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May 30, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:00
Escalation: Lindsey Graham Applauds 'Dead Russians' As Drones Hit Moscow

Sen. Lindsey Graham was in Kiev over the weekend where he spoke approvingly of "dead Russians." However, some of his most incendiary comments were actually edited together by Ukrainian President Zelensky's own office to make them sound even more threatening. Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones hit Moscow for the first time though no serious damage occurred. Closer we get to WWIII.

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Graham On War Anxiety 00:15:23
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Dan and McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
How was your nice long weekend, Dr. Paul?
Perfect.
Nice weather?
Good weather.
But I guess nothing can be perfect.
There was probably 10 or 15 minutes we thought it was going to run.
Anyway, it was a good weekend, good rest, extra days.
But the world kept moving along.
But you know what?
The most critical thing in the world right now is, are we going to have a budget and are we going to have a default?
Which I think is a joke because they default all the time.
Major defaults and little defaults and constant defaults.
But you know for sure it's not crucial because the Congress was gone for three days.
You know, if they thought it was, if they thought it was important.
Friday, I don't think they did much.
Saturday and Sunday and Monday, they weren't in session, so they weren't that worried about it.
But they got to put a lot of fear into the people.
You know, this is very, very serious business.
So anyway, and this was in the midst of something else going on, the thing that I thought was a big issue, but somebody could make fun of it and say, hey, no big issue.
They do this all the time.
And it was this headline that caught my attention.
Ukraine strikes Moscow with eight drones, Russia says.
My guess is Russia is probably telling the truth, because at least they were bragging.
Probably they were able to shot them all down.
But it was Ukraine.
No business of ours.
That's 6,000, 7,000 miles from here.
Ukrainians can do whatever they want to have to defend their country.
But I don't think it's that simple.
I think it's more complicated than that because I think somebody could make an argument.
That is essentially U.S. sending those missiles, those drones into Moscow.
And of course, the Ukrainians who launched the drones are saying, well, there's evidence that they would like to assassinate Putin.
So we wouldn't argue with that.
But that is, to me, a big deal because one of these days, and a lot of people say, well, we shouldn't do this now.
You know, the Allies and some people, even Biden has said it, well, we better not do this now because we might antagonize the Russians.
So this, I think, is worthy of accusing it of being antagonistic toward the Russian.
And they don't know when the Russians are going to respond because they could respond by saying, we're not going to expand the war with the United States.
Matter of fact, they don't even talk much about that.
But they could, when they decide to use the full force of the Russian military and do more destruction in Ukraine, they're capable of doing that.
So it will be, if that happens, then it'll draw more people against them.
They're using their same argument.
Americans would join in getting, they already have a propaganda machine, which means go after the Russians.
I think there's almost the people who are a little bit closer to Russia are not quite as anxious to start the war as the American people who don't seem to be well informed on this issue.
The neocons.
Yeah, let's bring this one, first one up.
This is from Washington Post.
Drones hit Moscow, shocking Russian capital after a new missile attack on Kiev.
So the claim is it's a tit for tat.
The missile attack on Kiev, apparently, according to the Russians, hit the military intelligence headquarters in Kiev.
So the Ukrainian drones are significant because it's the first time Ukrainian drones have gone into Moscow in civilian areas.
You know that one drone tried to hit the Kremlin unsuccessfully.
If you go to the next clip, you'll see a little bit of the damage.
There was some damage, I think, in an apartment building on the exterior.
You can see the picture here.
Hours after today's attack in Kiev, Sobanyan, who's the mayor of Moscow, said drones struck two residential buildings in Moscow, causing minor damage.
So it was hardly shock and awe, Dr. Paul, like we saw in Iraq when we completely leveled Baghdad.
But there is definitely a psychological component for the citizens of Moscow.
That even though these didn't hit and do damage, and most of them appear to have been shot out of the sky, nevertheless, if we were in the same boat, we would be feeling unsure and worried.
There was really no military significance to what they did, but it did have a psychological component.
But the two things that are important about this: the U.S. has claimed to be pretty explicit with Kiev that we don't want these weapons that we're giving you to attack inside Russia because that is too escalatory.
Yes, you can use them to defend yourself as you see fit in your country, but don't go outside of Ukraine and hit Russia.
So either one of two things must have happened.
