Return to Transcripts main page
Parker Spitzer
Leaked Documents; Pence on the Economy
Aired November 29, 2010 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ELIOT SPITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening. I'm Eliot Spitzer. Welcome to the show. Kathleen Parker out tonight. E.D. Hill, a friend of the show, kindly stepping in.
Thank you much.
E.D. HILL, CNN ANCHOR: I hope you call me friend later on.
(LAUGHTER)
SPITZER: Absolutely.
HILL: Because when you -- get off track I'm going to pull you right back on.
SPITZER: No such thing as getting off track. Not when I'm talking.
Anyway, we have a great show tonight. You know the story that is dominating the entire world right now, E.D., is this WikiLeaks dump, and Secretary of State Clinton is outraged about it.
We will talk to Fareed Zakaria, our brilliant CNN foreign policy analyst, who's going to explain what it means.
And Ambassador Galbraith, who has been in Afghanistan for years. His world view about the corruption of President Karzai in Afghanistan, validated by so much of what has been put out there.
HILL: Yes, he kind of felt pretty good about some of this stuff.
SPITZER: Absolutely.
HILL: Plus he's played a foreign leader, senator and Vice President Dick Cheney, Richard Dreyfuss joins us to discuss his effort for bringing civility to real-life politics.
SPITZER: You got to love Richard Dreyfuss. His movies are unbelievable. Just love every one of them. I can't believe he's going to be here.
HILL: Really great.
SPITZER: He made "Jaws." I mean who can't imagine -- I mean, yes. It's great stuff. But anyway, this WikiLeaks dump, you know, what the cone of silence about diplomacy has been ripped away. There is simply nothing left.
Anything a foreign diplomat has said to American diplomats, it's out there in these cables. And it is revealed that Karzai and the government of Afghanistan is as corrupt as anybody ever thought. Bags of cash flying back and forth over the border. It is absolutely heinous.
American troops losing their lives to support a corrupt regime that simply isn't doing what it needs to do to further the interests that we believe our troops are there for. So I'm deeply troubled by this. Something that Fareed Zakaria and Peter Galbraith will talk about later in the show.
HILL: Yes, right after being ticked at the jerk, who would publish all this stuff?
SPITZER: Right.
HILL: And cripple diplomatic efforts worldwide, everybody just -- what it is -- ready to tear him apart.
SPITZER: Right.
HILL: You know I go on to --
SPITZER: You're ticked today.
HILL: I am. You know?
SPITZER: All right.
HILL: Why would you do this to us? Why would you do this to the world?
SPITZER: Well, you know --
HILL: It's hurting everybody.
SPITZER: This is what the global diplomacy of today is all about. They're all --
HILL: Lying? Lying?
SPITZER: Absolutely --
HILL: Pulling the wool over everybody's eyes? Playing with your enemy?
SPITZER: This is -- this is -- if people are surprised by this, they should read these cables carefully.
HILL: OK.
SPITZER: This is the level of duplicity and backstabbing and it is important that people understand the corruption of Karzai, the duplicity of the Middle Eastern leaders. This is the world we're navigating in pursuit of what we believe are our national interests.
HILL: OK. Call me naive, but when my country goes to Americans and says believe give us your sons, give us your daughters, and allow us to put them --
SPITZER: Right.
HILL: -- in the frontlines in a foreign country to fight for them -- you know I'm crazy, but I'm expecting that we get something out of it. I'm expecting that we get peace, that we get stability. At least in their government. I'm expecting we get a non-corrupt government.
SPITZER: Well, look, that is why --
HILL: And none of that seems to be happening.
SPITZER: But, E.D., that is why I do not believe we should have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. We are supporting a corrupt regime. We are not even fighting al Qaeda where it is located. We should be going after al Qaeda where it is, which is more in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
HILL: OK. Then you've got to beef up intelligence.
SPITZER: Absolutely.
HILL: Take the shackles off intelligence and interrogation techniques.
SPITZER: Absolutely. Well, no, no. You're mixing --
HILL: Pull the troops out and then let us do the job.
SPITZER: Torture will not be the answer.
