The U.S. Election -- Facts and Positions?

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: Our Next President?

From what I have seen lately on "social" media, I gather there is a great deal of confusion on the part of intelligent, but somewhat less inured, people than amongst the unthinking.  There was even a few thoughts that Donald Trump would be better at foreign policy than Hillary Clinton, for example, as if it was possible to figure out anything of substance in this election.  So, this is a humble attempt to clarify what is going on in our election.  I need to give some background, however.

You have to think of a time when things meant more sense.  Start with something as simple as coffee.  That's right, believe it or not, it is as good a place to start as anywhere.  I was introduced to it one day when I simply felt very lethargic and my favorite cola did not work very well.  One cup and I felt more alert instantly, or at lease within a few minutes.  It is rather a bother making it and brewing it, and buying it ready made was a bit expensive, but at least it made sense.  All of a sudden, I started to hear about "Decaf" coffee.  What the hell?  It is the caffeine that provides the stimulation.  Why go to all the trouble of making it and also drinking the warm stuff if there is no caffeine in it?  It was better for you. Well, screw that – I'll just skip it, thank you.

So, what else? Skim milk.  Yes, go from 5% to 2% and from 2% to less.  So what do they do with what they removed?  They make butter and stuff like that, I suppose, but it really tastes like wet white stuff.  Forget it.

Diet Cola, Diet beverages of all sorts, no caffeine in your soda, actually, nothing in your soda.  One advertised only one calorie in an entire bottle.  Great! If you have to only consume 2,000 calories a day, you can drink 2,000 bottles of diet soda each day?  Something is wrong here.

Well, we also have diet news and diet elections.  How about Hillary Clinton wanting regime change all over and invading Iraq and Libya and killing the leaders?  Nope, let's focus on her deleted e-mails.  Benghazi? Well, never about what the hell we were doing there in the first place, but why we didn't send troops there afterwards when the same that happened to Gaddafi happened to our soldiers and other functionaries.  Yes, that's the real issue.  It is all Putin's fault.  Diet foreign policy.

"THIS IS WOLFGANG BLITZKRIEG WITH BREAKING NEWS – VLADIMIR PUTIN IS PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA.  HE IS ARMED AND CONSIDERED EXTREMELY DANGEROUS"

Er, thank you, Wolf, for that excellent example of our news today.  Diet news.

Syria is a far more complicated issue.  One of the candidates, the Libertarian, was asked what he would do about Aleppo.  He asked "What is Allepo?"  Later, he was asked which foreign leader he had the most respect for.  He could not think of one.  He did say Peres, but was informed that he had died.  The question of how many Palestinians he killed or Oslo was not even touched.  If the guy can't think of a foreign leader, why ask him further questions? You would have to ask diet questions.

Trump, however, has the answers, many of them, in fact.  "Knock the crap outta them!"  Is my favorite strategy.  Others are "Ban all Moslems from entering the country," soon replaced by a mélange of variegated drivel of other strategies.  Punish women who have abortions, but don't, actually he meant punish the doctors, well, not really, just so we punish somebody!!!!  He was against The Iraq intervention, but then there is no record of his so doing.  That's O.K., he has a Doctorate from Trump University.  Women are fat pigs and can't be a 10 if they have no breasts, but he only means that about Rosie O'Donnell.  Really, if you are taking this guy seriously, you've been on diet lemons too long.

Now Jill Stein of the Green Party does seem to know what she is talking about and actually makes sense.  For this reason, there is no way she will be allowed to become President. 

Our news media talk seriously about the "spoiler" candidate.  Now seriously, how is it possible to spoil this diet election?  It can't be done.  It is already spoiled.  To say not voting or voting for a third party candidate is a vote for Trump is patently ridiculous.

To take Clinton seriously, one has to think that she will not appoint another Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.  Otherwise, it is impossible to draw a distinction.    

Not that it makes any sense to bring in any substance to this discussion, I can not pass by the opportunity to post a transcript about education or the lack or it as it pertains to Islamophobia. 

