Call it "The Case of the Disappearing Defense Secretary." Just as a major war is about to break out in the Middle East - which will most certainly involve the United States - President Biden's Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin...disappeared! And no one noticed! Who's running the show? Also today: Hold your wallets: House Republican leadership set to "compromise" on big spending budget. Finally - war profits: US-funded troops from Israel are fighting US-funded troops from Lebanon.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Are you well rested?
I am fairly well rested.
Is your mind rested from the fact that you didn't have much to listen to?
No news, everything.
The world is all better off, and no more war and no more spending.
You know, usually on a Mondays, what are we going to talk about?
But today we've got a lot to talk about.
There's a bunch of things.
The one that we're going to spend some time on is a couple things we're going to talk about.
One is budget again.
We always talk about the budget.
The budget involves spending and debt and finances and the Federal Reserve and everything.
So we will be talking about because of a major agreement.
Democrats and Republicans working together.
We should be thankful that they're getting together, bipartisan.
We don't want them fighting up there.
You know, we may have chaos in the streets if that happens.
But anyway, we'll spend some time on that.
But we also want to talk about somebody else who's hogging the news.
The main reason he's hogging the news is he doesn't want in the news.
And that's the defense secretary.
You know, he wanted to sort of blend away, but everybody knows now he was in the hospital and he won't tell us what happened.
And so sort of whatever he was up to, it backfired.
I know the sentiment of, you know, you don't like to talk about personal things.
And you know that I'm not anxious to have it either.
Absolutely.
But when you're an important person, we have to know about you.
So he generally stayed out of the alumni.
He's a major general, you know, more than the low things.
He's a big shot general.
And he's around and he got that job.
And nobody's heard much about him.
But all of a sudden, you know, he got sick and we don't know why.
Believers in War and Budget Crisis00:15:24
And there's truth, isn't it?
You know, everybody's worried about it.
Well, you know, there could be an emergency crisis.
Yeah, we need somebody there in case peace breaks out.
What are we going to do?
But I think he had something to do with bringing the troops home from Afghanistan, so that's not such a good thing.
But anyway, we're going to start off more specifically because the budget.
You know, Mike Johnson, I didn't know him.
I was there, but he's respected.
He's smart.
He's neocon in a sense that he does support more military, but not as much as the bad guy.
And he must be likable because, you know, I mean, here he's been in a couple weeks and he hasn't fired yet.
Yeah, he hasn't fought with anyone.
But anyway, they've, but what puts our end in it up, at least mine, is the fact that he's getting to be, but he's with Schumer.
Oh, yeah.
You know, when Schumer and he can get together and say, well, we have to do something.
So they've had some superficial agreements with the total is, except they haven't had the Freedom Caucus talk to us about it yet either.
So I think it's a problem that they're dealing with, and a lot of them are doing it in sincerity.
They don't want to close down the government and disrupt things.
What they don't want to talk about is the inevitability of this conflict because they don't talk about the bankruptcy.
And, you know, when the dollar represented bankruptcy in 1971, that was a big deal, but they sort of fluffed over and got away with it, even though they destroyed 98% of the value of the dollar.
But that's what's going on now.
They're dealing with this bankruptcy.
And even if you're well-intended, how do you deal with it when people just deal with, you know, millions, billions, now trillions of dollars in one budget?
So it is a major, major problem.
And I could say I wish them well only on the condition that they'll help solve the problem by reducing the size and scope of government.
That's what business and individuals have to do.
They have to reduce their appetite for spending and printing money and borrowing money.
And in reality, countries should do that, eventually do it by losing the value of their currency and historic currency.
But they are doing it.
But they're in transition now.
But I also think very much in denial and in denial also of the moral climate of what's going on in this country.
And tinkering around the edges is not going to work.
And there are some people who actually want the thing to fall apart.
And their goal is chaos because we have an answer to all that.
And we won't tell anybody, but it has something to do with fascism and corporatism.
So we will not let the secret out on that.