Either the U.S. expressed itself very clearly to Kiev saying, do not hit Moscow with the weapons that you're getting from outside, and Kiev said, we don't care, we'll do what we want.
Or the U.S. is tacitly approving of these attacks inside Moscow.
Either two are not good news for anyone with a sane head, because if Kiev is not listening and the U.S. is not saying, okay, if you keep doing it, no more weapons, as we would with other allies, that's one thing.
But also, if the U.S. is pretending to put a blind eye on it, that is a real escalation that it's certainly people who are worried about World War III should stand up and pay attention.
I don't know the timing, but I worry more there will be escalation.
But you know, sometimes these events come up when they have a crucial vote in the Congress in order to put pressure on passing a bill.
But you know, I don't think we could really argue this right now because, you know, the American Congress has already, you know, went along with it.
That's the one thing that got more money in the military.
You know, $868 billion.
They have the money, so they don't even need it.
But it is more on how you describe it, what's happening, and trying to figure out what the consequence will be.
And I cannot see any benefit from it.
I think it's all a disaster.
And one of these days, you know, this was getting more risky all the time.
But it might have to take a little bit more.
What if they didn't work so well and they did hit Putin?
That would be a declaration of war.
In a way, though, in my mind, I call this a declaration of war.
It's subtle, it's hidden.
But when you provide all the weapons, enthusiasm, and all the money, and then I don't believe, I don't believe for a minute that they would do this without the United States' permission.
I can't conceive of that.
Maybe it could happen.
We give them our money and say, go to it.
But that would be hard for me to believe.
I mean, I know they're irresponsible, but I think They're going to allow, they're going to give the permission for the Uranians to go ahead and do this.
Yeah.
Well, there's an interesting timeline that we see because Lindsey Graham, and we've shown this clip before in the past.
We don't have the clip right now, but in the past, we've shown a clip of him in 2016.
I think it was in Ukraine saying, This is the year of your offense.
You're going to go after Russia.
We also know that he's called for someone to kill Putin several times.
Can you imagine if a foreign leader of a foreign representative said that about the U.S.?
So here he was.
Graham was in Kiev over the weekend.
He was meeting with Zelensky.
He was giving a talk.
We'll talk about that in a second.
And then a couple of days later today, you see these drones attacking in Moscow.
I wonder if there's a coincidence.
But Graham's visit to Kiev itself caused a huge controversy.
And one of them is because of this clip that was released while he was in Kiev talking to Zelensky.
Let's go ahead and cue that clip.
It's very short, so you have to pay attention.
It's 11 seconds.
Let's full screen it.
And then hear what he has to say.
Free or die.
Free or die.
Now you are free.
Yes, and we will be.
And the Russians are dying.
So the best money we've ever spent.
Thank you so much.
That was.
So that clip, Dr. Paul, looks very incendiary.
You look at that and you say, this is even much for Graham.
For him to say Russians are dying and it's the best money we've ever spent is very, very dangerous.
But the fact is even more interesting than this, because as much as I hesitate to defend Graham, he did not say it that way.
In fact, put on this next clip from Reuters.
This is interesting.
Reuters has to admit this.
Initial extracts of the conversation released by Zelensky's office had not made clear that the two marks were made.
Remarks were made in different parts.
So President Zelensky of Ukraine's office took two separate parts of the conversation of Graham and spliced them together to make it sound like Graham was saying killing Russians is the best money we spend, which is really, really dangerous language.
So our own ally in Kiev is doing something that makes the Russians more likely to want to strike and attack the United States.
I don't know about you, Dr. Paul, but that doesn't seem like a very good friend.
But you don't see somebody in the administration going after Kiev for allowing this to happen and for this discrepancy to occur.
But anyway, it's a mess.
All these things we look at in detail, do this, do that, and what if, we'd be out of work because we wouldn't be there.
We couldn't talk about Ukraine.
But that's not the way it is.
And I guess the debate over foreign policy is going to last until the military-industrial complex collapses, which is a possibility.
You know, that's how great nations always disappear.
It's through spreading their wings too far, going too far from home base, and they run out of money.
And those things are vulnerable to us.
And so I don't, as disappointing as it may seem, how they seem to be getting away with it, it always ends badly for those people who go too far.
But the thing that you can't get overly optimistic about it because it takes a long time.
It's just that people are starting to notice, even in the Congress, a few people here and there are saying, hey, wait a minute.
