Transcript of Alan Keyes CPAC Interview

IronJack: Good morning. IronJack and The Shrew here at the Conservative Political Action Conference Washington D.C. year 2002, speaking today with a gentleman known very well to Free Republic, Dr. Alan Keyes.

The Shrew: We really appreciate you being here. You know how much support you've had from Free Republic over the years. You've gotten staff and supporters and lots of people have been backing you.

Keyes: Hahaha, when I get a chance! I love it. Uh, and I have appreciated it over the years, that not only the activism and the dedication of FReepers, cause these are folks who have stood forward and been the backbone of my campaign and have stood forward to help during the Clinton years to dramatize the harm that he was doing to the country, uh, it's taken a lot of courage and I believe that it's been an important contributing factor to the kind of results we've seen in helping to turn that situation around some. So …

The Shrew: For you as you've been a, on a media pundit circuit and gone in and, and helped correct the perception of conservatives and provided conservative issues and views, now you have your own show. How is that going for you? Are you enjoying it? Is it, congratulations by the way, it's a huge accomplishment to some degree …

Keyes: no, no, no, the accomplishment will be if people watch the show. Hahahaha

Keyes: I think that the very important thing is, I have insisted, and we're moving forward in a way that will have integrity, that will correspond to the conservative priorities and principles and values that I believe in. I think that it was very important to me in going into this to make sure that the program was going to basically be a vehicle to get across to the American people in a common sense way the views and principles of conservatism in a context where I'm meeting challengers and taking on comers, and we'll see where it goes because I believe that our case is so strong that we can face the strongest opponent, Dershowitz, whoever it might be on any issue, and we'll make sense.

The Shrew: Tell us about the sweater. That's one of the things that's generated a lot of comments …

Keyes: Well, let's …, what about the sweater? I was really surprised that such a fuss was made over the sweater. The idea of changing from the jacket to the sweater was simply in order to convey what I hope will be the feeling of the (inaudible) discussion. We have so many discussions on TV that are all about trying to pit people against each other and generate a whole lot of noisy, opinionated exchanges. That segment will reflect the diversity of viewpoints, but the idea is that people should be talking to each other, listening, trying to see the thread of logic and with a willingness to acknowledge when logic isn't there. So, if you're not making sense, a willingness to begin to see that. So I wanted something that would kind of reflect the feeling of informality. That's why we don't have people wearing coats and ties and things like this.

IronJack: One of the things that I was going to say is that that segment has a different format in appearances, a different segment in how you interact with the speakers. It's very different across the board.

Keyes: It also, by the way, has been in some ways I guess the segment that, because it's uncharacteristic of the way that particularly cable news television has approached these discussions, where you just bring on regular folks and see what they believe. And so there's a question that I hope will be answered in a positive way because I think it's very important to highlight the common sense of our people, to get back to an understanding that when we confront challenging issues, America is about people applying their common sense. It's not about a bunch of sheep looking for some experts who are going to tell them what to think.

IronJack: Now that was one of the points I think you made in your address a few minutes ago was that we don't need experts. We don't need experts to tell us how to dress. We don't need experts to tell us how to eat. We don't need the experts to tell us how to believe. That's a misconception and it's a way of, of appointing a few elitist shepherds because that way you don't have to own the sheep.

Keyes: Right. The very idea undermines the confidence people need for real self- government. If you're waiting for somebody to tell you what to think, then you're not somebody who is going to be able to cast a vote, make a decision, involve yourself, in political life in a way that really reflects your own interest, your own faith, your own values. And …

IronJack: Now, what does it take to do that? First of all it's going to take some kind of confidence, you've got to believe in yourself.

Keyes: I think it takes a sense of integrity. That's why I always include faith because it requires that you have an understanding of who you are.

Keyes: What you base your own sense of integrity on. And without that kind of a moral background, it seems to me you get lost. You're like a ship with no anchor or somebody who's trying to navigate without any idea of where the North Star is.