But this is what's going on.
So it looks like this was seen as a positive step in conventional things.
But what if the money's being all spent for the wrong reason?
What if we went through this and said 97% of this money can be considered unconstitutional?
You know, that would be a different story.
But that's not what they're talking about.
It's how are we going to pull the wool over the eyes of the people and keep spending and keep promising and get by this election.
So I don't want to be cynical, but I'm just not overly optimistic that by another week's end that all of a sudden we're going to see tremendous improvement in the debate that's going on in this year's campaign.
Yeah, well, if I were Mike Johnson, and he looks like a nice guy, he doesn't have that nasty look that a lot of members and senators have.
He looks like a nice guy.
If I were Mike Johnson, I would not want this next picture to get out.
And this is from Politico put this up.
It is not a good look for him.
He's leaning into Chuck Schumer.
Looks like he's saying, as I wrote in our RPI update yesterday, hey, want to make a deal?
It's not a good look.
Johnson strikes his first bipartisan deal, a $1.7 trillion funding accord.
And I was working on our update for RPI last night.
You sent this over, I think, when I was working on it.
And the word struck out, bipartisan.
And I remember everything you say about bipartisan.
Be lurry about that.
Be leery about that.
But let's look at a little bit of the deal.
We don't need to get into the trees.
Someone else that does this more than we do can get into the trees of it.
But put that second one up.
Basically what it is, is they are going to fund the military at $886 billion, which is what President Joe Biden asked for in a deal with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
And non-defense spending will be at $773 billion, just a couple of bucks there.
Billions of dollars agreed to alongside the debt limit package, a side deal.
Non-defense budgets would remain roughly flat, amounting to a less than 1% decrease compared to current funding.
Military programs would see a 3% increase.
One of the things that struck me about this, Dr. Paul, without going too deeply into it, is I remember, maybe I'm remembering back wrongly, but I remember when Democrats would look at a 3% military increase and a 1% domestic spending decrease, and they'd be screaming to the high heavens, you know.
But now it seems like the Dems are on board with war spending.
Yeah.
They've indoctrinated the people and the people go along with it.
And I think they have terrorized people about what happens if the government locks down, if it closes down, but it really doesn't.
We've never had a close down of the government.
It could happen if we continue on the road of chaos plus chaos.
A bigger close down.
That'll be a close down, and they'll be fighting over who did it.
But they're already doing that.
I think that the people want some help, but I think they're overly scared about the lockdown and the close down.
I just wonder what it would be like if you and I were making the decision.
What about a moratorium spending for one year?
Do you think they'll survive?
What does that mean?
Oh, well, they could cancel the regulations that abuses the Constitution.
And anything you make, you can keep.
I'll bet you all of a sudden, there'd be a burst of, if it's only for one year, a burst for one year.
But I could just dream because I'm not going to see it.
But I would love to see what it would be like if we did.
Even though the slightest decrease in taxes gives a boost to the economy.
And the first campaign speech I ever gave was, and I put a line in, I still believe at least a good political line.
You know, the church never asked for more than 10%.
All governments put together should never have the moral right to take more than the church.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we've had some lean periods at the Ron Paul Institute, but you and I never got together when we had a little bit of a fundraising shortfall and said, here's a good idea, let's double our budget.
Let's spend more instead of let's we've got to tighten the belt temporarily and see if we can move ahead.
But you know, there is a hard deadline coming up.
There was only a temporary respite from the shutdown, as you mentioned.
But you know, you get this sense of kind of an intellectual drift, you know, if you know what I'm saying.
There doesn't seem to be anything driving the party.
Now, Johnson seems like a nice guy.
He looks like an insurance salesman.
Everyone likes insurance salesmen.
They're nice guys.
But he seems to have a lack of vision.
And you can see it in the picture.
Now, they spent their time rather than passing budgets for Treasury or whatever, all of these bills that you're supposed to do.
They kicked out one member because he's weird.
