wish there were.
And I can, I guess I can assume that you're unfortunate enough that you sat through the Democrat debate last night.
You see any hope on that side?
Well, I, you know, I don't think they're terrible.
I mean, I, I, I probably, they probably say fewer completely insensible things that the Republicans do at this point.
There's nobody who I'm enthusiastic about and it's kind of too early to tell.
I have no idea who I would vote for.
Okay.
Well, at least we all got to get it kicked out of Barack Obama saying he doesn't plan to nuke anybody right now.
Yeah.
Well, they have to show themselves to be tough in a way, and so they likely to say foolish things.
Yeah.
And now you enjoy, you endorsed John Kerry in 2004, right?
Well, given the choice, and it was, you know, our, our elections are pretty binary.
I mean, I, I've worked for third party candidates before, but I, I think, I thought Kerry was better than Bush.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
I'm too far off the point now.
Leaving the loyal behind.
This is one of the things that is a major American guilt trip from the invasion of Vietnam, leaving all the people in the South who were loyal to us and to the South Vietnamese government to be slaughtered by the communists when they took over.
And this is something that's, that's kind of brought up in comparison when we talk about withdrawal from Iraq, that all the people who've been part of, you know, the American Vichy government there are going to be left helpless to the slaughter if we go.
Well, that was a problem in Algeria too, wasn't it?
Sure.
It was.
I think we can do better than the French did in Algeria, and I think we can do better than the, what we did in Vietnam.
I don't think we have to, like, you know, leave next month.
And I think it's going to be really difficult, but I think that we can leave behind a situation in which there's not, in which most, I mean, a lot of very good people have worked as translators or, you know, in various things, in various capacities for the United States.
And I think we should certainly make a combination for the resettlement.
I mean, a lot of them, there's a huge number of Iraqi refugees, and practically all Iraq's Christians and a lot of its middle class have already left or are leaving, which is, kind of shows how really misguided this whole venture was, because these are, those are the people on whose, who would be most likely to build an Iraqi state that was, you know, I don't know what the word is, pretty sane, liberal, progressive.
But I think this is something that we ought to be thinking about, and I suspect we aren't going to like the outcome if we left Iraq, but I suspect it would be something that is not worse than the present, either for our security or for the region.
And I think we should be planning to do the best that we can, rather than deluding ourselves that, you know, we're only six months away, you know, one Friedman unit away from, you know, turning the corner.
One Friedman unit away.
Yeah, yeah.
I think Tom Friedman has said, you know, we're six months away, you know, like for the last four years or three years.
Yeah, is that a new sniglet?
Yeah.
I like that.
Well, I'm Scott Horton, this is Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 959 in Austin, Texas, and I'm talking with Scott McConnell, he's the editor of the American Conservative magazine, and we have a few minutes here, I was hoping I could ask you about Russia.
Your magazine has, has written quite a few articles criticizing America's attitude and policy toward Russia, and we can see the consequences.
I opposed this in the first place, so I don't know how upset I am that it's being undone, the agreement between Russia and NATO that Putin has now announced he's withdrawing from, but I didn't really want the agreement to end this way with bad feelings.
What's going on in Europe?
What's going on with America's relations with Russia?
For reasons that I can't quite understand, we seem to be determined to make Russia under Putin an enemy again, and I, you know, I don't doubt that Putin is something of an autocrat and isn't leading Russia towards democracy, but he's not doing terribly, and he's very popular in Russia, and he's not acting aggressively in the international sphere at all, and yet the United States seems to be determined to expand NATO, you know, right up to the banks of, you know, the city limits of Moscow and Leningrad, it almost seems, I mean, why are we doing this?
This is a government that, A, is a major military power, B, they have a certain problem with Islamist rebels also in Chechen, and they certainly are, I think, inclined to be part of any, you know, of any effort to curb nuclear proliferation, and there seems to be, and it seems to be so misguided, I don't even know where the impulse comes from, to treat Russia as if it's like, you know, an adversary state that is, you know, as if it's the Cold War again, and Putin, I don't want to sing his praises or anything, but he's, in the foreign policy sense, he's not acting in an anti-American way at all, and we're going out of a way to make Russia an enemy, and it's misguided, unfortunate.
I wonder if, really, the major factor at play there is simply just welfare for Lockheed, that the American taxpayer gives a bunch of money to former Soviet states in Eastern Europe, and then that money bounces right back into the bank account of Lockheed to give them a bunch of military technology and that kind of thing.
That's an argument that a lot of the smart people make, I mean, it's a variant of the industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against.
I think that there's something to it that I don't somehow think is the main factor, but I don't know what the main factor is.
Yeah, well, you know, there's a great article by Richard Cummings in Playboy magazine called Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and he talks about this guy, I forget his name off the top of my head, but he was a chief, you know, a high-level officer at Lockheed, and he's one of the guys who came together to create an Iraq policy group to try to come up with a reason for war, and this was in the summer of 2002, and the reason they went to him is because he had experience in trying to come up with reasons after the fact to explain why they were expanding NATO in the 1990s, and it was all basically just after the fact rationalizations for the welfare checks that he and his corporation were receiving.
And why does the Washington establishment that isn't part of Lockheed, both journalists and congressmen, go along with this?
And that's a little bit more mysterious, because it's not that they're just on the Lockheed payroll.
Right, yeah, well, I think, you know, probably a lot of that goes along with just the government can do no wrong attitude that the media has anyway, and they probably don't look that deep into it or understand it, you know?
I mean, honestly, we've all heard of the White House Iraq group and the Office of Special Plans and all that, but at least for myself, this Richard Cummings article was the first place I had heard of this Lockheed group, or this group that was led by this Lockheed executive that came together to say, oh, he gassed the Kurds, and we have to, you know, he put down the Shia uprising we encouraged in 91, and that's why we have to invade them.
