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Paul JayWhen I say I think we should vote for Biden without illusions, it means even in the days just before the election, there should be no hesitation of critiquing Biden. People should vote for Biden, I think, with eyes open. This is not going to be a progressive foreign policy with the possible exception of Iran. I think he'll probably reinstate the nuclear agreement. He fought very hard for it against Democrats like Chuck Schumer who were trying to kill it.
Honestly, as much as I fully expect Biden to win this election and I fully expect to spend the next four years savaging him on so many things, I do find myself having to say two or three positive things in terms of foreign policy and Biden. Even though, one, he's fully rooted, as are almost all of the leaders of the Democratic Party, rooted in the Cold War mentality. Meaning that America is the real civilization, the pillar of democracy. What was Reagan's line, "the beacon on the hill," or whatever? I think he believes all that. And it's convenient to believe all that because the military industrial complex and finance, it fits their strategy of how to make money out of being the global policeman.
But I also think he's realistic and pragmatic in the way Obama was. And Obama, we should remember, was against the Iraq war. And he said very clearly he wasn't against war and he wasn't against regime change.
"Dumb war."
Paul JayHe just thought the Iraq war was stupid. Yeah, it was dumb. And I think Biden agrees with him on that now, that that type of intervention is done. It doesn't help the empire. In one of his vice-presidential debates, he said that if you didn't want Iran to be a regional power, then the United States shouldn't have invaded Iraq. Because that's what Iraq was: the buffer. And he said, It's over now, you did invade Iraq, and you do have to accept Iran as a regional power.
That's a very important point of difference because of the foreign-policy-gang types around Trump. And I must include Chuck Schumer and, of course, Netanyahu from Israel and the Saudis. They don't want to accept Iran as a regional power. They want to try to destroy the place, mostly through economic warfare, but possibly more.
And I think when Obama got elected, I said, I only have one hope that he's going to be anything different than a Clinton or any other centrist Democrat: on Iran, he might be rational. And it turned out he was. The rest of his foreign policy was just normal, corporate-Democratic, defend-the-empire policy.
I'm saying I think Biden realized he was wrong about Iraq. He could have taken the Obama position. On the other hand, he's a political opportunist, Biden. He goes where the wind blows, where he thinks his political fortunes will be best. So, I think it was more about that than anything, why he voted for the resolution that wound up enabling the Iraq war.
Now, just a couple of other things to his merit. And again, this is less about him personally, but it partly informs us. Apparently, he was against Hillary Clinton on the invasion of Libya. There's a fair amount of reporting on that. And Obama went with Clinton, with completely disastrous results, especially disastrous results for the Libyan people.
There's a good book out on America's nuclear war strategy, and in the book, it reports and this is by a guy who's a well-known journalist and author and covers these issues. He says when Obama was trying to get the Republicans to sign on to renew the next big nuclear arms treaty, the Republicans told him, "We'll only sign on if you give us a massive new investment in modernizing the nuclear weapons arsenal." And Biden apparently argued against it. He says, one, the Republicans are never going to live up to actually supporting the arms deal anyway. And apparently, he was against this big expansion into nuclear weapons. But Obama went ahead with it and committed something like a trillion dollars over thirty years, most of which is going to get spent in the next ten years. So, maybe Biden has some instincts in that direction.
You know, what will assert itself in the end except for a big if will be the power of finance, the power of the military-industrial complex. There is no reason to believe Biden will buck them on certain kinds of issues. But if there really is a big mass movement, especially on questions of war and peace and on climate and against fascism, maybe there's some room to move. Biden is concerned about the left wing of the Democratic Party. He's going to have a lot of people in Congress that are going to speak out.
So, no illusions. Biden does represent a very definite section of capital that can be very aggressive, both domestically and in terms of foreign policy. But not as much. I don't know whether it's a quantitative difference or qualitative. [Laughs.] I guess it's quantitative, but it matters.
I don't like, for example, what Glenn Greenwald did in the last day or two. As we're talking, the internet's full of this Glenn Greenwald conversation. I see nothing wrong with Glenn reporting on Hunter Biden. I think he's been a serious journalist and as a journalist, he has a responsibility to be a journalist, not to judge how his journalism will affect the outcome one way or another of an election. And if he really has the goods on this story, then, yeah, he should write the story. I don't think the Intercept, unless they have really substantive proof that what Glenn's writing is wrong, just journalistically unsound, then they shouldn't have interfered, and they should have done what he said, like had a debate, a discussion and all the rest.
But when Glenn goes on Tucker Carlson" He crossed a line there. Not by going on Tucker Carlson. I'll go on Tucker Carlson, but they'd never invite me. One, I'm not famous enough. Nobody knows who I am. And, two, they know, if they listen to me, I'm not going to do what Glenn did, which is, I'm not going to regurgitate Tucker Carlson's own speaking points back to him and just say what he wants to hear. Because when Glenn was on Rising, that Krystal Ball show on The Hill, he didn't say what he said on Tucker Carlson. He spoke completely differently. He spoke to a leftwing audience. And to his left audience, all he did was defend his right to have journalistic independence and integrity and so on. But when he goes on Tucker Carlson, he says more or less the following words, that there's an alliance between the CIA and the Deep State and the Democratic Party and most of the media to undermine the first four years of the Trump presidency. Well, that's a Fox News, rightwing Trump speaking point. More importantly, it's just not true.
Yes, the Democratic Party obviously has been fighting against Trump. And most of the media, like, the CNNs, the non-Fox media. And that makes them money to be anti-Trump. Plus, Trump is batshit crazy. So, there's reasons for
Abby Martin [Laughs.] Paul Jay [Laughs.] He's a lunatic. I mean, anybody that can look into the camera and say, "I'm the least racist person in the room," that person's a lunatic. So, there are a lot of reasons for all kinds of sections of the elite to be anti-Trump.Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
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