Now, that shouldn't preclude members from serving because a lot of them are.
They kicked out one guy because he's weird, and that's George Santos.
Now they have two more Republicans resigning, including Kevin McCarthy and the third that I just read over the weekend, I forget his name.
That means their majority is razor-thin, so they're moving into an era, a period where they're going to have to pass these individual appropriations bills.
And they're really almost doing it with one hand behind the back because they can't afford any dissent on the Republican side.
So it seems like they have squandered what they had, and now the only thing seeming to capture their attention is the war funding.
We've got to get these, we've got to get this spending, we've got to get our normal jobs out of the way because we've got to return to funding Ukraine and funding Israel and giving some money to Taiwan.
That seems to be the only thing that animates the Republicans right now.
You know, the Speaker, like you say, he comes across as a decent person.
And he's working hard at it.
But of course, I don't think there's going to be a tremendous success because we're not dealing with the real issue of the nature of government and what has happened to our republic.
But in the Politico article, he's saying, but he called the deal with your friend Schumer, but he called the deal the most favorable budget agreement Republicans have achieved in over a decade.
And I would say, well, to whom?
Who's benefiting?
Not the taxpayers.
Noting that the bipartisan accord will allow, this is the one I want you to comment on, noting that the bipartisan accord will allow GOP lawmakers to put their mark on the federal budget rather than running the government like the horrible show of Schumer and Pelosi deals struck before Republicans claim that, well, there's some good desires about this, but my intuition is ain't likely to happen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, of all of a sudden, this idea that the people will really have a say in it because they're the same group as originally spent all the money and spent all the money on the military and everything else.
Not all of them, but the majority of them have been doing that.
That's why sometimes my antennas go up when I say, oh, it's bipartisan.
Yeah, it's in order to quiet the people.
Quiet the people, yeah.
And they are conditioned to think bipartisanship is great.
But as you always say, when bipartisanship means both sides throw away the principles.
Now the one thing about this, and I get the sense, I could be wrong, Dr. Paul.
I get the sense that Mike Johnson and the Republicans and the Democrats, really, they want to get this stuff out of the way.
It's like a kid wants to eat his dessert first.
They want to get this stuff out of the way so they can turn to what they really are interested in, which is the military funding.
They didn't put it in this, that $100 and some billion dollars.
They didn't put it in this deal, this agreement, but they want to get this off of their plate so they can enjoy their dessert.
And that's what it seems like to me.
Now, on Face the Nation, Speaker Johnson was on, and Margaret Brennan, a journalist, was asking him a few questions.
I just took a couple clips out of this to give people a sense.
Maybe I'm wrong about this, and maybe our viewers will correct me in the comments.
But if you put this next one up, this is the feeling that I get.
This is what really animates them.
This is what really excites them.
Not the mundane things about funding Treasury.
Who cares about that?
So here's Brennan.
She says, I need to move.
You're in the presidential line of succession now as Speaker of the House.
You receive access to the most classified information about national security.
How has that changed your worldview, specifically on Ukraine, where you now say Vladimir Putin needs to be defeated?
He says, I've always said Vladimir Putin needs to be defeated.
I've never changed my position.
And go to the next one.
Brennan says, well, Marjorie Taylor Greene, she came out publicly a few days ago and said you had.
She said he went from having a voting record to literally a month later going against his own voting record and being Speaker of the House.
So Margaret Brennan, the journalist, is saying, well, Marjorie Taylor Greene said that you were not so keen on funding Ukraine.
And he said, no.
I voted against one of those trenches of Ukraine funding to send a message to the White House, not as a lack of resolve in standing for freedom.
So he's saying, basically, I only voted no on that as a gimmick to show Biden rather than having changed my mind about sending yet more money to Ukraine.
You know, this is a healthy debate, what's going on now.
This is one place where the believers in, we have enough war and we're going broke.
We need to do something about it.
And so far, the conservatives are, this is great that you can have one and point it out to this popular new speaker, you know, to say, hey, you're not consistent.