HILL: I'm not saying torture. I'm saying convincing conversation.
SPITZER: Well -- right, OK. But what we need to do is use our assets wisely. The drone attacks are working. 100,000 troops in Afghanistan is not working. We are supporting a corrupt regime.
What we need to do is face up to the reality that that has been a failed policy. And I think that is something we will discuss with Ambassador Galbraith who was there and for years was saying Karzai is corrupt, don't put 100,000 troops there. It will lead to no good.
HILL: Can't we find someone who's not corrupt? I mean, excuse me. We have been helping to create the new government there. We can't find somebody better to work with?
SPITZER: Well --
HILL: If he's as bad as these cables are telling us and as bad as a lot of -- our experts are saying, there's no one better? SPITZER: Yes, but you remember what Afghanistan is. Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. For centuries nations have been trying to impose on Afghanistan governments that fit -- what they thought was good. Whether it's the Soviet empire, whether it is the United States, it has never worked.
All that happens is we lose our soldiers, we spend our money. At the end of the day, what existed in Afghanistan continues to exist and the empire leaves with its tail between its legs not having succeeded.
We should remember that history lesson and figure out what it is we're trying to accomplish because right now we're failing. We've got to figure out what it is we want to get out of that place and figure out how to get there easily but right now it's not succeeding.
HILL: That's shocking. Put our interests first?
SPITZER: Well, you know what? I think we're going to do that.
HILL: That's not the way we operate.
SPITZER: We're going to do that.
Anyway, for more on this diplomatic fallout, we're going to go into "The Arena."
Joining us now is host of CNN's "GPS", Fareed Zakaria.
Fareed, thank you for being with us. What does this WikiLeak dump really mean for our diplomacy for what's going on in Afghanistan and the Middle East? Talk us through it.
FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST, "GPS": Well, basically, it's welcome to the information age. You know this is inevitable in an age where information is rich, cheap, plentiful, and it's actually, in a strange sense, a sign of progress for the American government.
SPITZER: Why is that?
(CROSSTALK)
SPITZER: Wait, wait. This is counterintuitive. Explain this to us.
ZAKARIA: OK. For the last 15 years, we all kept hearing about how the American government was a dinosaur in the information age. We didn't share information, our computers didn't talk to one another.
In fact, one of the specific charges that was constantly levied about American government was that the State Department's computers did not talk to the Defense Department's computers.
Well, we now know that they do.
SPITZER: Wonderful. So we --
(CROSSTALK)
SPITZER: A hacker can break in to all of them simultaneously and this is progress.
ZAKARIA: Actually, no more. Because as of today the State Department put back up the firewall and said you know, that's enough.
SPITZER: Trust me, a good hacker will cut right through it. But it's a separate issue.
ZAKARIA: So the basic point is look, top secret clearances are held by 900,000 people. A lot of this stuff was just analysis and assessments of various meetings. So what I mean by welcome to the information ages, this is going to be awfully tough to cordon off.
That said, it is a huge embarrassment for the American government. It is a huge embarrassment because every diplomat who has ever dealt with foreign leaders now has their words and their reports and their secret cables being read by those same people whom they called, you know, erratic or angry or stupid or whatever it is.
HILL: Perhaps the secretary of state was using some of those. See, it's really not bad. We cast you in a good light. She was making all those calls to the allies trying to put out the fires. And here's what she said today at her press conference.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HILLARY CLINTON, SECRETARY OF STATE: So let's be clear. This disclosure is not just an attack on America's foreign policy interest. It is an attack on the international community. The alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity.
I am confident that the partnerships that the Obama administration has worked so hard to build will withstand this challenge.
(END OF VIDEO CLIP)
HILL: You know, from the secretary of state's perspective, she's trying to put a good face on it. How bad is the damage?
ZAKARIA: From her perspective it's pretty bad. I mean I would not want to take a look at her phone list for the next three or four days because she's got to call 100 people.
You know that's what I mean. There are all these minor embarrassments, but for her, major embarrassments in the sense that American diplomats have characterized certain prime ministers, foreign miners in certain ways.
HILL: People with big egos who don't want that out to the public.