They settled on the weapons of mass destruction later, apparently.
But I don't know how else to explain it either, so I'm just trying to come up with theories, you know?
I don't know.
Why would America want to pick a fight with Russia?
The Soviet Union is gone.
Yeah, I mean, maybe in part that there were a lot of false hopes raised that Russia was going to become a Western democracy, though I don't – I can't – and Putin seems to be, you know, disappointing them, and there's, you know, certainly probably, you know, less free press and stuff like that than there was seven or eight years ago.
But it isn't – I think that they got a little bit used to a compliant Russia that would just defer to whatever the United States wanted to do in the world, and that – Under Yeltsin.
Yeah, under Yeltsin.
And a compliant Russia, it just isn't the natural state of international relations.
Yeah, you can say that again.
You know, it's a proud country.
It has an army.
It's, you know, it doesn't – it's not going to defer to whatever the United States wants to do indefinitely.
It doesn't mean it's going to be adversarial and – or wants to be.
I think that it's possible that a Democrat would change that.
I don't know.
Well, I know I read on Antiwar.com an article by Pat Buchanan, Mr. Cold Warrior, Richard Nixon's speech writer, you know, a contributing editor at your magazine, and he turned the whole thing around and said, how would we like it if the Russians were coming in and buying up governments all in Latin and South America and made a deal with Mexico to not sell us any of their oil but to sell it all to China instead, et cetera, et cetera.
And I thought, my goodness, here is Pat Buchanan arguing the case for Russia against Soviet America and our, you know, imperial encroachment.
This is a real turn of events, and I don't think it's because Pat Buchanan has changed.
It's because America's policy has changed that much, isn't it?
Well, that old adage about power corrupting is pretty true, and I think you could make during the Cold War the argument that if we followed a strategy of containment and even pushy containment, it was reasonable.
But then you don't have a big adversary to contain, and suddenly your power, you can just sort of suddenly begin to push it out and nothing stands in its way, and you begin to think that it's the natural state of things for everybody to defer to you.
And it's not.
And anybody with a sense of history, which Pat certainly has, is going to realize that.
But I think that the current power elite in Washington, you know, doesn't have that perspective.
You know, as much as any world empire is going to alienate the populations that it subjugates, the fact that our empire is based out of North America, isolated from the rest of the world, way out here in the middle of the ocean where nobody can get to us, I think that's got to be kind of particularly insulting to people who are from the old world.
Yeah, possibly.
I mean, you know, a lot of the world looks to America for, I mean, America does still or can again kind of embody a kind of freedom from a lot of both cultural restraints and political restraints that's very attractive to much of the world.
So it's a double-edged thing.
But I think we've really gone over too much to the side of the arrogance of power rather than the, you know, potentially attractive and liberating things about America, which I think we can do best by being a good example of a successfully run, you know, free country.
Well, in Chalmers Johnson's new book Nemesis, he makes the case that it's almost, if not already too late to turn it around, that basically every Muslim on earth hates America, that that's a billion people, and that we've done so much to alienate the populations of the rest of the world, if not the, you know, our lackeys in their governments, that it's basically irreparable.
Do you think that, you know, barring Ron Paul being the president for the next eight years or something, there's a way to turn this thing around?
I don't agree with Chalmers, if that's his point.
I was in, last year around this time, I took a trip to Syria, Jordan, and Israel and Palestine, or the Palestinian parts of Jerusalem and the West Bank, and met quite a few Muslims.
I was a part of a group called Churches for Middle East Peace, which is kind of self-explanatory what it is.
We met with a lot of people, church leaders, both Christian and Muslim, and, you know, and non-church people, and their, you know, the focus of this group was on an equitable settlement in Israel-Palestine, and they're sort of like, among Muslims or among Christian Arabs, there's like, if the American people are good, if they only understood the situation a little better, they would see that, you know, that an injustice is being done with it, and they can correct it.
Oh good, that's what I think.
And I've been to Malaysia also, which is a Muslim country.
I think there's a lot of latent goodwill, and I think that things could be reversed by relatively sane policies.
I don't think, I mean, you know, I don't think it has to be somebody necessarily as non-interventionist as Ron Paul.
I mean, Bill Clinton was pretty popular in, for when it looked like there was going to be a serious Middle East peace, you know, I would call it 1998 when he was being hounded over Monica Lewinsky, and he took a trip to the Gaza Strip or something, and, you know, with like 20 deep, you know, these Palestinian Arabs sort of lined the road, lined the roads waving flags, and where it was sort of genuine enthusiasm, as far as I could tell from press accounts and watching on TV, it wasn't like rent-a-crowds.
And so, I mean, I think there's still a lot of latent goodwill.
I think that there is still a lot of latent sense that America represents material success and a degree of personal liberty that a lot of people in the world, Muslims included, not all Muslims obviously, find a little bit attractive, a little bit alluring.
And if it can just be sort of turned around that we aren't like sticking guns down their throats all the time, you can get a lot of Muslims on our side.
I sort of hope so, because if Chalmers is right, and we're going to be at war with the whole Muslim world, you know, it doesn't end very well, I mean, I don't think America can maintain its own liberties in a sort of perpetual war, and the war is bound to escalate.
So I kind of have to believe that things can get better.
All right, well, thank you very much for your time today.
Thank you very much, Scott.
I enjoyed it.
Thank you, Scott McConnell, he's the editor of the American Conservative magazine, look him up at amconmag.com, A-M-C-O-N-M-A-G.com.
Thanks again.
Thanks for your time.