Antiwar.com columnist Lucy Steigerwald joins the Ron Paul Liberty Report to discuss Dick Cheney's new book, "Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America." The neocons never give up...
Antiwar.com columnist Lucy Steigerwald joins the Ron Paul Liberty Report to discuss Dick Cheney's new book, "Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America." The neocons never give up...
Antiwar.com columnist Lucy Steigerwald joins the Ron Paul Liberty Report to discuss Dick Cheney's new book, "Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America." The neocons never give up...
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, and it's nice to see you, Daniel.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Well, good.
We have a special guest today, and she's very interesting because she writes about your good friends, the Cheney family.
And we're going to get some enlightenment because she's written a recent article.
Who is listening to Dick Cheney?
And we hope the answer is nobody, but we're going to find out.
Lucy Stegerwald has written for anti-war as well as Reason Magazine, and I believe she puts a column out every week.
And she also interviewed me on my little booklet, You Know Swords and the Plowshares.
So, but Lucy, it's nice to have you with us today.
Thank you, Dr. Paul.
I'm very happy to be here.
Well, good.
And I like the title of your article, Who is Listening to Dick Cheney?
I guess you can't give us a real quick answer and settle the whole thing.
Nobody ever will listen to Dick Cheney again.
So, what's your answer?
Well, that would be great.
I mean, that's always the very optimistic hope that nobody is.
I was kind of responding to a Washington Post piece that I unfortunately found a little too optimistic by a man named Paul Waltman.
And sort of what I got out of it, and I'm sure he could dispute my interpretation, but basically saying, don't worry about Dick Cheney and his spawn coming back and offering their opinions because nobody wants to listen to them because Bush left office with historically low approval ratings.
So, kind of Dick Cheney's out of fashion.
We don't really need to worry.
The class of 2016 is not going to be calling him up and asking him to give them a photo op.
I think it was too optimistic for a lot of reasons.
It sounds to me like nothing to see here.
Move along, you know, because I wrote an article for the Institute a little while ago about this, and we've talked about it before, Dr. Paul, that, and Lucy, I'm sure you've probably seen this.
Dick Cheney's Out of Fashion00:05:44
There's a shop called the John Hay Initiative, I think, where all, with the exception of a couple, all of the GOP presidential candidates are going to this one shop to get all of their off-the-shelf foreign policy.
And you look who started the shop.
It's the absolute same neocons who were all around Cheney when they were lying us into the war.
So, don't you think, Lucy, they're probably trying to divert our attention away from the fact that these guys never left power.
They've always been in charge.
Well, yes.
I mean, I think just because Dick Cheney himself, you know, people have a certain idea.
They make all these jokes about him being kind of a super villain, and we'd never trust him again.
And even though this Washington Post piece, you know, wasn't in praise of Cheney, it still felt a little too much like, well, you know, we're over that.
That was a decade ago.
We're much, you know, more morally upright people than we were when we let the war in Iraq happen.
And I'm afraid that I don't think that's true.
I still think that people are very easily pushed to war.
And we just have a slightly different type of war being fashionable now, which is the Obama version, which is the robots in numerous countries with which we're not even legally at war, which is a very sustainable type of war and will probably get even more sustainable as drones get cheaper and cheaper.
And someday a terrorist is going to have some too, probably.
You know, under the circumstances today, there's a lot of bipartisanship and a lot of rhetoric going back and forth.
And yet we all see that the foreign policy doesn't really change.
And a lot of people on TV sometimes would ask me, don't you think it's time for a third party?
And I don't know, it's time for a second party because they're all the same.
But a lot of people don't believe that.
They think there is a difference, and maybe there is in who gets to wield the power.
But it still seems like, like you already alluded to, that they all endorse this whole issue of power.
Now, their book is called Exceptionalism, Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, and why the world needs a powerful America.
That sort of bothers me.
What do you think they have in their mind when they talk about a powerful?
I doubt if they're talking about powerful libertarian views.
They most certainly are not.
If you saw that Wall Street Journal excerpt from last week, I believe, it's just, you know, it's like a joke.
