While the Weekly Standard and BuzzFeed are advertising Ted Cruz as the keeper of the libertarian flame, where do real neocons call for carpet bombing and making sand glow in the dark? Is this a media snow job?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
While the Weekly Standard and BuzzFeed are advertising Ted Cruz as the keeper of the libertarian flame, where do real neocons call for carpet bombing and making sand glow in the dark? Is this a media snow job?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
While the Weekly Standard and BuzzFeed are advertising Ted Cruz as the keeper of the libertarian flame, where do real neocons call for carpet bombing and making sand glow in the dark? Is this a media snow job?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Our title for our program today has something to do with a senator from Texas that's running for president by the name of Cruz.
And he, we have a title, Carpet Bomber Cruise, Libertarian or Neocon.
Well, that's pretty interesting.
But what I want to ask you, though, is, are we certain that this is not unfair to use carpet bombing?
Did somebody throw that out at him and it stuck?
Or how did that come about?
No, he did say it.
And obviously on the campaign trail, hyperbole is part of the stock and trade, but he said he would carpet bomb the Middle East.
He wanted to see if sand would glow in the dark.
And then he was criticized for that.
And of course, the fallback was, I'll never apologize for being tough against ISIS and that sort of thing.
But what he doesn't realize in saying that is that many of the places that are ISIS-controlled are villages, places in Syria like Media, where people have been starving because ISIS controls the city.
Is he going to carpet bomb those cities and kill thousands of civilians?
Obviously there will be to say that, well, we didn't target the civilians, but yeah, they just call it, what is it?
Collateral damage.
Collateral damage, and they brush it off no matter what.
But the article that we're referring to is written by Rosie Gray and was on BuzzFeed.
And the theme of the article is about Cruz's foreign policy and that he's pretty close to the neocons.
And it looks to me like they've acknowledged that their people, their first choices, like Bush and Rubio, must be out of the picture, which I think politically speaking, what's going on here now that the neocons are cozying up to Cruz is the fact that they've thrown in a towel when it comes to Rubio.
But that's just my own little opinion.
But I want to read one quote from the article, which sort of is the theme of the article, because not unlike a lot of politicians, Cruz is all over the place on foreign policy.
And he's smart enough to recognize that the libertarian movement, that element in the Republican Party, is not insignificant.
And he doesn't want to just say, oh, Ron Paul supporters are a bunch of goofballs.
And he brags about, I'm the one that's going to pick up his thing, his votes, and sort of knock down Rand because he's getting the libertarian votes.
At the same time, the article is very clear in pointing out that his associations with the neocons are rather stronger than I really believe.
It's sort of instinctive that you can't trust what politicians say.
But let me read this article, which I think is the crux of what's going on here.
And this comes from a quote from somebody from, they don't name the person, but it comes from the Pentagon, an unnamed Pentagon official.
But they put it in quotes.
And this individual says, I think most neocons think he's persuadable, that is Cruz.
And he's shrewd politically.
He had to get the libertarian folks, the Rand Paul folks, on board.
So that was his whole strategy.
So he's trying to balance, I'm a libertarian, I'm a good guy, and I want these guys that really don't like government.
But at the same time, my really close friends are, you know, the neocons.
And then she goes and names names.
So were you a bit surprised or some of these names that popped up?
They're pretty strong neocons, and I would think that'd be very significant.
Well, I wasn't surprised because I wrote an article back, I don't know, maybe six months or so ago, about all the candidates, except for two, and that was Trump and Rand.
But all the candidates went to this John Hay initiative, which is a neocon-run one-stop shopping for foreign policy advice.
They put themselves up as, hey, we're the experts.
We know everything about foreign policy.
We've been in this town forever.
If you need an advisor, come see us.
We'll set you up with one.
And so that's why he ended up with Bill Crystal, Elliot Abrams, James Woolsey, John Bolt, and all these people that he listens to.
So it just shows that when it comes to foreign policy, there's no independent thinking among these candidates.
They go to the same people that have been wronged consistently.
Well, does he get cover?
Does he get an excuse because he wants to be Ronald Reagan?
So he identifies with Ronald Reagan.
Strong, you know, and willing to use force, and he's, you know, the conservative.