And because the American people are with us on that issue, I think the American people are sick and tired of it.
Even if it's for a little less enthusiasm than we have, because they just want to spend it maybe someplace else.
You know, they might support it to send more battleships to the South China Sea, you know, that sort of thing.
But anyway, it's a healthy debate because it's clear-cut and they say, you know, the money for Ukraine takes money away, you know, from some of the things that are much more legitimate, like defending against the invasion that has happened.
I think our country has been invaded, and it's sort of participating in the coup of the takeover because we lose a lot by that.
But when they point this out, so like you say, they've delayed it.
They're not going to deal with that.
That would have been terrible to, you know, to have to delay and have a shutdown for a couple days.
And it may come to that.
But, you know, after the American, maybe if it goes a week or so, if they didn't announce it, how many people would notice?
They'd still get their checks.
Yep.
And it would never stop.
And there was so much momentum in the system that even just, you know, if Congress was canceled for a year, you know, I say, well, this would be nice.
But it doesn't solve the problem ever because there's way too much momentum in the system.
It's on autopilot.
And then even if it isn't, there's so much secrecy too.
But you don't want to talk about it.
You think the Federal Reserve gets involved in helping certain friends around the world or help extend the credit to the military industrial complex?
Oh, no, you can't believe that or you become paranoid.
Yeah, don't want to do that.
There's one other last thing from the interview with Margaret Brennan I wanted to point out.
And this is really interesting, reading between the lines.
To me, it looks, as I read this, that that whole sense of urgency of funding that $100 billion request for Ukraine and Israel, that was a farce.
Pretending to Hold Trade00:02:07
It was a charade.
They knew all along, at least when it comes to Ukraine, that it wasn't urgent.
The Republicans were just pretending to hold out.
No, we're not going to give you this money.
And here's what my evidence would be for that claim.
If you can put this next one up.
So here's Margaret Brennan.
She said, so when you met with President Zelensky, did you say to him, I just don't know if I can get you the cash.
I don't know if I can help you continue the war.
And Speaker Johnson said, no, no, that's not what I said to him.
I said, we stand resolved with the Ukrainian people and with your fight for freedom against Vladimir Putin, who is a ruthless dictator in my view.
But what he said publicly, he said in our meeting, and then he said in national media in interviews following our meeting, is that he could get additional funding as late as February.
He didn't need it in December, as the White House was intimating.
So that whole struggle that we're running out of money and we need it immediately, that was a farce.
And the Republicans were just pretending to hold back that money.
You know, we have bits and pieces of the peace dividend, you know, when the Cold War ended.
But it looks like they're determined not to benefit from the peace benefit.
You know, when you think of the oil wells and the pipelines and the trade that goes on with, you know, our arch enemy right now, well, we have several, but China is a big enemy.
But now we're in a trade war with them.
But China reacted to that, Tradeboard.
They put some sanctions on us.
How dare they?
I don't think they have a right.
They've been shooting down our airplanes too.
When they put this map up of this hundred and some attacks on America, you know, all around Iraq and that Middle East region.
You look at that and you say, where in the world?
I thought it was bad, but that picture, this image, just cluttered with it.
And there's the other picture that, well, you know, why should the Iranians worry about intrusion?
You look at that and you look at how many missiles and bases we have right around the border of Ukraine.
Lloyd Austin Fallout Grows00:14:52
Anyway, that's the way it goes.
Well, here's a crazy story, and everyone's going to be covering it, but put this up.
This is a politico piece.
Now, yeah, here we go.
So the Lloyd Austin fallout is growing.
Someone's head has to roll.
And we'll go in and here's exactly what happened.
Now, this is from a political piece this morning.
Go to the next clip.
Okay, here's exactly what happened.
Imagine this scenario.
This is weird.
At a White House meeting last week, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, noticed that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was absent.
A top Pentagon official, Sasha Baker, was there in his place.
There was nothing obviously unsettling about this.
