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https://www.mediaite.com/tv/pranksters-trick-newsmax-into-interviewing-fake-paul-wolfowitz-twice-and-the-impersonator-didnt-even-try-to-sound-like-him/





For 11 full minutes (complete transcript below, and back story here),
Tom Basile of NewsmaxTV allowed Andy Bichlbaum (posing as Basile's
"friend" Paul Wolfowitz) to tell hundreds of thousands of Newsmax
viewers that the $2.1T war in Afghanistan, begun in 2001, was a complete
waste of money. "It's very clear $2 trillion could have gone to things
that Americans could now be proud of, instead of a 20-year unwinnable
war," said Bichlbaum to the perpetually fooled Tom Basile live on the
air. "The next time we have two trillion dollars lying around, let’s
spend it on something useful like health care or education." Here is a
complete transcript fo the show:

Tom Basile: Welcome back to America Right Now.
It has been a week since Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, and still tens
of thousands of Americans and Afghanis are still trapped in the country
facing an uncertain future.
To get his views on how we got here, and how we move forward, former
Deputy Secretary of Defense under President George W Bush, someone who
is an architect of our national response after 9/11, Paul Wolfowitz, he
joins us on the phone.
Mr. Secretary, good to have you with us

Andy Bichlbaum (as "Paul Wolfowitz"): Great to have you. Thank you.

TB: So we are nearing the 20th anniversary of 9/11. You were there at
the beginning. Successive administrations have openly questioned our
engagement in Afghanistan and even dismissed it, but maintaining the
status quo was an important operational objective that we were achieving.
Did you believe that the the mission in some form should have continued?

AB: Oh absolutely, Tom, that goes without saying.
You know there's been a lot of talk about how President Biden ended this
war in Afghanistan, and on what we have to do now.
But there's very little about the fact that Biden did end this war.
And of course we do have to rescue our allies — I wrote recently about
this in the Washington Post [sic]. And every single Afghan who needs to
get out of there should be able to do so.
But Tom, what the piece in the Wall Street Journal is truly about is
that a sitting president, right, in the office of president,
unnecessarily ended a war for no reason at all.
Because let's be honest, Tom — there just aren't a lot of things that ordinary Americans can be proud of these days.
We know that other prosperous countries have it better in health care, infrastructure, education, elder care, food options, and income.
And if you take away our global dominance, we're left with a whole lot
of nothing.
Biden should have waited till he at least got something passed in terms
of health care and education, for example, or even just transport and infrastructure.
But with nothing to show Americans why America's great, dominance in a
place like Afghanistan is all we've got to keep us away from that ledge.
Now of course two trillion dollars could have been spent building stuff
that people want, instead of going to big defense contractors and
shareholders.
But that's all milk under the table, Tom.
And the point is, ending a war with nothing at all to replace it is the pinnacle of irresponsibility.
When you've got crumbling infrastructure, rising addiction and death
rates, poor food options, substandard education, expensive health care
and so on — Americans just can't be proud of that.
But they can be proud of a war, even if it's unwinnable, even if it
lasts 20 years, even if it's been a failure from day one, in my
administration.
That's what we've lost and that is truly tragic, Tom.

TB: Mr. Secretary, you want to talk about that op-ed that you wrote in
the Wall Street Journal last week offering the administration five steps
that they should take to protect our citizens and Afghans? It was it was
a very adult thing to do. You said, let's talk about all the stuff that happened before later, let's talk about what the operational needs are now. That and those folks need to get out of the country.
Walk us through some of those and whether you believe the administration
is taking those actions at this point.

AB: Well, it's really hard to tell. I'm not the administration of
course, so all I can do is observe from a distance.
I was in the administration that began the war, and I have to say that
in retrospect it's very clear that two trillion dollars could have gone
to a lot of things that Americans could now be proud of, instead of a
20-year unwinnable war and the dismal failure that we have seen.
There's a lot of factors in this dismal failure you know — it's not fair
to put it all on the footstool of president Biden.
But it is a failure and that is the key thing here.
Americans cannot be proud of a failure, they cannot be proud of this
war, this 20-year war.
They could have been proud of many things that two trillion dollars
would pay for, such as superior education, or free education, and health
care, and so on and so forth, all the things that Americans want,
including everything that's in this infrastructure bill and beyond.
But it's gone to the Lockheed Martins of the world instead.

TB: Mr Secretary, I want to, I want to stick on foreign policy.
You're on the board of No One, of an organization called No One Left Behind.
So talk to us about that organization and what they are doing, uh, in
the here and now, to help those who are stranded under Taliban rule.