IronJack: And that mentality, that absence, that vacuum lends itself very well to the liberal mentality, which is tell me what to do, tell me where to go …

Keyes: It lends itself to passivity and it's the opposite, I think, of the kind of active responsible thinking that is characteristic of the conservative mind. The liberal mind is a consumer. Alright? It just sits back and is shaped by forces around it. And I think that's also a reflection of the liberal concept of our human nature. That we're like corks bobbing on the waves of our passions and so we have to give in to them and our forces in society and so we're determined by class structures and government power. That is not the understanding of our humanity that's at the heart of conservatism. Conservatism says that we have a foundation to stand on, of our own integrity, of individual responsibility, and that there is in the world a basis for our ability to make proper and correct free choices between the alternatives that are presented to us in a responsible way. We're not just sheep. We're not just followers. We're not just consumers. We're shaping the destiny of our community.

Keyes: Well, I believe ultimately that moral basis comes from a willingness to acknowledge, as our founders did, that we live in a world fashioned by our creator, with laws and principles that he has put in place that sanction our freedom and our dignity, and at the same time give rise to a sense of what our responsibilities are toward one another and toward our society. I think in that framework of a willingness to acknowledge the power of God as higher than our own will, we actually discover the basis for our own freedom.

The Shrew: In the course of the 2000 election, when you were running for President, you got 1.2 million votes in the election. Free Republic had lots of supporters, lots of impact on it, and right now what's happening on Free Republic in regards to your editorials and your show is, there's … we're generating thousands and thousands of not just hits, but actual responses and debate about your show.

The Shrew: And, and about you. One of the quotes … Can I read a quote to you and ask you to verify it?

The Shrew: "The burning question in my mind …", this is from you in a New York Times Magazine interview... "… the burning question in my mind for Bush is that on September 11 we witnessed the most egregious failure of America's national security system in our history. Why has no one been held accountable for that failure in your administration?"

Keyes: It sure is. Yes. I don't believe that we can properly face the challenge to our national security until we have gotten a clear answer as to what went wrong on September 11. Something did go wrong.

Keyes: The notion, the notion that we were struck by terrorists and it's inevitable that they have this kind of success! We can't accept this! That means we're all sitting ducks and we might as well give up spending all these billions. If we spend not billions, but hundreds of billions of dollars on a national security establishment, and at the end of the day, all our intelligence, all our satellites, all the money we spend can't keep the Pentagon from being the subject of attack by our enemies?

Keyes: This is a problem, okay? And we're not being honest with ourselves if we're not willing to hold accountable the government. This is regardless of administration, regardless of administration.

IronJack: Is it simplistic to blame Bill Clinton? Is it simplistic to blame his failure to maintain a viable intelligence committee?

Keyes: I don't know. The problem I have, and this is actually a question that's also obviously addressed to the Congress, how do we know what we ought to be doing right now? I think that the September 11 attack was the consequence of an assault on and erosion of our national security, particularly our intelligence apparatus, that has been going on off and on for decades. You go back to the Carter administration. You will find them blasting away and gutting our U.N. intelligence capabilities. You'll see during the Reagan years an effort to rebuild it fighting every step of the way against Democrats and other liberals in the Congress, right? Then you will come to the Clinton years which took up the same assault on our basic national security structure that we saw during the course of the Carter years and made it far worse as we all know. And then we come to the Bush years and, I've got to tell you, looking at the early months of the administration I saw a lot of talk about how we needed to cut this and restructure that.

Keyes: believe that what we should have been talking about from the word go, and I said this during the campaign was how we remedy the incredible damage that has been done to our national security.

Keyes: during the Clinton years. And so it wasn't until September 11 that we finally got this focus. Why did we wait?