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring in Nazia Kazi, our fourth roundtable guest, professor of anthropology at Stockton University. Her latest article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Teaching Against Islamophobia in the Age of Terror." And as we have this discussion and all that took place this weekend in our neighborhood here in New York City in Chelsea, two bombs being placed here—one went off, 29 people injured. Then, in New Jersey, I think it was a backpack of some pipe bombs found outside an Elizabeth, New Jersey, train station. Actually, it was homeless men who found the backpack and told the police what they saw inside—wires and pipes. And also what happened in an area of New Jersey where there was going to be a race for Marine families, and the bomb went off in a trashcan, and it was only because the race was late that nobody got hurt. But, Nazia Kazi, your response?

NAZIA KAZI: Yeah, so, as an educator and someone who spends a lot of time in the university classroom, I get to see firsthand the ways in which a lot of our young people understand terror. You know, most of them have grown up in the so-called terror age, post-9/11. And the bad guys, to put it so simply, have been Osama bin Laden, ISIS, Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. And there is very little nuance, quite often, in their understanding of these global realities.

One of the things I find in the university classroom, and I talk about it in this piece, is the really puzzling coexistence of a deep hawkishness and a systemic ignorance. So, on the one hand, students will have very strong opinions about what the U.S. needs to do globally, but actually have very little knowledge about the histories of, say, Muslim-majority countries. And I take very seriously the fact that these things coexist. I think that the war against terrorism, the U.S. war on terror, would not have been possible without a deep, public anti-intellectualism. In other words, there's kind of a systemic ignorance that the war on terror needs, it requires, in order to operate. Many of my students have been fed these binaries about the free world and the unfree world, you know, peace-loving people and terrorists, and have accepted these binaries wholesale. And the job for us as educators is to really—what I argue, is to insert critical thinking as a terrorism prevention tool, you know, a way of thinking past these simplistic binaries, and thinking geopolitically, historically and contextually, making connections between U.S. racism domestically and imperialism abroad.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. Professor Nazia Kazi teaches anthropology at Stockton University. She's speaking to us from Philadelphia. Dr. Debbie Almontaser is head of the Muslim Community Network. She's the founding principal of the Khalil Gibran International [Academy]. Haji Yusuf is with us in Minnesota. He's with #unitecloud in St. Cloud, Minnesota. And Ramzi Kassem is a CUNYSchool of Law professor. Stay with us.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump responded to the weekend attacks by lashing out at Muslim immigrants and refugees, calling them a "cancer from within," while Democrat Hillary Clinton said Trump is helping ISIS to recruit more fighters. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham called for the New York bombing suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, to be treated as an "enemy combatant" rather than be treated as a civilian suspect. "The idea that they should all be collectively punished … is, frankly, racist. And that's what we should call it," says lawyer Ramzi Kassem with clients held in Guantánamo. "The notion that we should generalize ... military detention, extrajudicial imprisonment is not only absurd and runs against U.S. and international law, but it is the practice of totalitarian regimes."

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TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We're broadcasting from Chelsea, from New York City, that actually has just opened up in the last 12 hours on 23rd Street between Sixth and Seventh, where the bomb went off. The police, while there, have now opened the street, and TV crews and vans are all there continuing to film. We are having a roundtable discussion about the bombings in New York and the stabbing attack in Minnesota, the bombings in New Jersey, as well. And I want to return—to turn to the response of the major-party candidates, of Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, who responded to the weekend attacks by lashing out at the Muslim immigrants and refugees, calling them "a cancer from within," suggested American security forces should follow Israel's example in racial profiling. He said this during an interview on Fox News.

DONALD TRUMP: We're going to have to hit them much harder over there, and we're going to have to find out—you know, our police are amazing. Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are. They're afraid to do anything about it, because they don't want to be accused of profiling, and they don't want to be accused of all sorts of things. You know, in Israel, they profile. They've done an unbelievable job, as good as you can do. We're trying to be so politically correct in our country, and this is only going to get worse. This isn't going to get better. And what I said is, you have to stop them from coming into the country.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let me play Donald Trump, a little more of what he had to say, and Hillary Clinton's reaction.