We don't have to automatically vote for every nickel.
And even with this horrendous money they just appropriated, it was not unanimous.
Well, yeah, I mean, as Graham was over in Kiev bragging about all the billions of dollars the United States is sending Ukraine, as you've alluded to earlier in the program, Dr. Paul, we're in the midst of a crisis here in the U.S., the debt ceiling crisis, the military budget for 2024.
And that just came out, which is kind of an interesting juxtaposition because right in the middle of this discussion about how we can't spend anymore, we're Republicans, we want to cap the ceiling.
We'll put this next one.
This is from our friend Dave DeCamp at anti-war.com.
They did agree on a military budget, and it was $886 billion.
The debt ceiling arrangement reached between the White House and House Republicans was announced Sunday.
It caps military spending at only $886 billion for 2024, matching President Biden's requested budget.
I guess we should be happy about that, Dr. Paul.
Because remember how it usually happens: the president asks for a certain amount, and Congress says, oh, yeah, we're going to give you an extra $300 billion.
Take some more.
Even Republicans will do it for the Democrats.
Want some money.
Bipartisanship.
And then they've been re-elected for being bipartisan.
So on one hand, they're out of the money.
On the other hand, there's plenty of money for the military.
But, you know, Matt Gates is a good, good congressman.
He's pretty good on almost all his stuff.
But he had a statement on a tweet that I'm going to read slowly because he's describing it.
Because I think it's all fake, you know, and it's fiction, and this budget is not real.
And that, you know, if they need money six months from now, they'll just have another emergency.
It is so bad.
And then some people argue, are there real cuts?
Oh, yeah, there are real cuts.
We can show it on the paper.
But no, Gates makes a statement where he says, you can't even be, you know, complacent about the numbers that you're hearing.
So he says, that's right.
That 0.2% cut in spending, what they call it, is what all the brouhaha was over.
A cut which will not only push total debt to $35 trillion by the end of Biden's term, but will not even put a dent in the long-term U.S. debt trajectory, which even the CBO has no problem as showing its full hyperinflationary glory.
But you don't hear much of that during the discussion of how necessary it was.
Who's going to get food stamps and how is the military going to operate if they don't have enough money to advance their technology and on and on?
And they'll have to, that's why, that's why my argument is that they're not going to wise up in time.
But trying to get people to wise up is important because the thing will come down, then you have to know who will be available to rebuild the concept of what a republic ought to be.
Yeah, and even with that, you're talking about Gates has a great comment on that.
Even with that, and even in the context of this massive military spending bill, turn on that next clip if you can.
That's not enough.
That's not enough, Dr. Paul.
The White House and House Speaker McCarthy still need to get the debt ceiling agreement passed, but many hawkish Republicans will likely oppose the deal.
You think, oh, it's just spending, spending, no?
Because they blasted Biden's massive $886 billion military requests as inadequate.
Lindsey Graham is furious.
He said the Biden defense budget is a joke.
And if we adopt it as Republicans, we'll be doing a big disservice to the party of Ronald Reagan.
So they weren't mad that it spent too much, Dr. Paul.
They were mad, the hawks in Congress, that it spent too little, short-changing the military.
Rules Committee Debate 00:09:49
But the attention right now is on the Rules Committee.
And they'll meet tomorrow and have an up and down vote.
I think they said 3 o'clock Eastern Time.
And they'll probably live up to that promise.
But the big question is, you know, I think the committee is well loaded to the Republicans.
But there's several conservative Republicans, Roy, Congressman Roy and Newman and Massey.
They don't want to vote for it.
So even with the majority, a nice majority, it looks like what's going to happen?
And guess what?
It's going to depend on our friend, Massey.
And I have to say, I've been in that predicament where you could possibly justify either way to go.
It's to vote for a rule.
And I liked what he had said a while ago.
And he'll still have to face up to the vote tomorrow.
But he explained why he does not like to fight an important legislative issue in the rules committee.
The rule is supposed to say, can we have a debate?
So if anything, from what I read there, he's leaning toward a no vote on this.
Oh, no, a yes vote and allow it to come to the floor.
But the Republicans aren't going to have any part of that.
They're going to be very angry at him.
But he's been through it.
He is not a man that is weak with making the determination.
But my, well, I don't want to guess what he's going to do.
Technically, I don't think it's a philosophic thing.