Keyes: I don't know, a sudden epiphany on part of many people, but I have to tell you, it seems to me we won't know on the part of who or what until we start to take a good hard look at the background of these events and get some answers as to how we got into the shape we were in and why we weren't moving with expedition to do something about it. And I think that's something Congress needs to look at. How do we know what we should do to fight terrorism in the future if we haven't even gotten a clear idea of what went wrong on September 11 that let these people inflict such a blow on us, a coordinate attack . Remember what happened, a coordinated attack,

Keyes: People have been sitting around in this country doing their junk for several years some of them. And there was, there were obvious problems with coordination among our intelligence agencies and things of this kind. We need to get to the bottom of it and make sure that it is remedied.

IronJack: Aside from that lapse, do you think that President Bush and his administration are pursuing the war on terrorism with the proper vigor?

Keyes: I think we have to be all of us real careful when we're dealing with questions like that. The worst thing you can do is second guess people who are standing on the firing line while they're trying to fight people who want to kill you.

Keyes: I think we oughtn't to be distracting them from that, eh, very necessary effort with our kibitzing. Um, I think we can all of us have our views about what it takes to fight terrorists. I certainly express mine, but it seems to me that the response we made in Afghanistan was obviously necessary. We gotta put nations on notice. You help these people, you support them, you get in bed with them, and we're going to smack you down. And I think we need to serve notice and have effectively served notice with our work in Afghanistan on every country in the world. And we do need to follow up and look at them and say "Okay, you better back off or you'll be next!".

Keyes: The other thing I think personally we need to be sure of, I said it in my talk today, is that we have these people surely salted around the world, including at the moment probably Osama Bin Laden himself.

Keyes: Who knows where they are? I think they're in countries all over place including Europe because we know from the runup to this terrible terrorist episode that those cells were everywhere. They were in Germany, they were in France, they were in …

Keyes: And don't tell me that they aren't still there. We need to be taking effective action through our intelligence apparatus to identify who these people are and when we find them, we need to get them before they move. Not wait til they strike, not apprehend them after they've killed our people, but get to them and eliminate them before they move. And I think that that's essential.

The Shrew: One of the hottest trouble spots in the world right now is South Asia and you were in the Reagan administration weren't you an envoy in India?

Keyes: Well, I was a Consular Officer in Bombay. Yeah, I served a year and a half when I was first starting my career.

The Shrew: Do you have any insight into that part of the world that we should, our listeners should hear, about what we should be doing with Pakistan and India? I mean have they both technically (inaudible), we were talking to Frank Gaffney yesterday and we were discussing the detonation of weapons to intimidate each other and to show China they have them and…

Keyes: I think that it's very important for the United States to maintain its relations with both those countries because though we've had our ups and downs with India, I think that we have been in an era when there's a greater opportunity for us to access that government to continue to have an influence on it. We obviously have a relationship difficult and powerless with the Pakistani government because of the tremendous pressures that exist on that government in terms of its own internal lack of cohesion. But those difficulties cannot discourage us, I think, from trying to use the relationship there in order to avoid what I think would be a very very dangerous confrontation given both the presence of weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that at some point those materials might fall into the hands of some of these terrorists. That's true and we have an interest in making sure that it doesn't happen.

The Shrew: Dr. Keyes, we really appreciate your time today. Thank you for joining us.

IronJack: Like do you see us chasing the diplomatic solution as well as the military?

Keyes: Not always. Let me put it this way. Not always. I think that if by diplomatic solution you mean a solution that does not involve in some way the application of military force, no, there's not always. I think we should understand these things to be complimentary, that sometimes it is appropriate to make sure that you have used military force in such a way as to structure the context for discussion so the people understand. …

Keyes: Exactly. And at the same time, while you're pursuing that, we need to remember that the end result we're trying to achieve is peace. The end result we're trying to achieve is one that can only be achieved at the end of the day, through a negotiated process so that use of force will be in the context of that overall goal. But I think the idea that you can just talk these problems away through diplomatic means is a false idea, particularly when you're dealing with a threat like terrorism.