Austin was scheduled to work from home, and lower-level aides often sit in for their boss.
Now go to the next one.
But what neither Sullivan nor Baker, which is the underling, what neither of them knew at the moment was that Austin was already hospitalized at Walter Reed with complications from an undisclosed surgical procedure.
And then it goes on.
And since the Pentagon went public with the situation Friday night, new reports are coming in, including Politico's disclosure on Saturday evening that the Pentagon had not informed President Joe Biden or the National Security Council for days that Austin was indisposed for days.
Well, the president did not know anybody.
That's not a big deal.
He still probably does.
But you know, if he was absent and he didn't have a proper excuse, you know, some places used to dock your pay.
Yeah.
You think if he wasn't on ball of this, he should lose a couple days' pay?
Not hardly.
Well, as you point out, I mean, it's a problem.
Obviously, there's something embarrassing that he had done that he doesn't want people to know about.
Everyone has that.
Unfortunately, when you're in such a public position, you know, that things get out.
But the situation is now, the more he's tried to hide it, now everyone wants to know it.
But the craziest thing is, here we are, we're in the middle of crises after crises, Ukraine, Middle East, etc.
And all of a sudden, your top guy at the Pentagon is AWOL.
You know, it just, it looks like an administration that is so out of touch.
Nobody's talking to each other.
Nobody knows what anybody's doing.
Blinken's flying around to Israel and everywhere.
Austin is in a hospital somewhere.
Biden is struggling to get off stage somewhere.
It just is not a good look.
Well, the medical part is probably really significant because he was, you know, in intensive care.
I thought, well, if he had surgery, sometimes, you know, we wheel our patients into an intensive care, you know, recovery room.
But that's just not what it was.
I guess it was several days.
He went back, yeah.
Yeah, that's that, you know, what you think of, and I don't even know what surgery you had.
When people are taken back, a lot of the towns will say, because you can have, that's why you're in a recovery room to make sure there's no, the first hour or two is very dangerous.
So he might have had some type of bleeding and he had to go back.
But we don't know that.
And then, of course, if people are planning evil things against us and they don't know where he stands or he passes away, but there's no knowledge of it.
It might be, the whole administrative system, the president and others, they might get confused if they don't have order like this.
But they have so much confusion anyway, it's just that they don't know what to do about it.
Well, I mean, we shouldn't panic because a deep state is running things anyway.
So Austin is just a figurehead.
He's always been just a figurehead.
He's a substitute in there for Raytheon.
But it's still, it looks bad.
It looks bad.
And here's the one thing, you know, having spent some time in Washington, whenever you make your boss look bad, that's a big problem.
No matter where you are in the system, you make your boss look bad.
It's a big problem.
And this is what Austin did.
He reinforced the idea that Biden is completely clueless and out of touch.
And that's just not what you see from presidents.
You know, either Austin's completely responsible for that, or Biden is completely unnecessary to be brought into the loop.
He really isn't in the loop.
But, you know, lately he's been reading some speeches where it wasn't the worst time in his life.
But most people know that it's being read and it's not sincere and it's not a real thought.
But that's amazing that people can go along there and have figured that, well, yes, but you don't know how evil that Trump is.
That's true.
If you're dealing with two evils, you've got to go with the good guy, the least evil.
Well, here's also another weird thing about it.
So Austin is AWOL.
He's in intensive care.
And so his deputy should have taken over.
That's Kathleen Hicks.
I think she was the Army Secretary or Air Force Secretary.
I don't remember exactly.
But she's on vacation in Puerto Rico.
He contacted her.
She said, I'm available with Zoom.
Let's zoom in.
Zoom in.
So there you go.
That's a work-for-home environment.
But I would just say, and also the response of the administration right now is not good because this is typical of Biden.
This is how he handles crises.
And just put this next one up because this also just came out on Politico.
Biden will not accept an Austin resignation if offered.
So that is classic Biden doubling down when he looks bad.
And it's just a terrible look.
