RPI Chairman Ron Paul appeared on the Fox Business program “The Independents” last night to discuss the recent standoff between a Nevada rancher and the federal government. Dr. Paul again expressed his support for people standing up to federal government abuses and noted that he was very pleased that although there were plenty of guns present on both sides, none were used. It was a small victory, he said, but he warned that federal officers may well return, because, as he put it, “authoritarians will be authoritarians” and the federal government hates to back down.
Watch the segment here.
Strangely, one of the talk show hosts went off-topic at the end of the interview in attempt to blindside Dr. Paul with a question about an article that appeared here on the Ron Paul Institute website.
The article in question, written by former Reagan Administration official Paul Craig Roberts, was mostly a strong critique of Washington and NATO’s reckless Ukraine position, but it also included a few lines making it clear that he did not agree with the US government’s assessment of the attacks of 9/11.
We have already addressed this issue in a clarification of our editorial policy, which pointed out our willingness to engage with people even though we may not agree on each and every issue.
Nevertheless the program co-host grilled Dr. Paul as to why the Ron Paul Institute would publish such a person on its website, and was so upset that he later Tweeted that it “pained him” to even provide a link to the original RPI piece by Roberts.
How ironic, then, that the same episode of “The Independents” featured former US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, providing a platform for him to express unchallenged his desire for more drone attacks overseas and an even wider “war on terror.”
Bolton, readers recall, was a key figure in the construction of the lies that led the US to attack Iraq in 2003. He was an original signer of the 1998 Project for a New American Century (PNAC) letter to then-President Clinton demanding he take military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Later, he was instrumental developing and spreading the lie that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium from Niger and was using it to build weapons of mass destruction. As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern pointed out:
…a State Department inspector general’s report…found that Bolton ordered and received updates on the notorious “Fact Sheet” of Dec. 19, 2002, that claimed Iraq had been trying to procure uranium “yellowcake” from Niger. In other words, John Bolton played a key role in ordering that discredited intelligence be used to support the president’s case for war, three months before the attack on Iraq.
Just three months later the US attacked Iraq under false pretexts and the result has been the violent death of at least half a million Iraqis, thanks in part to Bolton’s lies.
The co-host apparently was not so “pained” about this.
It seems, then, that Paul Craig Roberts, who as far as we know never lied the US into a war resulting in half a million unnecessarily killed, must nevertheless be banned permanently from polite society because he holds controversial views on the events on 9/11 — views that we do not endorse, but that otherwise cause no bodily harm.
The whole issue is quite bizarre, as by the program’s own standard applied to RPI, i.e. that to feature a guest one must endorse everything he says or writes, we must assume that the hosts and anyone affiliated with “The Independents” endorses Bolton’s views in their entirety.
Therefore favoring more intensive drone strikes overseas and the “need to wage the war on terror more extensively,” as Bolton said on the show, is the official position of Fox Business’s only “libertarian” program.
So we enjoy much of “The Independents”‘ interview with Dr. Paul and commend them for discussing so many important issues in an informative and entertaining manner. But we are perplexed by their blindside of Dr. Paul, particularly considering Bolton’s neoconservative war-rants that followed Dr. Paul’s appearance and went unchallenged.
