Thursday, April 01, 2010

This is the latest in a series of conversations with former Congressman and conservative stalwart Duncan Hunter. He has agreed to these sessions as one way to keep his message of Reaganesque foreign policy and constitutional domestic policy on the front burner for the American people and his Republican colleagues. Hunter is currently spending much time and personal capital positioning a group of conservative candidates to take back congressional seats from liberal Democrats. With any luck, Mr. Hunter will choose to run for the presidency come 2012. But for right now, the 2010 midterm election is his mission. The interview takes place with Hunter driving somewhere in Southern California.

DH: Hello Jim, what’s up? I’m heading down the road now so I should have about 20 minutes to talk. So good timing.

AJM: Well, I figured it was time to get your take on the events of the day. Things are happening fast and furious, as always.

Let me start off with the Obama student loan takeover. As you know, in addition to the big healthcare debacle we just went through, the democrats voted party line to take over the entire student loan system and put it under the government’s purview. So isteead of just guaranteeing loans from private banks they are going to actually be the distributor of the loans, the sole distributor. And the CBO came out today and scored that as a $52 BILLION addition to our deficit. And I’m surprised that I haven’t heard too many Republicans talking about it. But is this something that we should be fighting to overturn?

DH: Well, I think in this forest of socialistic antics, it’s tougher to pick out individual trees as being keystones of the ‘Obama Movement’. But I would say that this administration is moving out on a campaign to establish dependency. Dependency of the voters on government employees, most of whom they happily anticipate will be democrats. And this appears to be another aspect of that campaign.

It makes you wonder when Obama is going to come out with a new campaign that they are going to do all of our grocery shopping for us, and you won’t get groceries unless you do the right things politically. Otherwise, they’ll be happy to shop for us.

AJM: (laughs) Well, they are already on the anti-fast food bandwagon.

DH: Sure. It’s a short step now, so you’ll probably see some nuts in the Obama Administration now moving to distribute food on the basis that it’s for our own good. They appear to be unfazed by this massive drop in the polls.

AJM: Apparently, it must be ‘let’s get it done while we can, time is short’.

DH: Or as one liberal democrat in California said recently, “people are really mad because we haven’t passed healthcare yet”. (laughs)

AJM: Who said THAT?

DH: That was Bob Filner, or at least it was attributed to Filner. I saw him on one interview where he was saying how it was remarkable that Congress is so unpopular now with the American people. So the moderator said, “So how are you going to vote on the healthcare bill?” And Filner said, “Well of course; for it. They want to see action now”.

AJM: (laughs) That’s quite a disconnect!

DH: Yeah.

AJM: The CBO just scored it today, so that student loan program is going to cost $52 billion to administer that. Also, what about all the private sector jobs that are involved in that right now which will dissipate? In the end, there might be just as many jobs, maybe more, but they’ll be all non tax payers, because they’ll be government employees.

DH: Well it appears to me that this was the model that was established by Marion Barry, when he became mayor of Washington DC. His game plan was to hire all the voters. There were so many city employees in Washington that if they all turned out, you won the election!

This appears to be Obama’s plan – if you can’t hire all the voters, at least make them all dependent for something!

AJM: Is this something that the Republicans should be annunciating loudly that they are going….

DH: Absolutely, but among other things. I think the healthcare thing is huge. It needs to be killed. There’s a lot of big game out there, and it’s hard to figure out how many rabbits you can shoot. I think we need to shoot at the elephants, or in this case, the donkeys.

AJM: Hey, you can’t say that! (laughs). That leads me to my next question.

I don’t know how much you’ve been paying attention to this, but the media and the democrats themselves – a lot of congressman – after that last Tea Party rally over healthcare, their new strategy seems to be that they are going to paint the Tea Partiers as a bunch of racists and whacko, violence promoting nutjobs.

DH: I’ve only caught snippets of it. But the Democrats like to turn their opponents into caricatures. I remember during the recounts in Florida in the disputed election between Bush and Gore. There were busloads of 70 year old Republican ladies coming down to rally and work on the recount. And the democrats portrayed them as raging radicals – some in their walkers – who were charging forward to disrupt the political process.

It’s interesting. You have the leftwing fringe of the democratic party that undertakes massive rallies against the government during the times of Republican Administrations, and those are called ‘demonstrations’. You get a bunch of 70 year old retirees toasting each other with tankards of Geritol holding a discussion session and the democrats portray them as a bunch of rowdy outlaws who are disrupting the American way of life.

You saw that throughout the country where they were having townhall meetings and a person would yell at the democrat politician and they would announce that they had a death threat!

AJM: So basically, this latest round is par for the course, is what you’re saying?

DH: Yeah. I think the democrats are great at portraying anyone who opposes their march towards socialism as being a radical.