ZAKARIA: Right. Right. Right. Now, you know, most of the -- the idea that Putin is regarded by the U.S. embassy as something of a thug, surely comes as no revelation for Putin either. But now there is a public face and he can extract something if he wants. So it's bad news for the diplomatic core for sure.
SPITZER: Look, there's the gossipy side of it, which is kind of amusing that you can put aside. Seems to me still the most interesting part is what the Arab Middle Eastern leadership were saying about Ahmadinejad and the Iranian nuclear threat.
And let's actually put in the screen here that has excerpts of what some of those cables said where you have Saudi Arabia saying, let's cut the head off the snake, referring to Iran, or the Bahrain leadership saying, whatever means necessary. Now that's basically -- and Egypt as well, as you can see on the screen.
Basically the Arab leadership saying to the United States and to Israel implicitly, do what you need to do to control Ahmadinejad.
Where does that take us going forward?
ZAKARIA: Well, what we now know -- and again, it's a confirmation -- is that the Arabs would very much like somebody else to deal with the Iranian threat.
SPITZER: Right.
ZAKARIA: This is a pattern of -- you know Arab behavior in some ways, I would say. They won't publicly denounce him for the most part. They won't rally coalitions around them, but they want the United States to do it.
Fine, but you know the United States cannot be placed in a situation where it has to bear all the costs of this. And so what I would hope is going on is that the United States is pushing back and saying look, you know, one of the things we need from you is some public declarations. So in that sense, this WikiLeak is actually good for American diplomacy.
HILL: If that happens. If that happens. But I think that that's what --
ZAKARIA: But it's now out. We now know --
HILL: Right.
ZAKARIA: -- that the Saudi government has been pressing the United States to do something on this.
HILL: You talk about, you know, we know this, we know that. You know people who spend a great deal of time as you do, as you do, studying this, yes, they're aware of how various governments, you know, act and, you know, what people think.
But I think to the American public in general, this is a real awakening to how much foreign governments turn to us to do their dirty work for them. Work which we get absolutely no credit for and usually a big kick in the pants.
So if we're looking for the silver lining, is it that the American public now sees this and either we hold our government accountable for where we're going and what we're doing? Or we demand more from other governments?
ZAKARIA: Well, I think that it's a very -- a very reasonable point. And I think that one of the things we will have to try and deal with going forward is the -- how do you deal with the embarrassment caused to other governments. So the Yemeni government and other interesting revelation is the Yemeni prime minister says look, we're going to pretend these bombs are ours when they're, in fact, Americans.
SPITZER: Bombs, just everybody know, that were being dropped on terrorist al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But frankly most people knew those were our bombs anyway, right?
ZAKARIA: Again, but he had publicly -- I guess the foreign minister says, yes, I just went to parliament and lied to them.
SPITZER: Right.
HILL: Right.
ZAKARIA: So this places the kind of strains and stresses on relationships where they want the Americans to do their dirty work, as you say, but they also want to retain some sense of national sovereignty. And that dance becomes more complicated when all these documents are revealed.
SPITZER: Well, write the next chapter. In other words, as the next month or two unfold, do the domestic politics in Saudi Arabia and Egypt force those leaders now to back off? Or can they say publicly, look, I was, in fact, talking honestly to the American leadership and the Iranian threat is what we should be worried about?
ZAKARIA: Well, interestingly of course, the next chapter might look very much like the current chapter because in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt they don't have a lot of press conferences. They don't have freedom of press. The king of Saudi Arabia does not have to answer to anybody.
So I suspect you will see a bit of the same, but yes, to the extent that marginally it helps they will probably be -- have to acknowledge that they have taken these kinds of positions. I think it helps the United States to be able to publicly acknowledge what was privately known.
SPITZER: And of course it still doesn't provide an answer to the underlying problem, which is there is no easy answer about what to do about Ahmadinejad and the nuclear threat.
ZAKARIA: The most interesting revelation to me was that Bob Gates -- secretary of defense -- said to, and I can't remember right now exactly whom he said it to, when giving his assessment of the military options --
SPITZER: A French official.
ZAKARIA: I think it was the French foreign minister.
