Chuck's Interview with Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-FL 1) April 24, 1997Chuck Baldwin: Thank you for calling Congressman Joe.Joe Scarborough: Hey, Chuck, how are you doing?
Chuck Baldwin: I'm doing fine, Sir. Thank you for calling the program.
Joe Scarborough: It is good to call. I received your fax about what was going on this week and thought I would give you a call.
Chuck Baldwin: Well I'm glad you did.
Joe Scarborough: I'm really sorry to hear about your mother, really sorry. We got a call a couple of days ago from Nan telling me what had happened. It happened, I guess, fairly quickly, huh?
Chuck Baldwin: Yes it did. She was taken to the hospital a week ago Sunday and she passed away on Thursday. She was in a coma all that time. She had a hemorrhage in the brain. She was 84 and had Alzheimer disease and had been ill for a few years. But her death was quite sudden and unexpected.
Joe Scarborough: Yea, I know it is always tough. My grandmother had been having Alzheimer type conditions for a couple of years. But that still doesn't erase the shock when somebody finally passes on.
Chuck Baldwin: No it doesn't. Thank you very much for your condolences.
Joe Scarborough: Well, how are things going there?
Chuck Baldwin: Doing well Joe. I have been out of touch with you for a little while. We have a concerted effort taking place by some NEA affiliated folks who are making it their number one priority to try and get this program off the air.
Joe Scarborough: Oh, really!
Chuck Baldwin: Yea! They are calling our sponsors and trying to intimidate them and keep them from supporting the program. But it is having just the opposite effect. The more the sponsors are hearing from these critics the more determined they are to support the program. In fact, they are doing more to convince sponsors stay on board than anything we've done recently.
Joe Scarborough: That doesn't surprise me. What do they say though. What do they say on why somebody should take away your right to speak on the air.
Chuck Baldwin: Isn't that amazing! These people who ostensibly are the vanguards of tolerance...
Joe Scarborough: Yea, right.
Chuck Baldwin: ...can't tolerate a one-hour talk show that presents a different point of view. Well, they're saying that we are hate-filled, mean-spirited, right-wing radicals. Things like that. The typical stuff.
Joe Scarborough: We've heard that before. What I find is that the people that call me the radical the most are those who are the radicals themselves. It's a very planned out, very calculated game-plan and strategy that they've been employing since the early 1960's when they employed plans to go and march into the streets and take over college campuses and burn draft cards and burn down college campuses and lose wars. And, of course, in the 70's they decided that the college campuses they tried to burn down and destroy would be where they'd go to become tenured professors and spread their radical beliefs to another generation. In the 8O's they took over Hollywood, the news media and Madison Avenue. In the 90's some of these sixties radicals who said they loathed the military took over the White House. It's just a very planned out, very calculated attempt to tear down all the institutions that made America what it was. It isn't just American jingo-wisdom. You can go back and talk about them wanting to tear down the institutions that made Western civilization great over the past 2,000 years. It is just very calculated and we've got 2,000 years of history on our side. And they've got 30 years of radical left-wing ideology on their side. I think we're going to win this battle.
Chuck Baldwin: I do, too. Isn't it amazing,though, that these who cry 'tolerance' the loudest, already own the national news media. They own the newspaper here. (Ideologically I'm talking about.) They have the print and visual media. And here is one program and they are scared-to-death and have made it their number one object for getting up in the morning to get this show off the air. It is incredible.