That's like the president of Harvard.
Can't let her resign.
We'll look bad.
Well, in the meantime, as the secretary is AWOL, the assistant is AWOL.
Biden seems to be AWOL.
Let's skip one and go to that Washington Post article.
In the midst of all this, we are in potentially one of the greatest crises that we've had in decades, which is a major, major Middle Eastern war which is brewing.
And here's a fascinating piece by the Washington Post.
I don't say that often.
But we also, like when you read Provda, in the old days, they had to read between the lines.
And so this is the deep state trying to explain something to the rest of us.
Israel's talk of expanding war to Lebanon alarms the U.S.
A Washington Post piece, I think, that came out yesterday.
And here's the author.
Go to the next.
Here's the author tweeting about it.
And he says, Scoop, a secret assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency casts doubts about Israel's prospects for success if it mounts a significant escalation against Hezbollah, saying IDF forces resources will be spread too thin given the war in Gaza as per sources, the fear being that the U.S. will be drawn in.
Yeah, but the other fear they claim they have is that Netanyahu's not doing well politically and that this will help him politically.
Isn't that tragic to think, well, if we go over, but our country and our presidents have done this before, and they've said, you know, I think it was Bush or somebody that said, you know, the wartime presidents are always more popular.
But he didn't prove that to be the case for a week or two.
So this is the whole thing.
That'd be just so tragic that yet we're trying to stir it up.
But you know, the one thing that really surprises me about this thing is that they're only now talking seriously of having Hezbollah and Lebanon being involved here.
I mean, it is a natural match, and they're not going to see total annihilation of Gaza and the Palestinians.
Somebody's going to come around where they'll think it's in their interest not to let every Palestinian be killed or run out because the history is so bad.
And of course, it's impossible to take a political position.
Of course, our political position is a lot easier, that supporting both sides doesn't make any sense.
It probably contributes to this kind of stuff.
And we don't have to make the commitment that said, oh, oh, yeah, that's genocide, and we have to condemn it.
Of course, we commit genocide.
We commit killing.
We commit to reject the wars.
But we also reject our foreign policy, which we have more responsibility on.
Yeah, you want people to stop here and these bad things happening.
But what are we endorsing and allowing to happen for the last at least 100 years now, since World War I in particular?
It's been bad on how much killing has gone on.
And if you start adding up civilians being killed by our bombs, even when we're not involved, like what's going on in Ukraine and all.
It's all our weaponry, you know, so, and in Israel, too, and Gaza.
Those are American dollars being used.
That's the problem.
Well, let's have a couple more tidbits from the piece, because it's really worth having a good look at.
And John Hudson, the journalist, he did a great job tweeting out the main points.
If we can go to the next one, and this is exactly what you just said, Dr. Paul, U.S. officials remain concerned that Netanyahu may see an expanded fight in Lebanon as key to his political survival amid domestic criticism of his government's handling of Hamas's attack.
Now, I'm a little bit obsessive, and I watch probably too much, but I watched some major attacks, major exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah over the weekend, including an Israeli base being hit on the other side in a retaliation.
It is definitely increasing, but I also saw another massive demonstration against Netanyahu in Israel.
We don't see that reported in the American media, but I think a number came out over the weekend.
Only 15% of Israelis want him to stay in office.
So deeply unpopular.
If you can put that back up, actually, deeply unpopular.
So he is trying to keep himself out of prison.
He's got corruption charges that are going to come at him.
So he's got every incentive to absolutely go for broke.
And he's doing it with us thinking that we're at his back.
And he says, when asked if political incentives are driving Netanyahu's military ambitions, a senior Israeli government official said that the prime minister will continue to take necessary steps to secure Israel.
Now go to the next one if you can, because I just want to get a couple of these out of the way.
So since October 7th, Biden and his top aides have urged the Israelis against a major expansion of the war due to the possibility it would draw Iran and other proxy forces into the conflict.
And eventually, that could also draw in the United States.