DONALD TRUMP: These attacks and many others were made possible because of our extremely open immigration system. From 9/11 to San Bernardino, we have seen how failures to screen who is entering the United States puts all of our citizens—everyone in this room—at danger.

HILLARY CLINTON: We know that a lot of the rhetoric we've heard from Donald Trump has been seized on by terrorists—in particular, ISIS—because they are looking to make this into a war against Islam.

AMY GOODMAN: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham called for Ahmad Rahami to be treated as an "enemy combatant" and placed in indefinite military custody rather than be treated as a civilian suspect. It's interesting. I heard a counterterrorism expert today on television saying that's exactly what ISIS wants, to be treated as a military force—they have enemy combatants—and not to treat him simply as a criminal. Can you talk about this, Ramzi Kassem? What does this mean?

RAMZI KASSEM: Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important to move past both sides of this conversation, as exemplified by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Most of the conversation goes through the security lens, and so Donald Trump is arguing that Muslims are a threat to security, and Hillary Clinton is arguing that we shouldn't discriminate against Muslims because that would endanger our security, as well. So, in other words, there's this instrumental approach to Muslims, where we're just a pawn in a larger security game, in a global security game. And so, I think we really have to move past that discourse. What we're talking about are American Muslims, some who have been here for generations. Islam is not new to America. These people belong here. This is their home. The idea that they should all be collectively punished and Muslims in the future should be prevented from coming here because one Muslim happened to do something criminal is, frankly, racist. And that's what we should call it, and it shouldn't be debated as some kind of policy proposal. So I think that's our starting point.

Then, when you move on to labels like enemy combatant and even the label of terrorism itself, these are labels that really impede understanding. They blind us to other possible understandings of these acts of violence, ranging from the personal to the political to the psychological. As long as we're obsessing over who to call an enemy combatant, who to label a terrorist, we're preventing ourselves from gaining a deeper understanding of whatever the phenomenon is. And actually, I should say "phenomena," plural, because whatever drove that young man, if he did do it, in Minnesota to whatever he did is going to be different from what drove the individual here in Chelsea to plant these bombs. And so—and so, I think, really, our understanding, going to, you know, what Nazia was saying, we have very real blinders on in this country that are preventing us from gaining a real and meaningful understanding of what is happening domestically and what is happening internationally. As someone who's represented Guantánamo prisoners for over a decade, I can tell you that the notion that we should generalize that practice, generalize these legal practices—military detention, extrajudicial imprisonment—is not only absurd and runs against U.S. and international law, but it is the practice of totalitarian regimes.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Nazia Kazi in Philadelphia at Stockton University, your response to what Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had to say, and also on the point you're making in your article "Teaching Against Islamophobia in the Age of Terror"?

NAZIA KAZI: Sure. So my response to both of these candidates responding to the events of this weekend, I mean, I think when we talk about immigration to the U.S., we need, in public discourse, a much wider conversation. I mean, if we're talking about Somalis in Minnesota, we can't fall back on these clichéd notions of immigrants coming here for a better life. We have to really ask about the conditions that lead to migration. And when we're talking about Somalia, that means talking about U.S. military intervention, real political and economic policies that lead to this type of migration. So that's absolutely critical.

And the other thing we need to be aware of in this moment is, any time things like this happen, we see this space opened up for Muslim Americans to represent themselves, to speak up. This roundtable might be an example of that. And usually what happens is one of two really tragic outcomes. One is that Muslims will repeatedly condemn ISIS. And two is that Muslim Americans will sort of wrap themselves in the American flag and position themselves as these quintessential patriots. And what happens when we engage in these type of conversations is a real diversion from the issues at hand, when we ought to be talking about the increasing role of militarization of daily life in the U.S. or the ramping up of our military apparatus abroad. And it is really the classroom that could become a space for this type of engagement.

AMY GOODMAN: Debbie Almontaser, you have been dealing in your own family with attacks on your family. You yourself aren't now taking public transportation.