Joe Scarborough: You know there is nothing more dangerous then an uninjured martyr! And by trying to turn you into a martyr they just give you more reason to speak louder and get more people interested and involved. It's part of a trend. The information age has obviously come to a full blooming and we're moving beyond an industrialized state and an industrialized era that adds centralizing forces not only on industry but also on information. You know we had, until the 1980's, our news shaped by four or five major outlets: CBS, ABC, NBC and the New York Times and possibly the L.A. Times from the west coast. All other media outlets fed off the information that came from those outlets. Then, with the information age explosion things have changed. Talk radio has sprouted up all across the nation. The Internet and other media outlets have taken that centralized power away from these people that have agendas that I consider to be radical and I think most Americans consider to be radical. And you see an independence that is starting to infiltrate, not only these alternative media sources but also mainstream media. And it is something that can't stand. It wasn't a coincidence that after over 200 Americans were brutally murdered in the Oklahoma City bombing of a couple of years ago that the President of the United States used that tragedy to go after talk radio. It's very calculated and they're horrified by the growth of power in people that they consider to be the great unwashed that live in the fly-over space between New York and L.A. We are not elites. We didn't go to their colleges. We didn't hang out in their clubs, their organizations and we're considered to be too stupid to know what's best for us. And that's what scares them so much, that the American people actually have devices like this radio show and other radio shows and the Internet to actually circumvent the radical left and the instruments of information that they've seized and controlled for the past thirty years.
Chuck Baldwin: Well, they are losing their monopoly on information and, therefore, they are losing influence over the minds of the people and that's why they're so fearful.
Joe Scarborough: And it is only going to get worse for them.
Chuck Baldwin: Right.
Joe Scarborough: It really is. This is not a conservative Republican talking. I think you can hear a lot of other people say the same things that the liberals of the left have turned into the elite, the ruling elite. And they're going to do everything they can do to support the existing status quo that they have created over the past 20-30 years. And they will do absolutely everything they can to seize and gain control of power, including committing felonies, wire-taping. We saw that come to full circle when we saw that the Martins from central Florida today pled guilty to federal wire-taping charges. That's going to take down, I predict, a few left-wing Congress people.
Chuck Baldwin: Like, Jim McDermott? Is he going to be held accountable?
Joe Scarborough: Well, I think he is. The Martins are now cooperating. But, you know, if you look at their background this has sort of been an unholy marriage of a lot of different sources of the unions, the NEA, liberal party members, of activists. Sort of anti-conservative groups have gotten together and have done whatever they could to destroy conservatives across the country. And we see that this isn't morning in America this is really morning after an America. We're seeing the results of 30 years of radical left-wing extremist ideology. And I guess the biggest surprise for me is that the rest of America has stood by quietly for so long and allowed radicals to call them radicals!
Chuck Baldwin: Right. I got a copy of the video tape that your office sent me when you and an ACLU attorney went head-to-head on the Ten Commandments being posted on the courtroom walls in Alabama. Joe, I thought you did a masterfuljob. That was tremendous.
Joe Scarborough: Here you had a lady that was talking about how radical people were for supporting a judge putting the Ten Commandments on the wall and claimed that she was doing her best to protect the constitution. We just simply pointed out to her that the father of the Constitution, the man who framed the Constitution, James Madison, said that the Founders had staked the entire future of American civilization, not on the power of government, but on the capacity of people to follow and live by the Ten Commandments of God.
Chuck Baldwin: Right.
Joe Scarborough: If Madison is talking about the Ten Commandments of God being the guiding principle of this civilization, American civilization, at the same time he was drafting the Constitution how could somebody come up and claim to be trying to protect the Constitution by trying to eviscerate our heritage and our history. And want to clarify it in case any of your listeners have a misunderstanding. This is not about religion. This is about our heritage. It's about the moral code and the standard that was raised by the Founding Fathers of this country to be the guidepost to direct us into the 19th, 20th and the 21st century. And we have to follow those guideposts or else we'll lose our way.
Chuck Baldwin: Joe, I'm a little concerned about the Senate side of things today, the Chemical Weapons Treaty. I know that the House doesn't vote on that. All the reports that I read are showing it 50/50 either way. What are you hearing up there?
Joe Scarborough: Well, it was considered dead until Senator Dole sort of came out of retirement and making Visa commercials and loaning the Speaker money to say that he now supports it and, in fact, was at a press conference with the President. Trent Lott has stated that he was opposed to it but is starting to now speak in more conciliatory tones. I can't believe that either of those actions bode well for those of us who are concerned about it and see it as really just a papering over of difficulties that will tie our hands but not the hands of Gadhafi and the leaders of Iran and other terrorist states that are not going to abide by this treaty.