U.S. officials worry that there will be more bloodshed than there was in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war.
I've seen a figure of 300 to 500,000 deaths if this goes full boar.
So the U.S. is concerned about an escalation, knowing that we may get drawn in because Biden has brought us so close to Israel in this that there's no way we can.
And it's this sort of sense that Israel kind of wink-winked.
They know we'll back them.
They know we'll back them.
And Biden is not able to extricate himself from this commitment to back them.
Well, I think the demonstrations in New York City demonstrate how deeply this issue is felt because I'm really amazed at the numbers of people that were pro-Palestinians turning out in support of Palestine and the Palestinians.
And that is not exactly what has gone on very often.
But it's a tragedy that this goes on.
And I keep trying to figure, well, when must it stop?
Sometimes it stops when both countries just kill each other off and they get tired of the war and nobody else to kill.
And we have, you know, they've been doing that.
And we have instigated all this.
This is the problem because somebody thinks there's profit.
But one of these days it's not going to be profitable.
I don't know whether you'll ever see the day where there's a rebellion against the military-industrial complex in a serious manner.
There's a little bit of talk about that.
The old progressives used to talk about it.
And you didn't get Robert Kennedy anywhere talking about it.
Well, a couple of other things from the piece, and I don't want to dwell on it too much, but if you put this next one, this is from the article.
Now, this is something that you won't see reported very often in the U.S. media.
And again, I think this is the deep state through the Washington Post signaling we need to put a lid on this.
A new secret assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency found that it will be difficult for the Israeli Defense Forces to succeed in a war in Lebanon.
That is something that you never thought you would see.
They were supposedly invincible.
The DIA thinks they'll lose.
This is not a good look.
So them, they must also know that, and they're counting on us.
Now, this, I clipped this, Dr. Paul, because I knew you would appreciate it.
This is one of the reasons this article, I think, is so important.
If you go to the next one, here's a tweet by a, I think it says a Brazilian journalist.
And here's the quote.
According to U.S. intelligence reviewed by the Post, the IDF has hit the positions of U.S.-funded and trained Lebanese armed forces more than 34 times.
The comment of the person who retweeted this, a U.S.-funded and trained army is attacking another U.S.-funded and trained army.
This is perfect for the military industrial.
A little bit of that was happening up in Syria on the occasion.
Exactly, yeah.
They love it.
It makes no sense.
Non-intervention is beautiful compared to the tragedy of these wars.
Unless you're making money off of them.
Unless you're making money off of them.
That's why they love this.
So anyway, that's the craziness of it.
Well, tragically.
Yeah.
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Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
You know, in general, no matter what issue we talk about, in my mind, I go over this issue with three questions.
Practical Questions Matter00:01:45
And usually the answers will help me decide what we should do.
And one is that when people propose something, I look at it and say, well, is this morally correct?
Should we be doing this?
Should we be bombing somebody or doing some other thing or some domestic thing that is done for humanitarian reasons, but it's actually going to make life worse for the people who need some help.
And also, the question is, is this constitutional?
Has the Constitution authorized this process and this decision?
Has it authorized us to be the empire of the world?
And that's not too hard to figure out because it's just not there.
But it's been around for a long time.
But then the other question I asked, how practical is it?
And that's where they tend to win, especially because the military-industrial complex and the special interest, you know, get their word out there and say, well, this is very practical.
It's good for jobs, da-da-da.
But most of the time, if you look at it, it's not very, very practical.
So I think it's very important to ask a few questions because when it comes down to it, if you want something that is very practical, you know, we should go with the principles of liberty, putting the responsibility on people and what they do and how they run their own life.
Merit is a better way to report people than by, you know, having affirmative action, a DEI, and all this nonsense that works for and works through a corporate fascist state.
Because that goes bankrupt.
We're in the middle of it.
It's going to get worse.
We need more people asking credit.
Is what we're doing moral?
Is it constitutional?
Is it even practical?
And I'll bet you what, we'd have a different world.