There's nothing, it's very sort of, it sounds intellectual, like this is a serious policy suggestion, but there's nothing there.
It's just America great, America powerful.
America was powerful and then it made everything better.
And that's all.
And there's one point where the Cheneys write about how, you know, the young people need to learn about World War II, learn about how the bombs were necessary, the atomic bombs were necessary, and just this list of historical things that are completely lacking in nuance or complexity when they're mentioned by the Cheneys.
They're just cheerleading for America.
And that's the kind of history books they want for young people.
It was very disturbing to read, even though it didn't surprise me considering the source.
It seems to me like they're trying, and I've said this before, Dr. Paul, they're trying to rehabilitate 2003.
They're trying to rehabilitate the Iraq war, just as the Soviets had rehabilitated people that were Titoists and et cetera, et cetera, if you fall out of power.
I think American people want to feel good about a bad war.
That's why we're seeing people like Petraeus, whose wonderful 2007 surge contributed to the creation of ISIS, now telling us we have to make common cause with al-Qaeda to defeat ISIS.
But what I was going to ask you, Lucy, and I cannot figure this out for the life of me.
It's a question that I always have.
Why is it that the neocons, everything they, every analysis and every prescription that they have for our future has been wrong and discredited?
Why are the neocons not discredited?
Can you imagine your financial advisor, every advice that he's given you has caused you to lose money?
Do you have an answer for that, Lucy?
I'd love to hear it.
Well, I mean, you know, speaking from a purely libertarian perspective, government isn't discredited for people's minds yet.
But in my mind, government has, you know, officially proven that it is, you know, bad and the least possible.
Arguably, no government at all is superior.
But, you know, in most people's minds, that's absurd.
Of course, you need government.
There's something about government and public policy, including something as deadly serious as war, where no matter how many mistakes you get, you're allowed to make more.
And there are a few people saying, oh, why do we listen to Dick Cheney?
Why do we listen to David Trump?
Why do we let them be on TV without a lower third that says, what was wrong about the Iraq war?
But nobody who puts them on TV really believes that.
It's just, I don't know, it doesn't matter if you're wrong.
No matter hundreds of thousands of people die because you were wrong.
I don't know.
It's just how it works.
You get a thousand chances.
I think the one lie they get away with, you hear it in the campaign right now, and it's both sides of the aisle.
Of course, the Republicans turn on Obama.
It's all Obama's fault.
But this is this idea that Obama and the Republican Congress, obviously, has allowed our military to deteriorate and we are under threat.
The Chinese are coming.
Military Deterioration Debate00:07:22
The Russians are coming.
And the Cheneys, hey, we have to rebuild, rebuild.
How in the world are we going to refute this thing until somebody, we need to get those statistics out?
Of course, they control the major media.
But I would say I doubt very much.
Matter of fact, I know there's been no reduction in military spending.
That's something that the general rule is that when you're talking about cutting the military, you're talking about decreasing sort of the automatic increase.
You're not talking about less military one year than there was before.
As far as I know, that's generally how it works.
I mean, so it's even dishonest to talk about cutting the military.
We've slashed the military when there are all these automatic funding that isn't being touched by anyone.
And the rate of increase is affected by the design of the procurement.
You have a lot of money, trillions being spent on this F-35, which everyone concedes is a piece of junk.
So it costs a lot.
So in a way, it's the people who are appealing to the military-industrial complex, like the Cheneys, who are actually depleting our military because they're diverting so much money into junk and diverting it away from taking care of troops, from taking care of veterans and this sort of thing.
Right.
Well, you know, Daniel's concerned about the fact that they keep going back to the bad guys to get more advice.
Well, I have a word of encouragement.
I'll keep my fingers crossed on this.
Because this is actually my belief.
I've been there, and I know the clowns that are in Washington, and you've met many of them too.
We're not likely, there are a few good ones, but we're not likely to have a majority vote and come to our senses.
But it does end.
What did the Soviets do for all those years?
Did it really change communism?
When did it disappear?