What have I missed?

You have missed a lot. Keyes despised Clinton and Gore, but he was very disappointed in GWB, and summarized his critique in this column: I am not a Bush Republican

Published just before 9/11.

After 9/11, he has felt a duty to support a nation at war, and he has felt substantial approval of the general line of policy taken by the Administration in military and foreign affairs.

And before 9/11, he had expressed some kind words for things Mr. Bush had done, but he also had uttered critical words, which are summarized in the piece I linked you to.

Thanks for the link.

Interesting column. But it seems clear to me that it was written by a man who had not yet fully recovered from the hurt feelings that he suffered in the 2000 campaign.

It's all different now. Keyes has his own show and is feeling better about himself again. He has now pledged to support Bush's reelection in 2004 and he never even hints at criticisms of Bush anymore, at least not in the shows I have been watching. I just can't hold it against him that he blew off a little steam last year when he was feeling wounded. He's only human.

Like I said before, I think Keyes is Bush's best friend on TV. O'Reilly and the other guys criticize Bush. But not Keyes. He consistently provides nothing but positive, constructive moral guidance.

By the way, do you think he's trying to maneuver himself into a position to take over for Cheney if Cheney's health keeps him off the ticket in 2004? That would be super, I think.

Interesting column. But it seems clear to me that it was written by a man who had not yet fully recovered from the hurt feelings that he suffered in the 2000 campaign.

I have to confess that I'm feeling a little bit ignorant right now with regard to that statement. I honestly do try to reasonably determine the truth of things when I am presented with any sort of information, and in the absence of my running for election in 2000, I had no feelings to be wounded, yet I had many similar criticisms of the Bush administration before I read any article condemning some of its policies. That includes federal control of education, failing to articulate, for the purpose of enacting, the principles of freedom and property ownership with respect to the confiscatory tax code, and several other issues I will not mention here because of their tendency to incite irrational discussion on this forum. The point is, what is clear to you--that Dr. Keyes was harboring ill feelings from the election--is not clear to me. In fact to me, the article seems well-reasoned and logical, which is the antithesis of an emotive response. I was hoping, therefore, you could point out to me those instances in the article that makes it clear, so I can see it as well.

Thanks.

I guess it has just been easier for me than for you to understand how personally devastating it must be for a politician to be rejected at the polls. It must be very painful, I think. Anyway, if you think that his criticisms last year sprang from the logical as opposed to the emotional side of his brain, maybe you can tell me:

1) Why Keyes now fully supports all of Bush’s policies?

2) Why Keyes never even hints at any criticism of Bush on his TV show?

3) Why Keyes has already pledged to campaign for Bush’s reelection in 2004?

You probably just hadn't thought of those things, had you? That's OK. Some are more cerebral than others.

One thing I think we have to do is draw a line between criticism of Bush and criticism of his policies. I've not read one article or heard one speech from Keyes critical of the Bush administration that has not been directly tied to one of his policies or statements...such as the article cited earlier.

I also don't think that because you "understand" how painful it "must be" to have someone else elected in front of you imparts on you any sort of clarity that is exclusive to you. What you offered is speculation, which is fine; people speculate all the time. What I'd like to see, if you can cite a quote or two, is something in particular from the article that makes it clear that Dr. Keyes is being emotional, and that it could not be an explanation of a logical conclusion Keyes drew based on the actions of the President and his administration. That, in fact, is what it seems to be to me. Whether or not Keyes was emotionally devastated is irrelavent if he doesn't allow that feeling to be demonstrated in his actions. Being critical does not necessarily prove an irrational response based on his hurt feelings.

As to the particular points in your post, I would disagree with number one entirely, and I haven't heard number three at all except from you, so I couldn't possibly address that unless you could supply a link or quote to the effect of your claim (even if it is true, though, I fail to see the importance to the question). I can cite simply the article to prove that Keyes is not fully supportive of Bush's policies, and I would offer a challenge to you to demonstrate where he has rescinded those earlier statements.