DEBBIE ALMONTASER: That's been for the last couple of days, Amy, and it's just, you know, being cautious, given that this attack took place right here in the city. And so, I made the decision, the conscious decision, not to travel in public transportation. But again, you know, yesterday, I was in the middle of the city in City—near City Hall. It was fine. Sometimes, you know, I have this sense to overreact, as well as others, and it's justifiable and understandable. But we can't live in fear. And this is something—this is something that I'm constantly telling members of my community, is that we can't live in fear, that we're part of this society, that we need to live our lives, and we need to be unapologetically Muslim and continue contributing to society, whether it's in our professional field or in our communities, volunteering and doing things that we've been doing. And so, that's one thing that's really critical.

And I really appreciate what Nazia is talking about, because just today there was an op-edthat was published in the Gotham Gazette that I had actually written about using the classroom as a place for teachable moments and to make sure that we address racism and bigotry, and, given the number of hate crimes that have taken place locally and nationally, how important it is for teachers to establish a caring and nurturing environment where children could feel free to speak their minds and know that their fellow students are there to support them and that they're allies and upstanders, versus being bystanders, when something happens in the school cafeteria or the schoolyard.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it's interesting, one of the things that have come out in the last 24 hours about Ahmad Khan Rahami is that years ago his sister filed a complaint with the police around domestic violence. And we're finding this so much—now, she recanted that, but in a number of these cases—that the first signs are violence within the family, whether it's Omar Mateen attacking his wife, who shot up the Pulse nightclub and led to so much pain and misery, that actually it is taking domestic violence seriously at the beginning that might be preventative.

DEBBIE ALMONTASER: It certainly is. And the thing that's disturbing, Amy, is that what we see constantly is when we see that there are mental health issues that are brought up, immediately that narrative is changed. And so, for example, right here in New York City, I was very perturbed by the notion of some of our elected officials saying we're not calling this a terrorist attack. Why aren't we calling it a terrorist attack? It is a terrorist attack. When someone seeks to terrorize people by putting bombs anywhere, that is terrorism. And so, waiting and holding back on it, as if to say we're waiting to see if it was a Muslim, therefore calling it a terrorist act, is really unfortunate, and it really puts American Muslims in a position that makes people wonder, "Is Islam inherent to violence and terrorism?" And that's not the case. And it's really important for us to work very hard in changing that narrative and changing the language. When something does happen, we have to call it what it is. Whether it's a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, anyone who does anything in the name of violence against people, we need to call it out.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask our guest in Philadelphia, Nazia Kazi, how you use the classroom to teach against Islamophobia.

NAZIA KAZI: Yes. This is kind of an evolving strategy as I develop ways to relate current events that are happening in real time to a classroom. And I think one of the things is to really regard these tragic events as teachable moments, as moments to really get our students to pause and deliberately reflect upon the nature of our—the world around us. A perfect example of this was last year when the Paris attacks happened. A really fruitful classroom conversation took place about why there was a Facebook solidarity filter with the French flag, but not one with the Lebanese flag. And that led to a really remarkable conversation about race and the value of white victims, really.

I also think that, as I said earlier, we need to inject critical thinking into the dialogue. We need to get away from sort of knee-jerk vengefulness—right?—and think very broadly about the U.S.'s role as an imperialist superpower. I mean, my students are surprised when they learn about, you know, everything from Iran-Contra to what you said at the top of the show about white phosphorus being supplied to Saudi Arabia. And these types of moments in the classroom really lead to a way more fruitful dialogue than just clichéd notions about Islam being a religion of peace or Muslims worshiping the same God as Christians and Jews. It leads to a far more fruitful conversation when we begin to think geopolitically.

AMY GOODMAN: Ramzi Kassem, final word?

