Alan Grayson got grilled by Scott Horton on U.S. military welfare for Israel and blowback.
Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) brought a K-Street knife to a logical gunfight when he was interviewed by Scott Horton at AntiWar Radio, last week (23:29):
Rep. Grayson was on to discuss his “The War is Making You Poor” act [.pdf], introduced last month to the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill “does three things”, according to his website:
1) It limits the amount of funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
2) It eliminates the federal income tax on the first $35,000 of every American’s income ($70,000 for married couples), and
3) It cuts the Federal deficit by $15.9 billion.
Is it a radical bill in the absolute sense? No, but movement by Congress to defund a war, in just about any sense, gauges the pulse on whether Capitol Hill will move to muscle the Pentagon and the White House to shut down an overseas operation. In other words, the tolerance for taxation is—like just about any bill that isn’t of abolition—an element of the bil, but the ship has sailed on the precedence for legitimizing taxation, legally; the bill passing wouldn’t hurt in the sense that aggression is lessened in the ‘a little less pregnant’ manner. “All State wars…”—Murray Rothbard wrote in The Ethics of Liberty [.pdf]—“involve increased aggression against the State’s own taxpayers, and almost all State wars (all, in modern warfare) involve the maximum aggression (murder) against the innocent civilians ruled by the enemy State.”
If one goes to his YouTube channel, that person would find a wealth of provocative statements by Rep. Grayson to people of all ranks—some warranted, some silly. Most notably, he co-sponsored the totality of Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-Texas) bill to audit the Federal Reserve, which was “gutted” in the U.S. Senate after passing in the House. An enemy of central banking, Rep. Grayson is not, but closer to Dr. Paul than just about anyone else on Capitol Hill, regarding the Fed and the American Empire. Or is he?
Mr. Horton moved on from the bill Rep. Grayson introduced to a simple question: do Palestinians have the natural right to life in Gaza? Rep. Grayson eventually answered ‘yes’, but he was either lying or his J.D. is unqualified; a first-year law student can tell you that the difference between a ‘natural right’ and a ‘privilege’ is primarily that natural rights are inalienable. Therefore the unlawful blockade of the Gaza Strip, which is—according to Amnesty International—“suffocating” the Gazans, would be wrong. That which is not right and definitely wrong has no morally or logically connecting proof, yet the congressman is incessant to justify the blockade. He even goes so far as to assert that Israel’s occupation of Gaza is over, which Chris Guiness, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency’s director in Gaza, recently refuted about as well as one can—that controlling foreign borders and seashores define an occupation.
The reason why the occupation is denied, as Mr. Guiness indirectly pointed out, is that occupation legitimizes resistance, according to international law. Acknowledging the occupation de-legitimizes the use of force by the Israel Navy against the passengers of the Mavi Marmara. Being a U.S. congressman, voting to continuously fund Israel after its Navy unlawfully shoots an American citizen in the head, repeatedly, and authorizes said action as ‘legitimate’, raises an ‘congressional ethics’ question—not a matter of mere opinion. Mr. Horton connects this to 9/11 as blowback for unconditional blank checks to the Israeli government.
Rep. Grayson acted as if he wonders why Mr. Horton was getting heated to the fact that he couldn’t answer straight questions and logically connect them to his position on supporting the State of Israel with continued welfare. His comments reached the point where he called for an elevated level of respect because of his status as a member of the House. He had the nerve to respond with amounted to ‘Don’t you know who you’re talking to, little boy! I’m a congressMAN!’
I’ll admit that I was shocked when Rep. Grayson voted in support of House Resolution 867, “calling on the president and the secretary of state to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’”—known as the “Goldstone Report“, which condemned the war crimes of the Israeli government and Hamas during Operation Cast Lead, headed by self-professed Zionist jurist Richard Goldstone. The so-called “conflict”—more accurately referred to as the ‘U.S.-Israeli Gaza Massacre’—resulted in over 1,400 Palestinian and 13 Israeli deaths, the ‘wanton destruction‘ of almost 40,000 Gazan homes and left tens of thousands homeless. Of the nearly 1,200 dead non-combatants, hundreds were children.
Looking back to what I can remember of Rep. Grayson’s comments on the Fed, the wars, Israel and belittling Mr. Horton’s status as a human being of a lesser kind, it dawned on me: his position on everything is about being a nationalist, not a champion of any higher virtue. What set him off about the Fed was TARP money going to “foreigners” and lack of power in the hands of U.S. politicians. His rhetoric against the U.S. wars are always related to the U.S. economy, which he wants fully controlled by the U.S. Congress—via the complete nationalization of the Federal Reserve and its money monopoly. His support for funding Israel and the U.S. whitewashing its war crimes are rationalized with lunatic relations to the Cuban Missile Crisis and simultaneously saying that Gazan children have a natural right to life, but the State of Israel has the right to starve those children to death if the Israel Lobby can put enough money in the pockets of Democratic Party politicians with a talking points memo that keeps everyone on the same page.
Furthermore, I’m convinced that Rep. Grayson has little-to-no clue of how U.S. policy toward the State of Israel is incompatible with the objective of the U.S. government’s prosperity and the betterment of American people—the Realpolitik aspects of the issue, best regularly articulated by Professor Stephen Walt.
Remember, reason isn’t right in Washington. Might makes right and political might being on the side with the most unified narrative, no matter how it defies reason. This is displayed best in his pleas for Mr. Horton to agree with him, if for any other reason, to have a unified narrative among soi disant pro-peace people.
Listen to the full interview here.
Little Alex in Wonderland 