Chuck Baldwin: If Trent Lott caves on this, then as far as I'm concerned, his credibility as a conservative leader is very suspect. This is a draconian treaty. What's with these guys? Who was it that said 'they are our guys until they go to Washington, D.C. Then, all of a sudden, they're not our guys anymore?' Is it endemic to Washington, D.C. Is it the day-to-day pressure of the mainstream media? What causes otherwise good men to lose their resolve and courage when they get to Washington?
Joe Scarborough: I don't know that they lose their resolve or their courage. I think what they lose is their perspective. Steve Largent, myself and the 'gang of eleven' that took down the rule and almost took down the Speaker a few weeks ago were in a meeting yesterday. And we were going around the room and Steve Largent, who is as strong as anybody, was asked what he thought about what our strategy could be? 'I just got to go back to what I was thinking this weekend when I was back in Oklahoma,' he said. 'I think a lot more clearly in Oklahoma than I do in Washington.' That's the case. I mean, you come here and you are surrounded by 435 House members and 100 Senators and a news media. You come into a very hostile environment and it is very easy to get 'Stockholm Syndrome' unless you have a bedrock core of beliefs and ideologies that will guide you up here. That's why business people that are Rotarians, that don't have a hard, fast ideology like Ronald Reagan can come up and get knocked around so much because you are besieged with so much information that sometimes it can become overwhelming. I catch myself sometimes in meetings going into the meeting saying I believe in this position and then I sit there for an hour and I listen to twenty members who are very articulate, who are very intelligent, who are very gifted in their abilities to persuade. You sit there and go, you know that's a good point. And that's a good point. And that's a good point. Pretty soon you are saying, 'Gee that is the reasonable position. How could I have ever been raised in such a way that would make me come down on such an unreasonable side. I should be ashamed of myself.' And then you walk out of the room and yell 'Hey, Wait a second! Those were really nice speeches. And they know how to string words and images together but that doesn't change reality.' So, you go back and you have to have a test, a standard test, that you filter all this information through or else you're going to be guided by emotions instead of by principles.
Chuck Baldwin: What happened to HR 400? Was that voted on yesterday?
Joe Scarborough: We actually voted on some amendments and the last amendment that we voted on changed it to such a degree that the final one didn't come up because it protected small businesses, protected small owners, individuals. What it did was just totally gutted the bill so they didn't even bother bringing up the final bill.
Chuck Baldwin: Well, terrific! That is good news! Finally, something good out of Washington.
Joe Scarborough: You take it wherever you can get it. But there are going to be more battles in the coming weeks. Boy, you know it never gets easier up here. If you are in the minority and just want to vote 'no' on everything it is pretty easy. But if you're in the majority and you're trying to move things forward and you're trying to work together with people to balance the budget, to get tax relief, to get rid of some of these programs that are so wasteful it's hard because they put together these budgets that may balance the budget in six years or so but there is so much garbage thrown in there that you just say, 'How could I ever vote for that?' So, you're sitting there and wondering whether great is the enemy of good or whether good is the enemy of great and whether you should vote yea or nay. Obviously, there are some people in my district that would like me to vote 'no' on absolutely everything and beat my chest in self-righteous indignation and say, 'Hey, I'm better than everybody else. I'm morally pure.' But I'm sort of beyond that now.
Chuck Baldwin: I think most reasonable people are. And I agree with you that is a self- righteous position to take.
Chuck Baldwin: Joe, I'm way over for a break. Can you hold or do you need to go?
Joe Scarborough: Actually, I've got a meeting I've got to run to, but I wanted to tell you that we're thinking about you and that we're praying for you. And, I look forward to getting that group of people together every week that you mentioned in the fax; and the sooner the better. We've got to get together to plan and pray for this country.
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