RAMZI KASSEM: You know, my hope, again, in the coming week—and I'm sure my hope's going to be dashed—is that this time lawmakers and policymakers won't come out with harebrained proposals to reform our way our immigration laws are implemented and that this time law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the NYPD won't descend on entire communities rather than conduct their work in a more targeted fashion. But again, I'm sure that my hope is going to be dashed. Time and again, every time something like this happens, be it in New York or overseas or elsewhere in the United States, there's no shortage of people, dozens of people, who will come into our offices at CLEAR saying, for example, that they're being approached for questioning by the FBI, even though they have no connection to what happened.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there. We'll continue the conversation. I want to thank Ramzi Kassem, CUNY law professor; Nazia Kazi, who is at Stockton University; Debbie Almontaser, thanks so much for joining us. And I want to thank our guest in Philadelphia, Haji Yusuf. Thanks so much.

Professor Calls for Fighting Systemic Ignorance That Leads to Islamophobia in the Classroom

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Erdogan, Israel, and our Election

THE ABSURD TIMES

Remember Latuff?  Banned in Turkey and accused of all sorts of things.

Emperor Erdogan, Trump, and Other Stuff

By

Papa Yaga

Nobody else at this publication wanted to publish anything for a long time, so they asked me.  I said, "why not?"  And so here I am.

One of you said that whoever keeps their mouth shut the longest in this election would win.   Obviously, Trump has not listened.  Ever.

This has all been quite silly.  A Pakistani Muslim suggested that Donald read the Constitution, especially Amendment 14 of The Bill of Rights.  Well, Trump claims he has read it.  Nobody seems to know that only the first Ten are called the "Bill of Rights," insisted upon before all states would agree to join back then.

Instead, Trump has talked about Islamic Terrorism.  There is no such thing, but then, sometimes thinking makes it so? 

Another example is Trump calling Obama the "worst President in history".  Actually, he is no great one, but he hardly qualifies as the worst and there is not likely to be an improvement anytime soon.  Most of the worst that come to mind have been Republicans, BTW, including Nixon (see below), Herbert Hoover (look up depression), Grant, and there is no point in continuing the list. 

He also blamed their son's death on Hillary Clinton although George Bush II was President at the time.  He has never been a history buff.

Nude photos of Trump's wife have been published lately.  Who cares?  Fortunately, no nude photos of Bill Clinton have appeared.  Yet.  Trump is unpredictable, after all.

Hollande of France says Trump makes him want to vomit.  I think he is the only foreign leader to say that – in public.  Others, well, they have their own ideas.  All I can say is that Trump is sort of a Groucho Marx without the humor.

Anybody know why Trump keeps praising Putin?  Putin doesn't.  But what the hell?  It would be in his best interest, and the interest of most of Europe, if the U.S. were in the hands of Trump.  Balance of power and all that.

This actually goes back to after Hillary pushed the "reset" button.  Then, a U.N. Resolution to "protect innocent civilians" from Libyan bombing – that's all.  It turned out to be regime change with catastrophic results for all concerned and neither Russia nor China has believed anything we said since. 

A more recent issue is whether we paid ransom for the people in Iran, the 200 million dollars.  The brilliant Gore Vidal once said, and we remind you of this many times, that this should be called the "United States of Amnesia."  

This is what happened: during the 70s, the time of two great Republicans, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, who was appointed by Gerald Ford as his successor in order to be pardoned for his crimes, and the semi-Democrat Jimmie Carter (who today looks like a flaming left-wing liberal), the Shah of Iran paid the U.S. 400 million dollars for some weapons (we love to sell weapons).  The Shah had to get out of Dodge, Iran, and appointed Shapur Baktiar (remember him?) as his successor.  The weapons were never sent, although Ronnie Ray Gun did have a deal involving Iran and Honduras to overthrow the Sandinastas.  The international court found us guilty, but we didn't care.  Another case involved the 400 million dollars we still kept but never sent the weapons for.  The 200 Million is part of that payment and has nothing to do with hostages.

Oh well – this is a very tiring season. No wonder nobody else here wanted to write anything about it.

Drones and Assassinations

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: from Latuff.  Seems Latuff can't help calling it as he sees it.  The only difference here is that the U.S. has absolutely NO legitimate role in Syria, Syria is a client state of Russia's.  Good or ill, that is the one main difference.