AB: Of course. Well, we are doing everything in our logistical capacity,
which is frankly, Tom, not that much.
I mean we're talking about a large country with millions of people.
If every single Afghan man, woman, and child who deserves to get out of
there — which is every single Afghan man, woman, and child — let's be frank, every single one of them deserves to get out of there — then
there is no way that an organization which is at the end of the day a
small organization can possibly help with that.
The entire US military could not possibly help with that either.
The fact is that there are a lot of people who will remain and it's not
going to be a pleasant situation.
It could have been a better situation, certainly for people in
Afghanistan. For Americans though, 300 million Americans, what this
means is that there is one less thing left to be proud of, and without
the sorts of things that we should have here at home that leaves pretty
much nothing at all to keep us away from that cultural ledge, let's call it.

TB: Okay, now, now, um, so, so that organization is not, is not
assisting, you're saying that their, what, their efforts is not,
they're, they're not actually helping?

AB: Well, we're certainly assisting. That organization is doing
absolutely the best it can. But that's kind of nothing compared to a
20-year war that cost two trillion dollars that could have been spent on
things that Americans would need.
We have rising death rates from addiction, rising addiction rates, less
and less access to education, lower incomes, etc.
And none of that is what that two trillion dollars went to over 20
years, so from day one it was a little bit of a….

TB: Well, I mean, and just, just to be fair, I mean, we've spent
trillions of dollars on loads of of public assistance and welfare
programming and other things over the course of the 20 years here
domestically. Um. I, but i want again, i want to, I want to stick with
the foreign policy, and, and this and the war on terrorism and, and you
and i stood together after the bombing of the Al Rashid hotel in Baghdad
as the casualties were being brought out there. You have comforted the
families of the fallen, you have stood behind that podium at the
Pentagon that we all watched earlier, you've seen firsthand.
Many Americans feel that the war on terrorism, Islamic terrorism is real.
Now the Obama administration tried to scrub the global war on terrorism
from our lexicon and foreign policy.
And i want to play for you a clip from President Biden's interview the
other day — just take a listen to this.

INTERVIEWER: "Are you committed to making sure that the troops stay
until every american who wants to be out is out?"
Biden: "Yes"
INTERVIEWER: "How about our Afghan allies, does the commitment hold for
them as well?"
Biden: "The commitment holds to get everyone out, that in fact we can
get out and everyone should come out, and that's the objective. That's
what we're doing now, that's the path we're on, and i think we'll get
some…." [fades]

TB: Uh, that was the wrong clip. But what i really wanted to play for
you, Mr. Secretary, was that the president seems to continue to talk
about Afghanistan within sort of the context just about Al-Qaeda. Um,
why don't people in Washington understand that, that our, our dealings
with, and our national security concerns with respect to terror groups,
uh, and those of our allies, uh, is not just about Al Qaeda or Bin
Laden, it's broader than that?

AB: Well, look, Tom, there have been a lot of mistakes here. There have
been a lot of mistakes from day one.
Talking about the Taliban as being the same as Al Qaeda or what have you
— I haven't heard that clip but I'll take your word for it — is a mistake. And pulling out of Afghanistan without anything to show for it, without anything to show here or there, is a mistake.
But there have been mistakes made from the get-go, from the
administration that i was a part of, enormous mistakes.
The last administration also, when President Trump met with the Taliban
and conceded an enormous amount of things to them in advance — that was
a mistake.
There have been certainly Obama, President Obama's, uh, you know,
whitewashing or whatever you want to call it, of the record — was a
mistake.
Um, the whole, I would say the whole 20-year war has been one colossal
mistake that was fairly easy to predict.

TB: But what do we do now, Mr Secretary, and especially since you were
you were there at the beginning, you were one of the architects of of
the global war on terrorism which I was a part of, and I was a part of,
and I also believe you know did actually, uh, did actually achieve
certain things, and we can always weigh the cost benefit analysis but,
uh, but where do we go from here given the, the reality of today?

AB: Yes, no, point taken, Tom.
The question is where now, and after a 20-year error and two trillion
dollars going to defense contractors and so on, I think one thing we can
do from here, besides evacuate everybody that's possible to evacuate, is
learn from our errors.
And in the future when we have two trillion dollars lying around we give
it to causes and rebuilding here at home that is deserving, that will
create the kind of conditions that Americans can be proud of well into
the future. This has happened before in America, it can happen again.
We don't need to repeat mistakes.
Afghanistan itself was of course from the beginning a repeated mistake,
you know — there was the British foray, the Russian foray, and then our foray.
We had had other forays that had ended up terribly tragic, I don't even
need to remind you what those are.

TB: Yeah.

AB: I think what we can do today is simply learn from our mistakes and
the next time we have two trillion dollars lying around we do something
useful with it instead.

TB: Yeah, and again I am, Mr. Secretary, i'm not entirely sure how
spending trillions on, on, on, on roads, which may be necessary here
from a domestic policy standpoint, actually, uh, improves or, or
protects this country from a national security standpoint.
Uh, but we do appreciate you spending some time with us and, and
appreciate your service to the country, former Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
Thank you so much for your time sir.

AB: Thank you so much, Tom.

TB: Still to come, we are tracking Hurricane Henri as he is making his
way up the Northeast. That story is next.

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