But at the same time, the administration of Ronald Reagan wasn't exactly non-interventionist.
I mean, I think Reagan got a huge pass because one of the people that Cruz has mentioned that sort of he looked up to was Jean Kirkpatrick.
Now, she's hardly, she's hardly even leans in our direction.
She's not even, would you even put her in the camp of the realists, or would you say that she sort of made the neocons quite happy?
Yeah, she was one of the original neocons that I would say infiltrated the Reagan administration early on.
And he was convinced to give some positions of power to some of the neocons to quiet that wing of the party.
Maybe I'm being too nice to him.
But what they did is they took over places like the National Endowment for Democracy, all of the regime change things.
And this is where they built their power base.
And these are the people who he now embraces.
But listen, I'll forget, you know, we ran a piece by Paul Craig Roberts on the Institute website.
And Paul Craig Roberts points out that Reagan did talk to Gorbachev.
He did talk to the Russians.
He was willing to give up a significant amount of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
He was willing to compromise.
And the neocons had fits when he went to Reykjavik.
And Cruz mentions an association or admiration for Victoria Coates.
A lot of people wouldn't know that name, but she happens to have been a close aide of Rumsfeld.
So that connects him to the most neocon presidency we've ever had was George W. Bush.
And he's not bashful, you know, about that.
So I think that right now it might be coming together and some current conservatives who are saying, well, you know, I sort of like Rand, but we don't know what's happening.
So we better look at the next closest thing to libertarianism.
So they're thinking about going with Cruz.
But what about this association?
One of the excuses that they use in this article is why he might be a good guy, and we can trust him.
That's what the neocons are saying.
Well, he went to Harvard.
He went to prison.
Like, he graduated from our schools.
And therefore, even if he has to play politics, we can trust him because he really is part of the establishment.
Policies And Their Human Impact00:08:29
What's interesting is the Rosie Gray article you pointed out talks about all of his neocon advisors, but there's also a Weekly Standard article that Stephen Hayes wrote that does the opposite in a way.
It talks about what a libertarian Ted Cruz is, and it talks about how so many of the Ron Paul 2012 supporters have gone over to Cruz.
So in a way, they're making some cover.
Obviously, politics is the art of deception, but the Weekly Senator is going out of their way to make it look like he's less a neocon and more like a libertarian who's putting the two together.
But I think the argument could be made that as many of your voters, if not more, have gone to other candidates.
I think Trump appeals to a lot of two-year-old voters because he's perceived, probably wrongly you'd say, is an anti-establishment type.
But just because a few have gone to cruise doesn't mean that he carries the mantle.
You know, and he will not give an inch on his hostility toward Iran.
You know, no matter what.
Every Iranian is a bad person and there's no way you can ever talk to him.
And after this settlement or agreement that has been made, an international agreement, by the way, that some of the money that the internationalists, and especially the United States, stole, $100 billion plus, is going back, you know, to the Iranians.
And he is hysterical about that.
At one time, when they worked out that prison deal and some prisoners was released and he was grateful, which he should have been, but that doesn't mean that you can trust him.
He wouldn't give even the slightest inch that when you talk to people, maybe you avoid some conflict.
Like now, we don't have these types of conflicts with China like we used to.
But he not only remains hostile, he's very aggressive.
And this is not libertarian.
It's not non-intervention.
It's not sensible.
It doesn't help us in any way in defending our country.
Is that he wants not to just put the sanctions back on that have just been taken off the Iranians and seems to be helping a whole lot because, quite frankly, a lot of people do believe that the Iranians are less likely able now to have a nuclear weapon.
So he's saying that not only should we put them back on, they should be a lot tougher.
And if you're very consistent and you look at what sanctions are, that's like a blockade.
And that's what we have done to these countries.
And we did it to Iraq and we did it to Iran for a long time.
Then we wonder why the hostility lasts for a long time.
Sometimes I think you have to give them a little bit of credit after their punishment.
You know, look how long we have bombed some of these countries and what we have done.
And even if we didn't do it directly, and even though we didn't target them, a consequence of our foreign policy meant great harm and danger and destruction to these countries.
So this whole idea that we need to punish them even more, never recognizing that maybe they're like other human beings and like they're a faction in this country.