DRONES AND ASSASSINATIONS

By

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Just a quick note: our media would have us believe that North Korea's nuclear weapons would be used against us.  How?  Any idea of how many satellites we have focused on them? Whether they have one fusion bomb or not, how many would they have to launch at once to get even one through our massive defenses?
Perhaps Russia could accomplish it, but not North Korea.

While everybody worries about what would happen if a Republican, Trump, was elected, Jeremy gives us a great insight into what Obama, that peace-loving liberal has been up to with his drones and meetings.

Several years ago, in fact, one of Jeremy's tweets mention that was was difficult to reconcile a Nobel Peace Laureate with his own "kill list," but that is what Obama started. U.S. Citizens are not exempt from this list, either, unless, possibly, they are here in the US (but I wouldn't bet on it).

He writes for a publication called the Intercept, a newer venture that seems to be pretty forward looking and dedicated to investigative reporting.  He was originally a producer on Democracy Now.

Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald weigh in on comments from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her rival, Bernie Sanders, who have both supported the use of drones. Scahill notes that while Clinton is often portrayed as a more hawkish "cruise missile liberal," Sanders also supported regime change in the 1990s. "Bernie Sanders signed onto neocon legislation that made the Iraq invasion possible by codifying into U.S. law that Saddam Hussein's regime must be overthrown," Scahill says, and "then supported the most brutal regime of economic sanctions in world history, that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis."

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TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, I want to turn to Democratic presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Last year, Guardian columnist Owen Jones questioned her about the use of drone warfare.

OWEN JONES: You're a loving parent. What would you say to the loving parents of up to 202 children who have been killed by drones in Pakistan in a program which you escalated as secretary of state?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, I would argue with the premise, because, clearly, the efforts that were made by the United States, in cooperation with our allies in Afghanistan and certainly with the Afghan government, to prevent the threat that was in Pakistan from crossing the border, killing Afghans, killing Americans, Brits and others, was aimed at targets that had been identified and were considered to be threats. The numbers about potential civilian casualties, I take with a somewhat big grain of salt, because there has been other studies which have proven there not to have been the number of civilian casualties.

AMY GOODMAN: And last October on NBC's Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asked Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders about his position on drones.

CHUCK TODD: What does counterterrorism look like in a Sanders administration? Drones? Special forces? Or what does it look like?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, all of that and more.

CHUCK TODD: You would—you're OK with the drone, using drones as—

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Look, drone is a weapon. When it works badly, it is terrible and it is counterproductive. When you blow up a facility or a building which kills women and children—

CHUCK TODD: Sure.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: —you know what? It not only doesn't do us—it's terrible.

CHUCK TODD: But you're comfortable with the idea of using drones if you think you've isolated an important terrorist?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, yes, yes, yes.

CHUCK TODD: So, that continues in a Sanders administration.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yes. And look, look, we all know, you know, that there are people, as of this moment, plotting against the United States. We have got to be vigorous in protecting our country, no question about it.

CHUCK TODD: All right.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Bernie Sanders; before that, Hillary Clinton. Jeremy Scahill, please comment.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, you know, first of all, Hillary Clinton is one of the sort of legendary Democratic hawks in modern U.S. history. She's—you know, she is what I like to call a cruise missile liberal, where—you know, they believe in launching missiles to solve problems and show they're tough across the globe. Hillary Clinton, while she was secretary of state, really oversaw what amounted to a paramilitarization of some of the State Department's divisions, and was the main employer of the private contractors that were working on behalf of the U.S. government, and was one of the key people in the horrid destruction that we're now—in creating the horrid destruction that we're now seeing in Libya, because of her embrace of regime change. But Hillary Clinton, on these issues, is sort of, you know, an easy target, because she is so open about her militaristic tendencies.

