9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America

Interview With Brion McClanahan

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Brion McClanahan, author of 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America: And Four Who Tried To Save Her is on the Dude Maker Hotline.  One of the other things that bothers me, and ought to bother everyone out there listening to this about this, about the USDA, what else that has done.  It has removed the beautiful and traditional necessity of having farms near where you live so your meat is grown the same place your tomatoes are.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Brion McClanahan:  I think you pointed out something very important.  It’s the transition there.  Before Roosevelt, you didn’t have chief legislators.  With Roosevelt you get that.  If you go back to the founding generation and you look at how they’ve sold the presidency, they said, even Hamilton said, the president is not going to be the chief legislator.  He can’t do that.  He has no control over commerce, which essentially is legislation.  He has no control over the purse.

I think that when you look at Roosevelt, he’s so important because he comes up with the idea that he is now going to be involved in the legislative process, initiate legislation, and he’s going to push the agenda.  He called it the bully pulpit.  Not only is he making recommendations, he’s actually doing things.  He says in his autobiography: I did things that obviously people would claim are unconstitutional.  He’s not saying that directly but he’s implying that.  I let Congress debate me not the Constitution.  Roosevelt is going to seize the agenda and do things knowing full well that they probably have some legal problems with it, but he doesn’t care.  He was saying that about the Panama Canal.

The way he got the Panama Canal was so underhanded.  He helps Panama secede from Nicaragua without congressional approval.  This is a secret mission to do so.  So Panama breaks away from Nicaragua.  Then he signs a deal to get Panama.  This should never have happened.  Congress should have been involved in this process but they weren’t.  He does it to get the Panama Canal.  It’s a great thing, we got the Panama Canal, because we gave it back.  That’s a great thing.  The way he did it was unconstitutional.  I think we should hold him accountable for that.

Then, of course, you look at all the progressive legislation that he wanted, things like the Pure Food and Drug Act, the FDA, all these things that we look back and say: My gosh, these are huge regulatory agencies.  It was pointed out at the time that the people hurt most by this were the little guys, not the big companies.  They were already regulating.  They already had rules in place to try to ensure that meat was better and our food wasn’t contaminated.  Now with these new regulations, it was more expensive.  All the little guys were shut out; they went out of business.

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Actually a nice modern example of that is tobacco.  When the Master Settlement Agreement was signed back in the late ‘90s with the tobacco companies, the little guys were the ones that were crushed.  People like Philip Morris, which is Marlboro, they could afford all the regulations.  They could afford to pay all these big, huge sums of money to cancer victims.  The little companies were crushed by it.  Now they can’t make it – Marlboro will always be the number one cigarette because of that Master Settlement Agreement.

If you go back to the early 20^th century, that’s what you find with your meatpacking industry.  Most people don’t realize the people that went out and inspected the meatpacking industry, they had no idea what they were doing.  They’d never been to a meatpacking plant before.  Upton Sinclair had never been to one.  They actually took a line out of there, which I thought was really funny, about The Jungle.  Upton Sinclair couldn’t believe what he was writing because he made it all up.  They took that out and kind of softened it a little bit.  He didn’t believe what he was writing.  He made everything up.  He had never been to a meatpacking plant.  Just like Harriett Beecher Stowe had never really been to a plantation in the South to see what it was like there.  You have these very transformational books in American history like The Jungle or Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Unfortunately, people that are writing them are making things up as they go.  It has an impact on policy.  Roosevelt was fully caught up in this.  He wasn’t a socialist, but he was fully caught up in this drive to reform America.  He was an awful president.

Mike:  The Green Bay Packers are named after, that’s the Green Bay meatpackers.  Most people don’t know that.  What’s a packer?  A meatpacker.  Back in the ‘20s and ‘30s when football first came around, if you said packers, people would have known they were talking about meatpackers.

One of the other things that bothers me, and ought to bother everyone out there listening to this about this, about the USDA, what else that has done.  It has removed the beautiful and traditional necessity of having farms near where you live so your meat is grown the same place your tomatoes are.  They’re not gassed with a bunch of preservative gasses, argon or whatever they gas the tomatoes with so they don’t die because they have to ship them to us from California.  They are grown locally.  The meat is grown and packed locally.  Then you know the farmer.  If it’s rotten, the farmer is probably not going to sell it to you because you’ll go to his ranch and burn it down.

McClanahan:  You’re right.  This large industrial complex we have for food is a byproduct of these things, and they were fine with it.  The other thing that I put in the book that’s really funny is the spelling board.  Texas will rejoice because Roosevelt thought he could just rewrite the entire spelling in the United States.  We’re just going to change the spelling of things, and I’m going to do it through the executive branch.  We’re going to adopt these spelling board recommendations and instead of phonetic “ph,” just make it “f.”  We’re going to change all this.  Congress said: You can’t do that.  You can’t unilaterally decide this.  They blocked him.  Still, Roosevelt was trying to do it.  He is such a transformational figure.  Most Republicans love this guy.  He’s awful.

Mike:  Brion McClanahan is our special guest.  The book is 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America: And Four Who Tried To Save Her.  As Brion said, you might be able to get a very discounted copy of The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution, also by Mr. McClanahan.  If you get it at Amazon, go ahead and get a copy of Is Davis a Traitor? and all your American history / constitutional reading is done for the year.