We have our side, the Libertarian Non-Interventions factor, competing with the neocon.
Couldn't this possibly be the case with Iranians?
Don't you think there might well be factions in Iran and that we shouldn't be identifying them as all the same thing?
Yeah, giving ammo to the hardliners.
But Cruz is no dummy.
He has earned this mantle of being anti-establishment by taking on McConnell, the Senate majority leader, who's one of the most despised people in Washington, probably after John McCain.
So he's played his cards right.
I think he understands that there is such an anti-establishment mood here in the U.S. now that he's taking it on.
But if you look at beyond just style and look at the policies, we talked a little bit about, I made a little quick list of Cruz on world affairs.
You say, no talking with Iran, NATO expansion up to Russia's borders, back to 1962 on Cuba.
He once told a group of Middle Eastern Christians who a lot of them were victims of Israel's policies, you must stand with Israel.
And they booed him off the stage because he was so inconsiderate to their problems.
More sanctions on Russia, more support for democracy activism overseas, i.e. regime change.
The only place, I try to be positive, I found one thing that I think we would agree on.
He does not want to go ahead and go in and overthrow Assad because he rightly warns that ISIS will take over.
So he's got one right and a lot wrong.
Yeah, well, all those things you suggest is sort of a carpet bombing of bad policies and it's scattered all about.
So I don't think much good can come from this.
But in a way, he's going to fit in to the debate because foreign policy, other than go after ISIS, and they're out trying to compete with each other on who's the toughest, who's going to kill them.
But they never talk about the consequence.
How do you identify them?
Are they in the cities?
And carpet bombing doesn't solve any problem.
And they never, never ask the question, well, maybe some of the people who grow to despise us and our policies, our invasions and our bombing, has something to do with our policies.
And so few look inward.
You know, it's a natural instinct not to look at ourselves and see our own personal shortcoming or our country's shortcoming and see if correcting those problems might not be helpful.
So often we had these issues come up in the Congress where we wanted to punish a country because they had infractions of human rights.
And there was a lot of that.
They want to punish China in different places.
And, you know, recognizing it and maybe making a suggestion is one thing.
But the inconsistency, do they do that with Saudi Arabia?
And besides, if we're out there giving instructions of this country, you do this, ignore this country over here, and not paying attention to the violations of civil liberties in this country here.
Just look at our justice system.
How many, why are we incarcerating nonviolent criminals at a rate far exceeds minorities and it does Caucasians?
So that is an injustice that we should be correcting and not saying that we're going to punish the Iranians because we can't trust them.
We don't know what's going to happen.
Yeah, I think the biggest disappointment in someone like Cruz is that he still views the neocons as experts.
And if you look at every piece of advice they've ever given, it's always backfired.
It's always been wrong.
It's always produced, as you say, blowback.
And there are other people out there that are not neocons that you can listen to.
Yeah, it's an interesting subject, and it won't finish, I guess, until the election in this particular fashion about what the policy beliefs are of the various candidates.
But right now, I think Cruz is getting a free ride from criticism from the libertarian group.
I just heard caution.
Look and read.
Don't go by what Daniel and I say.
We do our best to quote people accurately, but it's out there on the internet.
And it wasn't us that created the word coppet bombing.
That is Cruz, which is not logical and not good, and it has no benefit.
So there's no question in my mind which way he leads, although Daniel points out one point where he was right on Syria and said some correct things.
And on civil liberties, he has done the same thing.
But since he is also a flip-flopper and he's in politics and even the Pentagon recognizes it, well, we give him an excuse on this because he has to do this for political reasons.
Of course, many of them do.
But it's also the reason the American people are disgusted.
And hopefully they would find out the people who are going to do the same things in office that they claim they're against.
And that's the real challenge for the American people.
But unfortunately, the elections are very superficial and they're guided by the propaganda of the media and the government and the total establishment.
You know, Cruz, of course, was praised because he went to Harvard and Princeton.
I mean, that's where a lot of this stuff comes from.
But we need to wake up and look at what these people are saying.
And if you want non-interventionist, if you want a policy that defends this country and not talk about policing the world, you'll have to look elsewhere than for Ted Cruz.