As to criticisms on his show, I offer again that the show is about issues more than it is about personalities. Why, for instance, cite a criticism of Bush when the question for understanding is the errant issue Bush is promoting? In his very first show, in fact, Keyes was critical of the use of military tribunals. Because he didn't turn it into a character assassination, which I maintain he has never done (although there is a small group here who disagree), doesn't mean he supports the policy. He made it clear that he does not.

Criticism is not the same as revolutionary dissent. It is a healthy element of any party or political system. Granted, some people see it as disloyalty, but done correctly I think it is demonstrative of the highest respect for the individual's intellect, character, and propriety. That is why, by the way, Keyes advocated voting for the Republican ticket after the primaries. A Republican electorate, he insisted, would be the best chance for conservatives to have representatives responsive to good people whose goal it is to keep them honest and on track.

I agree with you that it is useful to distinguish between personal criticisms of the President and criticisms of the President’s policies. And I also agree with you that Keyes has never publicly leveled any personal criticisms of the President. Even in his moments of greatest personal despair, Keyes never stooped to criticizing the President’s speech patterns, or gait, or manner of dress. The point that I have been making, however, is that Keyes no longer criticizes Bush or his administration at all. Surely, you’ve noticed this change.

What you are seeing on television now is the real Alan Keyes. Four nights per week. He is more mature than he was last year. He looks better and he feels better about himself. His “I am not a Bush Republican” days are behind him now. Forever.

There is no doubt that some of his more intemperate outbursts last year struck a chord of sorts with some disgruntled citizens. And some of those disaffected people (who are now known as “paleo-Keyesians”) still post and lurk on these threads.

However, the “neo-Keyesians” (and I am one) join Dr. Keyes in supporting the President and all of his policies. Like Dr. Keyes, we do not criticize the President and we have pledged to work hard for his reelection in 2004.

Welcome aboard.

"The point that I have been making, however, is that Keyes no longer criticizes Bush or his administration at all." I wouldn't go that far. I happened to be at a Pro-Life Banquet in Pennsylvania last Friday evening where Keyes was the keynote speaker. He was awesome, of course, but he did express again his disappointment with Pres. Bush concerning the Stem Cell Research decision. Coming from his strong pro-life viewpoint, Keyes feels that in spite of Bush's strong talk against the forces of 'Evil', that decision furthered Evil in our society. (Now don't flame me, Freepers, I'm not agreeing with that position; just reporting what Keyes said!...I happen to support the President on that decision.)

However, the “neo-Keyesians” (and I am one) join Dr. Keyes in supporting the President and all of his policies. Like Dr. Keyes, we do not criticize the President

Back when Jeffords was getting ready to defect, a pollster called me up and asked me, now that the Senate is going to the Democrats, whether or not it was time to rally behind the president's leadership.

I answered an emphatic "no," because it would naturally depend on where the President was planning on taking us. I didn't get an opportunity to give my explanation to the interviewer, however, and I was promptly dismissed. Your statement reminds me a lot of that phone call.

Once again, I have to point out that Keyes has had criticism of the Bush administration even since 9/11 with respect to the creation of the military tribunals. He made this criticism of policy on his very first show. Therefore I still fail to recognize your claim that he supports the President and all of his policies.

The problem with claiming absolutes is that your opponent only needs to show one example. :)

God bless!

Best of luck and thanks for the exchange.

Same to you, but let me assure you that my "sympathies," so to speak, do not lie with Senator Jeffords. I just believe, as I've stated, that public criticism and the resulting debate is not the end of a party, administration, or a free republic. In fact, they are signs of a healthy society. In each case, we analyze the opposing sides and make a decision on which parts to support. Blindly following any individual for the resulting "victory," in my opinion, is not a good idea. In our cases, we often end up with precisely the sort of regulation and oppression we sought to end. That's another discussion though.

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