PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.
The Republican convention is off and running. Now joining us to talk about it is Larry Wilkerson.
Colonel Wilkerson was former chief of staff for U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
He's currently an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary and was--I don't
know if he still is, but he was a lifelong Republican. Thanks for joining us, Larry.
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Thanks for having me, Paul. And yes, I still am.
JAY: So what do you make of this positioning of Romney? I've mentioned this in a few other
interviews, but I still haven't got an answer I'm happy with, which is, in the year 2000,
George Bush decides that to pitch this kind of right-wing neoconservative ideology, you
have to call it compassionate conservatism. Well, they've gone now with Romney's choice
of Ryan and the whole positioning of--that he took in the primaries, that everyone said,
oh, he won't be so right-wing once the election begins; he'll have to be--come back to the
center. Well, he's not. He's running from the right, and he's apparently running almost
even or even in the polls. So what do you make of all that?
WILKERSON: I think it all depends on your opponent, and I think that's what it's all
about here. George W. Bush's opponent was Al Gore, who was, for lack of a better phrase,
a centrist à la Bill Clinton. Barack Obama has been best attacked--whether we want to
say it's accurate or inaccurate, lies or truth, he's been best attacked for all the things
that the right wing stands against, whether it's the rights for gays and homosexuals in
general, or whether it's socialism and Europeanism and all those things that the Republicans
like to throw out without even knowing what they're talking about. That's where the president
is vulnerable. He's vulnerable with these right-wing attacks. And so that's where Romney's
staying.
JAY: So I agree with what you're saying. What opened the door--and I once did a commentary
about a year--two years ago, during the 2010 elections, which was the six reasons how the
Democrats allowed the Republicans to rebrand themselves. It's really the weaknesses of
the Obama administration that opened this up. There's such confusion amongst people
now about how to get out of the crisis.
WILKERSON: There is. And when you look at the Obama administration, you look at things
like the Patriot Act and the way they're enforcing it, which is more draconian than the Bush
administration, even the first one, and you look at things like the amendments that are
coming up or the re-passage of the FISA amendments, the FISA act's amendments. Those things are--they're
a usurpation of your constitutional rights. And they're going to go on and on and on.
And the Justice Department for President Obama seems to be reveling in pursuing these things.
So if you want to say the American people are in a state of confusion over which way
to go, the extreme right or the extreme left or somewhere in the center, I think that's
a fair characterization. I do think we're going to see a far--I think we're going to
see 50 percent or lower turnout in this election.
JAY: Yeah, I mean, that is the other thing. When polls are taken, they poll registered
voters, they don't poll the whole population, 'cause we know about 40 percent, at least,
normally don't even vote in presidential elections, and as you're saying, it might even be higher
this time that don't vote.
But there's a lot of press right now about this fissure in the Republican Party between
what they call the corporate side of the Republican Party, which I guess are most publicly represented
by the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson types, and the social conservatives. And you have
this sort of unholy alliance between the two, because Sheldon Adelson clearly runs casinos,
and I don't know that he believes in many of the social values of the social conservatives
he is allied with. But neither side seems to care about that.
WILKERSON: Casinos, Paul, which, like lotteries, are one of the most impactful taxes on the
poor ever invented.
JAY: And in terms of moral values, family values, and all the rest, Las Vegas is not
the center of those things.
WILKERSON: Yeah, it flies in the face of everything these right-wing Paul Ryan types want to hold
up, American values and so forth. Sheldon Adelson is a--he is a caricature of those
values.
JAY: But none of it seems to matter that much. What I mean by that is you would think that
rational-thinking people who are not like--you know, believe this with sort of religious
fervor--and some do--would see through the hypocrisy of this. And as you said at the
beginning--and neither of us in all the interviews we have done, none of us could be accused
of being defenders of the Obama administration. But this Romney-Ryan ticket boggles the mind,
that, for example, apparently Romney can be ahead in Michigan, a place that he would have,
according to him, let the auto industry essentially go down the tubes.
WILKERSON: It is a mystery, unless we're looking at polls being influenced by the fact that
advertisement, TV, media, everybody else wants to continue to make money off both these campaigns,
and so they have to constantly pitch them as being roughly equal, which I do think plays
a factor. We could be looking at 60/40 and we wouldn't know it because it'd be reported
as 51/49. That's so they can continue to make billions of dollars off these idiots who keep
putting this money forward in order to finance these sort of underneath-campaigns. That's
a big part of it, in my view.
JAY: Yeah, I was actually--that was going to be my next question to you is that there's
such a profound economic interest on the part of the television networks, one, to make sure
this is a horse race--the more a horse race it is, the more money they make. Number two,
there's supposed balance. Like, I watch CNN's--as much as I can take; to be honest, I couldn't
watch the whole thing--CNN's profile of Romney, I think, was on, you know, just last night
or the night before. And it's not a piece of investigative journalism. You can see people
making that documentary primarily saying to themselves, oh, we can't be accused of being
biased. So you have to kind of give sort of prettified look at Romney. There was some
critique, but it was very minor. But it's also in their interest to keep this phony
balance going rather than just investigate what both parties are saying and doing and
coming to some conclusion based on facts.
WILKERSON: That's true. That's true. Yeah. I long sometimes for an H. L. Mencken, who
would, you know, just wade into it and tell us what he really thinks. There are a few
people like that left, people at McClatchy and elsewhere, that still do real journalism.
But other than people like you and The Real News and some of the things I see on the internet,
there is no real journalism, especially investigative journalism, out there anymore.
JAY: Well, of course, I thank you and appreciate the comment. So just finally, the press is
giving a lot of play right now to the sort of division between corporate Republicans
and social conservatives. There's a lot of talk about this guy that was--who's running
for Senate who said real rape--women who are really raped don't get pregnant, and they've
asked him not to run, and this is supposedly showing a big divergence between these different
camps in the Republican Party. How real was all that?
WILKERSON: I'm told, Paul, that 48 percent--48 percent--I hope this is wrong--48 percent
of the Congress believes that God created the world, that evolution had nothing to do
with it, and that what God created has happened in the last 10,000 years. You think about
that for a minute.
JAY: Forty-eight percent of Congress.
WILKERSON: Half of the legislative branch of the United States government.
JAY: So what conclusion do you draw from that? How do you get--you couldn't get those numbers
in any other advanced industrialized country, not in Europe, not in Canada.
WILKERSON: No way.
JAY: And I don't think you could find it in most undeveloped countries.
WILKERSON: No way. This is part of the American mystique, it is part of our heritage, to from
time to time become, essentially, speared on our own devices. We use religion, we use
finance and economics. You ask about the division in the Republican Party. If I were the Koch
brothers, if I were some guy making billions of dollars off a hedge fund and paying absolutely
no taxes or very little taxes, I'd go after Romney, too; I wouldn't vote for Obama. Obama
at least looks like he might be slightly interested about the vast majority of poor people in
this country. He looks as if he might slightly be interested in revenues through taxes. He
might slightly be interested in things that impact the majority of people in America.
Romney's interested in the richest people in the country. And so if I were they, I would
be out there like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers and others; I'd be funneling
that money out there for Romney; I want an idiot in there who believes in predatory capitalism
the way I do, so that I can continue to rape the world.
JAY: Thanks for joining us, Larry.
WILKERSON: Thanks for having me, Paul.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network. And join us soon for regular
reports from Larry Wilkerson on the state of U.S. politics, on geopolitics. And please
join us. And don't forget there's a "Donate" button over here somewhere, because if you
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