Now, my personal rule in making a judgment, when I had been in a predicament like this, I would say, I'm always going to vote to allow the debate to pursue.
Let the people speak through their members of Congress and let them have a vote.
I said, except when every once in a while you had a vote that was so bad to bring a bill that you don't even want any near it, like let's go to war type of thing.
You know, let's go bomb who knows what.
I thought there was a limit there that they don't even, the rules committee should be a barrier, you know, to even putting it on the floor.
So it's a mixed thing.
It's not pure on either way.
And I don't think I'd be horrified if a good constitutionalist voted for the rule.
Yeah.
Well, this is a good example of something you always say, which is a principled person, a principled minority can have a huge impact.
You don't need to have it.
And I think Congressman Massey has been a key player for a long time.
He was certainly key to McCarthy being Speaker, and he was criticized by conservatives for doing that.
But he's now, as you say, on the Rules Committee, also a key player in this budget fight.
And if we can skip ahead to the next clip where it says McCarthy's team, I think we're going to skip one.
We can put that one up.
Now, this is Massey's going to be a key player.
As you say, Dr. Paul, McCarthy's team thinks they can avoid disaster at today's, oh, it's going to actually, it's going to happen today, it looks like, at today's House Rules Committee at 3 p.m., okay, in Eastern time.
However, Representatives Roy, Norman, and Thomas Massey, three conservatives on the panel, may not vote for the rule which allows the, I love this, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, oh my gosh, to come to the floor, Punch Bowl News reports, and this is according to Zero Hedge.
And this is what you're referring to, and I think we should read the quote because it's interesting if we can put that next one up, because this is not as easy an issue.
There's going to be a lot of blowhards who are going to be furious if Massey goes the wrong way.
But this is from that Punch Bowl article.
Keep in mind the fascinating exchange Massey had with reporters four months ago.
Bloomberg asked Massey if he would be a firewall on the rules committee to make sure a clean debt limit increase never made it to the floor.
And this is what Massey says.
Over the past 10 years, I've been an advocate of regular order and trying to make things work, trying to make the place work right.
And I would be reluctant to try to use the rules committee to achieve a legislative outcome, particularly if it doesn't represent a large majority of our caucus.
So I don't ever intend to use my position on there to hold somebody hostage or to hold legislation hostage.
Now, that not necessarily is not necessarily predictive of how he will vote today, but I think that's a statement of his principles.
And this is something that you've talked about a lot when you saw the destruction of regular order.
You no longer vote on appropriations.
You can no longer bring amendments to the floor.
And it's really hard to argue, at least from my perspective, with that philosophy.
No, and you mentioned already that one vote can be very valuable.
And I noticed that every once in a while I voted by myself.
I don't know if you remember that a couple times.
But I had a vote and I voted by myself.
And I never had such heavy pressure for me to change my vote to yes because they wanted it to be unanimous.
I said, what do you care?
You have every vote.
I'm the only one there.
I have no clout.
I have nothing.
I can't buy anywhere or whatever.
But it's interesting that one vote can be valuable, you know, if it means something.
So they were begging and pleading, but I decided to stick with my note.
Well, I think you had something else you wanted to bring up a little closer to home in Houston, the hospital issue, if I'm not mistaken.
That was something you said over the weekend.
Because that enrages me, how the doctors are wimped out, especially during COVID.
And it's continued.
You think maybe they could walk away.
Yeah, they had to do that to keep their job in medicine.
And yeah, natural immunity.
Nobody understands it anyway.
We can bend the rules on that and say, no, it doesn't work.
We have to have more inoculations.
But it's continuing.
And now it's just transgenderism going on in the surgeries.
And one ad several months ago I saw that was just atrocious.
It was a promoter, and I think the person that was doing it was a business person and wasn't an MD, trying to get a clinic to accept this type of surgery.
And she was talking about this, how wonderful it was.
It's a really good money maker because you get good payment for it, and the government will usually pay for it.
You know, there's so many programs.
They qualify for this.
And she really was poison hard.
And she says, besides, they never get better.
She didn't use those words, but she was implying they have to keep coming back.
They'll always have problems.
All we have to do is look around.
And some of these people might have had their surgeries several years ago.
What is it going to be like in 10 years from now?
They'll continue to do it.
That was sick.
That is really sick.
And that's where medicine has gone.
