Duncan Hunter Interview 07-20-10: Barry & Hugo, the Monroe Doctrine & a Patriot Pop Quiz

This interview is part of an ongoing 2010 series of conversations with former Congressman and conservative icon Duncan Lee Hunter. The intent is to keep this rock ribbed conservative’s ideas in the public square which will hopefully influence the direction of the Republican Party, as well as inspire the American people to embrace his Reaganesque views on American life and politics. With any luck, Hunter will seek the presidency again in 2012, but for now he is concentrating on helping the GOP wrestle control of the Congress from the radical Pelosi brigades.

AJM: There are a couple of questions I want to get at. I always have a long, running list of questions. I know my time is limited. We usually get to two or three, which is sufficient. But last week, we covered the EPA and the sanctuary cities and Arizona….

DH: Incidentally, one other point about the sanctuary cities. I can remember when San Diego actually had a policy, a written policy directing their police force NOT to turn over illegal aliens to the federal authorities. At the same time, they clamored for federal funds to reimburse them for their costs! For their education and the medical treatment of illegal aliens, and their incarceration.

So it’s interesting, and hypocritical, that none of these communities want to cut off the funding. They like that, but at the same time, many of them at least, want to stiff arm federal immigration law.

AJM: If I’m not mistaken, you actually sponsored some legislation to cut them all off.

DH: Yeah, that’s right. The idea being that it’s not consistent for a community to create a magnet, such as a sanctuary city or even a partial sanctuary city – for example the policies that San Diego city had at one time which was to prevent their apprehension by federal authorities – and at the same time want to get paid for them. It’s more left wing rubbish.

AJM: Yeah, yeah. In fact two of your contenders in the presidential primary, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, both had their hands out to the Federal Government but they wouldn’t do anything to support the apprehension and removal. NY City was a sanctuary city and for all intents and purposes, Massachusetts was a sanctuary state.

DH: I think the illegal aliens are probably the most conservative people in Massachusetts. (laughing)

Anyway, I wanted to get your 2 cents on the situation down in Venezuela. As you know, Chavez has been down there for awhile, moving aggressively towards a socialist dictatorship. And just as importantly, we haven’t done anything about it. And two weeks ago he seized 20 US corporation owned oil rigs. They weren’t getting paid for their oil, so they quit pumping. So he seized them. And I have not heard the State Department, I’ve not heard Obama, and I’ve not heard anyone raise a red flag or complain about it.

DH: Though I think we have very limited leverage with Chavez – there are things we can do to stifle his ambitions, none of which are being done right now.

I’ll tell you what I’m worried about with respect to Chavez. During the Contra wars, the Russians were moving military equipment to the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. They were also moving military equipment to the FMLN, the communist insurgency in El Salvador. And that conflict was a conflict of sorts with the Soviet Union, albeit fought by proxies. And it was in our hemisphere, which was very troubling.

We won. Jose Duarte became the democratically elected leader of El Salvador; an outstanding person. The dictator of Nicaragua, Danny Ortega, made the mistake that lots of liberals have made, and that he actually believed the ABC polls that said he was going to beat Violetta Chamorra, and of course, went down hard.

But China is now engaging very strongly with Chavez. And we could at some point have a replication of the Contra Wars that occurred in the 1980s, where you have a foreign dictatorship, that is communist China, moving military equipment into our own hemisphere. And that military equipment being used either to subjugate people in places like Venezuela, or to expand their form of terror and violence into other parts of our hemisphere. In that case we will be once again, in a proxy contest, military competition, in our hemisphere with China.

That’s not good. And yet that could well happen. That’s something I’m concerned about.

AJM: It’s not just China. Putin and Ahmadinejad have been over there offering all kinds of goodies to Hugo as well. I guess the question comes down to this: Do we still believe in the Monroe Doctrine?

DH: This Administration apparently doesn’t. I think it will be tougher for the United States to maintain the Monroe Doctrine at this time, which Reagan essentially did during the Contra Wars. Our policy during the Contra Wars was, for all practical purposes, the reliance on, and execution of the Monroe Doctrine; that is not allowing hostile foreign influence to have an impact and control states in our own hemisphere.

Now the USSR was an economic disaster. It was an economically weak, militarily strong antagonist. China, however, has become America’s banker. So the levers that China has, the economic levers that China has, are much more robust than those that were maintained by the Soviet Union. They not only loan money to the United States in large sums, but they also now have a grasp, or a grip, on a great deal of America’s industrial base, by virtue of the fact that we moved a massive amount of our industry and our production to China. So China now has large economic leverage over the United States, so they are an altogether different competitor in any replication of the Contra Wars.

AJM: Yeah, but I don’t think their military is quite up to the level of the Soviet Union’s at the time.

DH: Yeah, but remember, the proxy war that was run in our hemisphere wasn’t run by military incursion on the part of the Soviet Union. It was run by them moving lots of war material to the Sandinistas and the FMLN. And China has a robust economy, operated with American dollars. They have the ability to move in lots of military hardware, in quantities that could be very meaningful in terms of the balance of power in a number of countries in Central and South America.

AJM: Now it’s already been established that Chavez has quite a few contacts and he levies support to FARC, the drug running terrorist organization that has been giving hell to Colombia. Obama seems to be standing back doing nothing despite all this provocation. What should we do in the short term.

DH: Listen, I don’t think you are going to get any action out of Obama right now in terms of that. Other than him getting a signed copy of Chavez’ next book. And the nation is busy in Afghanistan. We’re busy packing up in Iraq. We won the Iraq war before Obama came into power, and thankfully his and Joe Biden’s resolution to kill the surge was not successful.