But Bernie Sanders, in a way, has been given a sort of pass on these issues. Recently at a Democratic town hall meeting, Bernie Sanders was asked directly about whether or not he supports the kill list. The actual term "the kill list" was used in an interview with him. And he said that the way that Obama is currently implementing it, he supports. You know, Bernie Sanders goes after Hillary Clinton all the time for being a regime change candidate—and he's right—and blasting her for her alliance with people like Henry Kissinger. But let's be clear: Bernie Sanders in the 1990s was a supporter and signed onto legislation that was authored by Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol and these notorious neocons, who created the disaster of the Iraq invasion with Democratic support. Bernie Sanders signed onto the key document that—the legislation that was created as a result of the Project for a New American Century, demanding that Bill Clinton make regime change in Iraq the law of the land. Bernie Sanders then voted for that bill, which, again, was largely authored by Donald Rumsfeld and the neocons. Bernie Sanders then supported the most brutal regime of economic sanctions in world history, that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. He supported the bombings in Iraq under President Clinton, under the guise of the so-called no-fly zones, the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam. Bernie Sanders was about regime change. Bernie Sanders signed onto neocon-led legislation that made the Iraq invasion possible by codifying into U.S. law that Saddam Hussein's regime must be overthrown. So, when Bernie Sanders wants to hammer away at Hillary Clinton on this, go ahead. You are 100 percent right. She's definitely the politics of empire right there. But Bernie Sanders needs to be asked about his embrace of regime change, because the policies that he supported in the 1990s were the precursor to the disastrous war in Iraq that he hammers on all the time without ever acknowledging his own role in supporting the legislation that laid the groundwork for it.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I'm going to give you the last word on this. You, too, have been writing about these candidates.

GLENN GREENWALD: It's actually kind of amazing there's nobody with a more adept skill at being able to just selectively concentrate on some things, while ignoring unpleasant things, than the Democratic partisan. I mean, Jeremy is right that Bernie Sanders has been given a pass, but that's because Democrats have largely chosen to ignore foreign policy as part of the Democratic primary, because they simply don't care. They only pretend to oppose wars when there's a Republican in office and doing so can lead to partisan gain. So Hillary goes around the world vowing to get even closer to Netanyahu, to take our relationship with Israel to the next level, refuses even to talk about Palestinians like they're human. She is responsible for one of the worst disasters of the last five or six years, which is the NATO intervention in Libya, and obviously supports President Obama's bellicose policies and wants to escalate them. She criticizes him for not being aggressive enough. And yet Democrats just simply pretend none of that exists. They don't care how many people outside the borders of the United States are killed by a Democratic president. And so Bernie has gotten a pass, unjustifiably, and hasn't been asked about the things Jeremy described, because Democrats collectively—with some exceptions, but more or less generally—have decided to ignore all of the heinous things that Democrats do outside of the borders of the United States, because paying attention to them reflects so poorly on Hillary, and they just ignore things that reflect poorly on her.

AMY GOODMAN: And Donald Trump? Today, a key primary could determine whether he gets the nod to be the Republican candidate for president, in Indiana?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, I just think it's—in some sense, Washington, D.C.—not the United States, but Washington, D.C.—is getting exactly the election they deserve. These are the two most unpopular presidential candidates ever to run, I think, in 30 years. They have the highest unfavorable ratings of any nominees in decades. The only thing they're able to do to one another is try and be as toxic and nasty and destructive as possible, because everybody has already decided, more or less, that they're so unlikable. And so, it's going to be the opposite of an inspiring election. It's just going to be two extremely unpopular people trying to destroy the other on both a personal level, backed by huge amounts of money and serving more or less the same interests. And I think the two parties and the establishment leaders in Washington, and the people who support and run that whole system, have gotten exactly the election that they deserve. Unfortunately, Americans are going to have to suffer along with them.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, and I want to thank you both for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, author with the staff of The Intercept of The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program. It's out today.

And that does it for our broadcast. I'll be speaking tonight in Atlanta at the First Iconium Baptist Church, 542 Moreland Avenue Southeast, then on to Washington state. Spokane, I'll be speaking Wednesday night, Olympia Thursday, Seattle Friday,Mount Vernon Saturday, then Eugene and Portland, Oregon, on Sunday. Check democracynow.org.

Special thanks to Denis Moynihan, Mike Burke.

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