Fortunately, they represent a small group of people because I still know a lot of doctors that are very decent.
But that was a big deal.
And now there's an announcement for Houston because one of the biggest hospitals, matter of fact, I think somebody said it was the biggest children's hospital in the country.
That's the Children's Hospital in Houston.
And it says, largest U.S. children's hospital will no longer offer transgender medical procedures by the CEO.
I said, why'd you ever do them?
Why do you, yes, come back.
But it's not a clean comeback.
It's not so much that they all of a sudden saw the wisdom of it and saw the morality of it.
They probably had some public pressure, and I think the public pressure probably helped because it motivated Texas to finally write a law that won't go into effect until September that would keep them from promoting this.
But I don't think it, I think it sort of decides sort of the promotion will no longer offer.
Like you can't offer this.
So it's not the greatest, but it's a step in the right direction.
It's reflecting some public opinion.
And let's hope so.
Let's hope that there's a public opinion about what's happening as time goes on.
Unfortunately, more people will hear of the atrocious results of this.
And the whole thing is, is they do this whole thing under the guise of personal liberty.
You know, that this happens, even though it's the pressure put on somebody who has to pay for it.
It's usually not the patient.
Yeah, and I think reading that article, they perform one of these procedures on someone 11 years old.
If someone who is of age, if someone, a full-on adult makes the decision to have some kind of surgery, that's their own business.
But when you are doing something like this with a child, I think most sane people are in agreement.
Well, I'm going to close out by reminding, and I was going over to work today and I looked, there was some billboard out saying, get ready for hurricane season.
That is not what I like to hear, but it's a fact of life, especially for us down here.
And getting ready, part of getting ready is certainly making sure that you can survive if your power goes out.
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And my final word is that this is the last week to get your tickets for the conference, Dr. Paul, on Saturday.
We're going up to Houston on Saturday.
We're going to have a really nice turnout.
Get your tickets.
Come see some great speakers.
Dr. Paul is going to be talking.
We're going to have just a great time.
We've got Scott Horton joining us.
We've got Jordan Schachtle joining us.
We've got our friend Peter Van Buren joining us from Hawaii.
And we're going to be talking about lies and nihilism, two of your favorite topics.
So I will put a link when the show's over in the description.
Click on there.
We kept the prices at last year's level because we want to visit with you.
So we'll get a link for you to click after the show's over.
Over to you to Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I'm going to close by just summarizing a little bit about what we have been talking about.
Everybody's been talking about in that here's the budget coming up.
And it looks like the key vote might be this, a rule vote, because if it doesn't come, the bill doesn't get to the floor, there won't be a vote.
But I sort of think that the bill will pass afterwards because there's been announcement, and probably true, that there's a coalition of Democrats that want the bill passed, and the Republicans will, and there will be dissenters.
But I think behind the scenes, there's a lot of stuff they can pass out.
If you vote for this, this is what we get you.
And that's the part that is pretty nauseating on how it works.
But it's going to pass, most likely.
But my attitude is very cynical because what difference does it make?
Well, it calms things down for a day or two.
It says we're having a coalition, a strong coalition for $886 billion to pursue the war in Ukraine.
But that's not a positive for me.
That's a negative.
And bringing a coalition together, because they were able to extenuate this, and like Gates tried to point out, the numbers really don't add up when you do the correct ahead.
The deficit is definitely going to continue to go up.
Even if you had six months or a year reprieve, it's built into the system.
There's been no significant philosophic changes.
There's still a warfare state, there's still a welfare state, and there's still deficit financing.
And there's a lot of rhetoric that says they're against it.
But I can remember a long time ago they talked about the same way.
I remember Barry Goldwater talking about why the debt shouldn't continue.
It could be troublesome.
Well, it's troublesome now.
And this is something that will not change gradually.
As I've always said, it will change because it cannot be maintained.
You can't have wealth produced out of a printing press forever.
You can deceive the people.
You can fool the people into telling them there's value in your currency, but the currency eventually goes to pot, goes to, yeah, it does go to pot.
It goes down in value, and that's the tax, and that's what's happening now.
This idea that inflation is over and the economy is booming again, there are some positive signs, but I'll tell you what, they haven't changed policy.
The monetary system is the same, and it's been steadily eroded, especially since 1971.
And there's no resemblance to what the founders intended for us to have that would restrain the growth of tyranny over a republic.
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