But you’re not going to see any tough actions taken in South or Central America by Obama. I think, once again, what you’ve got to do is elect a Republican congress that will give some real direction to our foreign policy as it relates to Venezuela and other regional antagonists. And then, a Republican President in the next two years. Right now, we’ve got to concentrate on getting guys like Gunnery Sergeant Nick Popaditch elected. And we need 40 of those seats from current Democrat held districts. That’s the first step to getting back to a strong foreign policy in our own hemisphere.

AJM: If you had been elected President, or were now president, wouldn’t you consider the Monroe Doctrine to still have standing?

DH: Oh certainly! I think that the Monroe Doctrine is a very practical doctrine. It’s one that is based on the proposition that for America to maintain its freedom and prosperity, it’s much easier to do that by having a hemisphere that isn‘t intruded upon by outside powers, especially those that bring the type of foreign policy that the Soviet Union, and now China, export.

But now, instead of the US president influencing neighboring countries to isolate, or to impede Chavez, it looks as though the opposite is happening. I think a conservative led House can help start to reverse that dangerous course.

Let me throw you out a handful of names of some people, and you give me a quick synopsis, a sentence or two on….

AJM: No, no, no. I’m not going to put you on the spot for some of your current Republican friends or colleagues, or anything like that. (laughs).

DH: Well what do you want me to tell you? (laughs) He was a tough man in a duel.

AJM: Yes he was, even though he got shot in the shoulder that haunted him the rest of his life.

DH: Probably one of the best things he ever did was cane a recalcitrant congressman!

DH: I think he was the epitome of American toughness and independence. And Andrew Jackson embodied the rise of the frontiersman on the American scene. He was essentially a frontiersman. And he went on to become the President of the United States.

DH: Yeah. He would have been quite a bit to the right of Clinton and Obama. (laughs)

DH: I think Limbaugh has been an outstanding voice of conservatism in a tough and turbulent time. You know, it’s interesting. The liberal press has tried desperately to counter Limbaugh. They have put up a number of shows that represent liberal, leftwing advocacy. But they can’t pull it off.

In the old days, you had just a few major networks. And those networks would put on a façade of even-handedness. You would have a fatherly voice ‘telling us like it was’. That fatherly voice was backed by radical producers who left lots of facts on the cutting room floor, when they didn’t correspond to the liberal view of the world. So you had a liberal voice on the major networks that pretended to be fair and balanced, while pushing an extremely liberal agenda.

That was countered, initially, by William F. Buckley, who really brought advocacy journalism to the fore, because he was such a superb and eloquent speaker and writer. He had the first point-counterpoint TV show that I know of. It was called Firing Line. That was really the father of the type of show that ultimately produced Crossfire and then lots of other programs in which they had people from the left – I’m Tom Braden, and from the right – I’m Pat Buchanan, right?

DH: They got to hear both sides. So Buckley gave rise to shows that were honest in the sense that didn’t pretend they had no agenda. I’ll never forget when I was on the Hannity show one time, Hannity and Colmes, and Hannity said “that’s a pretty conservative statement” and I said “I’m a rightie, I am a conservative”. To which Colmes responded “and I’m a lefty and here’s my view”. And I thought that was appropriate. We were both half kidding, but the point was that Colmes was identified as being a liberal and he proudly stated it. Now I thought that was much more honest than to have one of the old major network stars essentially pretending to be even-handed when they certainly were not! So this point-counterpoint journalism became very popular because I think the American people like the honesty. They like hearing both sides, when people prepped their remarks with the fact that they WERE coming from a particular point of view.

Getting back to Rush; Rush Limbaugh is a conservative. He’s a proud conservative and he calls himself that. And I think that the open advocacy of conservative positions has been good for the country and healthy for the country. And I think to some degree he has been the model for lots of folks. I think lots of people who first heard Limbaugh talk, while driving down the street or listening at home, said ‘I like that guy and I agree with that”. So I think Rush is one of those guys who has successfully transmitted the logic of conservatism to millions of Americans. That makes him VERY valuable.

AJM: No, obviously not. I think he wrote two books and both were multi-million sellers.

OK. The last one for today, I want you to take on, is one of the founders. Benjamin Franklin. Have you studied up on him?

DH: Some, but not a lot. But I think one of the most telling things that Ben Franklin did was at the Constitutional Convention, in 1787. At a time when the founding fathers were deadlocked, they were trying to put together the foundation of this new country, they were reviewing what small amount of precedent there really was for such a new form of government, and they were having fights. Some of them had left. And Ben Franklin rose, and I’m paraphrasing him, but he gave a speech in which he said essentially: ‘When we thought we were going to lose our heads to the British, we prayed to God to protect us, and He did.”. He said, ‘we ought to do the same thing now.’ He further said, paraphrasing, ‘that if a sparrow can’t fall to the earth with out God noticing, how can a great nation rise without His support?’

And Franklin sat down, and I think it was James Monroe who moved to have prayer lead off the Constitutional Convention meetings. That was quickly seconded. That speech unified, and gave a sense of a renewed purpose to the delegates. They went to work and they produced a constitution.

I think that was symbolic of Franklin. It was a leadership of wisdom that this great man brought to the country.

AJM: Exactly. That’s what I’d say. He was the wise man behind the curtain. Because he didn’t say a lot during the debates.

DH: It’s been said that when he gave that speech, as recorded at the time – though this is one of those things that even if he didn’t do it he should have – it was observed by either Madison or Monroe that George Washington BEAMED when Franklin gave that speech.

AJM: Because he’s too big of a subject to cover in a sound bite. But I just want to throw in on Franklin; I’ve read several biographies as well as his autobiography. An amazing man from start to finish. And I think also his diplomacy in France, to a large extent, helped us win that darned war.