AJM: And this one has gotten especially nasty because several of the members of the Black Congressional Caucus went out and walked among the tea partiers in DC last time and they said they were being called the N-word and all this other stuff – spit on. And then Brietbart TV has done a great job. They went back and examined all of the different tapes that various people had used from cell phones and camcorders recording. And there was nothing of the sort. No epithets thrown, no spitting. These guys went back and got on the House floor and lied that they were being called racist names.

DH: Yeah, well unfortunately I didn’t see that. I like to comment on stuff I actually see. But I think it’s clear they are doing everything they can to portray the exercise of free speech of conservatives and the tea parties as something gruesome. They want people to think of that as terrorist activities if people actually get together and protest, Heaven forbid, democrat politicians!

AJM: Pretty much.

DH: Because the democrats have used the “Phony Protest” for years, as a way to advance their causes. There’s lots of taxi cab drivers in Washington DC who made a lot of extra money by going out and holding a well printed, nicely printed, mass produced sign while they are being paid by a democrat ‘organizer’ to express their protest over something. I mean the staged protest is a tool of the Marxist left.

Now you’ve got spontaneous, REAL protests, by people who aren’t being paid to protest – they really mean it, they are doing it because the want to, they want to retrieve our liberties – but they are protesting a Democrat administration and leftwing legislation; and that is, as they say in show business, ‘strictly prohibited’.

AJM: Granted you are not fully aware of this latest round of race baiting, but they’ve always played the race card. Do you remember when Bush was first running, the NAACP ran that terrible ad that was blaming Bush for that black man that got dragged to death behind that truck down in Texas.

DH: Yeah, I vaguely recall that ad, but not all the particulars. They’ve used those tactics against Bob Dornan as well.

Suffice to say, that the people who invented the orchestration of protests, absolutely hate it when they see a real one. They like everything in democracy except the people.

AJM: (laughing). Hey, your friend down in Florida, Bob Smith, just decided to drop out of the Senate race. I don’t know if you knew that.

DH: No, I didn’t see that. He dropped out of the race?

AJM: Yeah, it was earlier this week I read that.

DH: He’s a good guy. I like Bob Smith. He did a lot of good stuff for the Armed Services Committee on the Senate side. A lot of good things for our Armed Forces, and particularly for the Marine Corps. He was a strong advocate for upgrading the capabilities and equipment of the Marine Corps.

AJM: Yeah, I also remember him being there, being one of your staunchest allies during the Clinton Administration, during the days of the gun grabbers.

DH: Yeah.

AJM: And the gun grabbers weren’t just Clinton. There was Giuliani in NY, and a bunch of other RINOs like Romney, and Bob was one of your staunchest allies against them.

DH: Yeah, he was. Good guy, Bob Smith.

AJM: OK. Let’s see. Oh, here we go. McCain is at it again. I know you don’t want to beat up on him too badly, but he’s kind of taken what I think is the Republican Party line. He’s in that primary race so he’s being asked a lot of questions by the media. And he came out the other day, I think on Fox, and says that he’s always been for ‘border security’.

DH: Really?

AJM: Yeah, and then he went on to list what he considered to be border security. Now he wants the National Guard down there – but he was listing things like more hi-tech, more surveillance devices for monitoring, etc. But I noticed he did NOT mention the Hunter security fence, the actual thing that would do the job. And I think this is not only the attitude of McCain, but of a lot of your GOP colleagues.

DH: Well listen, I didn’t see what old McCain said on TV, and I’ve been too busy to follow he and JD’s race. They are both friends and both campaigned for me, so I’m not choosing up in that race, as you know.

But I will say this about McCain’s hi-tech “border security”. I told these guys when Homeland Security signed up for a massive contract with Boeing for a so-called ‘virtual fence’, that it would be virtually worthless. And after their experiences there with trying to vector border patrolmen in rugged desert environments, in the dark of night, making sharp left and right turns through gullies and mountains and patches of cactus, trying to catch people pursuant to sensors activating; it’s clear that the only thing that wasn’t virtual about this fence is the billions of taxpayer dollars that were spent on it - with John’s blessing. Real dollars.

That was the only thing real about the entire program. So you’ve got to have a REAL fence, real obstacles!

Years ago, when we were building the fence in San Diego, I asked McCain and the Arizona delegation if they wanted to participate in the fence and the basic message back was “no, we want to have a friendly border”. They didn’t want to make Mexico…

AJM: (laughs). Congressman, are you still there??

(nope – redial)

AJM: Hey I lost you there.

DH: Yeah, I’m going through a canyon right now Jim. So we’re almost to the end of our rope here.

AJM: OK. If you drop out again, we’ll pick it up next week.

DH: Sounds good.

AJM: You were saying that the Arizona delegation didn’t want your fence. Oh oh. I just lost you again, I think