When did their empire end?
When did communism end and the walls came down?
It's when they went bankrupt.
So unfortunately, there may be a little bit of weight.
Unfortunately, though, it may come too fast and we might not be prepared.
But no, this is not going to be long-lasting.
I think it will end.
Here's hoping.
Well, anyway, Lucy, I want to thank you very much for being with us today.
And your article is great.
Who is listening to Dick Cheney?
I advise people to read your article and read your weekly articles, but I do not advise people to send any money to the Cheney and buy exceptionalism and buy their book.
They should read your articles because I do know that you're a consistent opponent to wars, and I'm delighted that you're opposed to the war on drugs.
And I do have one short question dealing with that.
Just recently, and I'm sure you saw, a gentleman was released from prison after 20 years of a life sentence.
At least he didn't get total life.
Now he's a grandfather and elderly.
But he was put in jail 20 years ago for a life sentence for smoking marijuana.
Can anything be more atrocious with a society that we pretend to be a free society and an exceptional society?
There's few things more awful than that.
The war on drugs was the worst domestic policy since Jim Crow, certainly.
And that's another thing where the people who made it did not get punished.
Joe Biden, you know, they're talking about him running for president.
He was a huge drug warrior.
I mean, the nice thing, a reason for optimism is that public opinion and even politicians who, as John Stossel taught us, you know, they come and they lead the parade of public opinion, pretend they're leading it.
Finally, everyone's decided, oh, this is, you know, we really do want to reform the war on drugs after decades of it being a complete non-starter of an issue.
So it's an actual reason for optimism.
But, you know, the casualties of it are still, they're still in prison or they're still like this man.
who I've read about, though I'm forgetting his name, he lost 20 years.
You know, you can't give that back.
You can't give that back, no matter what, no matter how sorry and how serious you are about changing policy.
You can't give it back, that's all.
Thank you, Lucy.
And hopefully our audience will be following what you've been writing for several years now already.
But anyway, I think this is an important issue.
The Cheneys are very important people because they're so negative and they're so destructive to our country.
And there's so many people in the Republican Party who still think that they're, you know, our salvation.
And unfortunately, I was hoping at the beginning of the program that nobody would listen to the Cheneys, but unfortunately there are too many.
And most of it is being controlled by the military-industrial complex.
And they're very much involved.
But they're militants.
It's very, very dangerous.
But the whole thing is, is that neoconservatism, even when the Democrats are in charge, is very much influenced.
The rhetoric is different.
But just look at this current administration that is being run by somebody who won the Nobel Prize for Peace.
He's initiated wars in Libya, Ukraine, as well as Syria, and they're ongoing.
And unfortunately, we have to once again look at the role of government and what our foreign policy ought to be.
The founders had given us some advice, and unfortunately that advice has not been followed, that friendship and trade and peace, that would certainly go a long way.
But eventually it'll become necessary because we won't be able to afford this type of a policy.
The welfare state will come to an end.
As far as I'm concerned, we live in very exciting times and they can be very, very good.
And we just need to generate the interest in this newer generation, individuals who will have to do all the paying and all the fighting.
Get them where they say war is done with.
We don't want any more wars.
We don't want war on the American people's privacy.
We don't want war on people's drug habits or marriage habits or anything.
We want to just get rid of the wars and we don't want any more of these wars under the Cheney doctrine, not the Bush doctrine.
It was the Cheney doctrine.
We can go anywhere to fight terrorism in any country we want without a declaration of war and justify anything that they do without congressional approval.
Unfortunately, we're very close to the day when there's been a total acceptance of an enabling act that permits our federal government at the executive level to do what they want.
If we want to live in a free society, that whole attitude has to change and we have to start thinking about who should be making the decisions in a free country and that's the people.
They'll make mistakes, but they suffer the consequences.
But we should be brave enough to believe that individuals making decisions is a much better system than putting them into the role of government officials.
Because people who like to make decisions for other people and who make bad decisions find themselves in government like the Cheneys.
That, to me, is a very dangerous recipe for a disaster.