I want to skip the other usual suspect, the other Roosevelt.  Let’s go to the next one here, which most people will not perceive that Truman screwed America up.  I haven’t read your chapter on it, but I do know enough about some of the things that Truman did.  Number one, and I say this without trying to bait you into a conversation or a debate over – I only say it because I’ve read Buchanan’s book on it and I’ve done a lot of research and reading on this.  Truman is the one that takes over for Roosevelt and, against the wishes of Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz, decides he’s going to go ahead and detonate a nuclear ordnance device over a monastery in Nagasaki or Hiroshima, Japan.  It is Truman that makes the nuclear world the nuclear world.  We can argue, [mocking] “Yeah, but they were doing this . . . .”  They never detonated one.  Truman detonated one.  You can’t give the guy a pass.  Why do you put Truman – if Mike was writing the book, I’d start the chapter with that.  You didn’t have to, obviously.  Why did you put Truman in?

McClanahan:  First of all, I couldn’t put that in there because, if you look at whether that was constitutional or not, you can make an argument it was.  We’re at a time of war.  You can say dropping an atomic bomb is inhumane, but is it constitutional.  I think you can make a case it is.  Absolutely you’re correct.  Truman wanted to show the Soviet Union we weren’t afraid to use the big stuff.  That’s what he called the nuclear bomb, “the big stuff.”  We’re going to use the big stuff on the Japanese and those commies over there in the Soviet Union, they’re going to avoid us.  That’s why he did it.  It’s purely political.

Taking that aside, Truman was a guy that was going to put Franklin Roosevelt on steroids.  Franklin Roosevelt has his second Bill of Rights, which he famously issues just before he died.  Truman says: Hey, this is great.  We can take this and do this and call it the Fair Deal.  He starts calling for national healthcare.  He starts calling for a higher minimum wage, more government regulation.  Take your pick of things, better housing, all these things that we would consider to be the modern leftist talking points.  It all comes out of that second bill of rights.

What Truman is going to do is actually ingenious.  He takes all these government agencies that were created by World War II, which were unconstitutional during the war, all these departments that were created to regulate the economy, control production, spending, consumption, these kinds of things.  He just rolls them into a new bureaucracy with a different name.  We have them still.  He keeps this stuff in place because when the Korean War begins, he just brings them back.  He says: Okay, we need to regulate the economy again.  We’re in a time of war.  We’ve got to control production.  We’ve got to control consumption.  We’ve got to control prices.  As a matter of fact, we’re going to go to war in Korea, but we don’t need congressional approval because this is a police action.  We’re fighting for the United Nations.

He’s abusing the Constitution that way as well.  People don’t call him out for this but they should.  The funny thing was, if you read his message to the public about why he’s doing this, you get the idea that North Koreans are going to be sending bombers over the United States to bomb us.  Last time I checked, they didn’t have any long-range bombers that could come bomb the United States.  This is for our own good, right?  We’re going to pay higher taxes and regulations.  This is for our own good.  Being a good, patriotic citizen is doing this stuff.

Of course, he nationalized the steel mill, just took it over.  He said: You guys are out on strike, so I’m just going to nationalize this thing.  Earlier on he wanted to do that, and he not only wanted to do that, he wanted to hang the labor leaders who were on strike.  This guy is completely off the rails for executive power.  Again, he’s Harry Truman.  He’s this populist guy.  People like him.  Of course, he wins World War II.  It doesn’t make sense if you look at the original Constitution.

Mike:  No, it doesn’t.  His list of atrocities is long.  I’d also say this.  Gutzman and Woods in their book Who Killed the Constitution, they have an entire chapter on Truman taking over, was it Bethlehem Steel?

McClanahan:  Yes.  It’s a great chapter.  I brought that up in the book.  I cited it.  It’s a fantastic chapter in that book on that.

Mike:  A court actually tells him that he can’t do that, right?

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McClanahan:  They do.

Mike:  Imagine that, a court actually intervenes and tells the president: How about no?

McClanahan:  Unfortunately the Congress nor the Court has done that enough.  Again, Truman kind of gets a pass.  People kind of skip over Truman.  They shouldn’t because Truman is just laying the groundwork for Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.  He’s doing the exact same thing.  Truman needs to be criticized as much as the others because he was just a complete wreck when it came to executive power.

Mike:  Brion McClanahan, author of 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America: And Four Who Tried To Save Her is on the Dude Maker Hotline.  As Brion said, you might be able to get a discount copy of The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution alongside this book at Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com.  We’re going to skip Obama because we bashed him enough to last another millennia.  You did zero in on Nixon.  This is kind of like Mike said, Brion said.  Mike was saying that Nixon gave us HMOs, a dumb move.  Nixon obliterated or

ended the gold standard singlehandedly, on his own after he was begged not to do it.  Dumb move.  I can’t count the other imbecilic things that Nixon did.  Why does Brion McClanahan have him on the cover of 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America?

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McClanahan:  You mentioned one of them, and I did bring up his bringing off a precious metals standard in 1973, which was unconstitutional.

Mike:  I can even tell you the date I’m so dedicated: August 18, 1973.

McClanahan:  It was completely unconstitutional.  There’s no doubt about that.  You look at all the regulatory agencies that we enjoy in the United States today, whether it’s the EPA or OSHA, take your pick.

Mike:  Enjoy?

McClanahan:  All these things we just sit back and enjoy with love in our life.  Nixon is the guy that created all this stuff through executive order.

End Mike Church Show Transcript