SPITZER: Yes.
ZAKARIA: He said, the thing you've got to remember about a military strike -- and this is Bob Gates. He says it will delay the Iranian nuclear program, not destroy it. And by one to three years. That is a pretty conservative estimate of the -- you know, in other words we're not going to get much bang -- much bang for the buck.
SPITZER: Right.
ZAKARIA: -- with a military strike. And if Bob Gates feels that way, my gut tells me the United States is not going to do this under almost any circumstance.
HILL: Thank you very much for a fascinating conversation.
SPITZER: Still to come, how dysfunctional is Hamid Karzai? We'll hear about it from a man who was on the inside of the presidential palace in Kabul. Don't go away. We'll be right back.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PETER GALBRAITH, FORMER U.S. DIPLOMAT: Whoever it was that leaked the documents certainly should be indicted and tried, but it is the incredible incompetence of a system that would have put some 250,000 very sensitive documents on a network in which where hundreds of thousands of people had access in circumstances where you could download these things on a thumb drive.
(END OF VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SPITZER: We're back. Tonight E.D. Hill sitting in for Kathleen. E.D., a friend of the show.
Thanks for being with us.
HILL: Thank you.
SPITZER: Our headliner tonight, Peter Galbraith. In 2009, Galbraith served as United Nations deputy special representative for Afghanistan where he helped expose evidence of massive voter fraud in the Afghani presidential elections.
After butting heads with his superiors who did not want this information released, the U.N. terminated Galbraith's position, sent him home.
As always, E.D., no good deed goes unpunished.
HILL: No. As a working diplomat, Peter Galbraith has a unique perspective on this weekend's WikiLeaks document dump.
Ambassador, welcome. Thank you for being with us.
GALBRAITH: Well, good to be with you.
SPITZER: You, for a long time, have been telling specific stories. You've been saying that Karzai has used drugs. You made allegations that are no corroborated.
Tell us about those incidents. Give us some more grist, some more texture to what is now becoming a story line of an ally who is completely -- you know somebody we just shouldn't be able -- we shouldn't trust.
GALBRAITH: Well, there is, of course, the most serious problem, which is that he in collaboration with the people who are running the Afghan elections stole his last election, and he's correctly seen as illegitimate by many Afghans and by people around the world.
He runs a corrupt regime. His vice president, according to these documents, had $53 million in cash going to the -- Dubai. There's no legitimate explanation for the vice president of a country running off with $53 million. Another of these documents points out that his half brother is involved in the drug trade.
And then there are of course the accounts of Karzai himself as being emotional, unstable, suggestions that he uses drugs.
I must say when I very carefully put forward that suggestion, not saying it was true, but simply that there were credible reports, Secretary Clinton said my claims were outrageous. And of course, it turns out she was getting exactly that same information from her own diplomats.
SPITZER: So given the current context, given what we now know, is there any way the Karzai regime can be our partner in any Afghan policy that you could support?
GALBRAITH: Look, the problem is not whether the -- whether the goals are right or not, it is that they are unachievable because the policy -- the military surge depends on having an Afghan government that can provide honest administration and win the loyalty of the Afghan people.
And it's so obvious from these documents, from the record, from Karzai's public behavior, from the stolen election, the stolen parliamentary elections, that we don't have that partner. And if we don't have a partner, the strategy can't work.
If General Petraeus were here today, he would say exactly what I'm saying, namely that his strategy depends on an Afghan partner.
HILL: You know, I just get this gut reaction when all this happened, when it started coming out, yes, it's interesting, but I am just so ticked.
Is it good in a way for the American people to know how these people are operating, how we're allowing them to operate?
GALBRAITH: Well, I think the only good thing from this is that we can see the high quality of work of -- is done by our diplomats. These are people who really do have a keen understanding of the local scene and that's what's being reflected in these reports.
Look, some of this double dealing is very much in our national interest. We know that Saudi Arabia is going to denounce us, but it actually is rather welcomed that they say yes, we'll denounce you and privately they're saying, you know, we wish you would go bomb the Iranians. Privately they have a different line on the Israelis.
What is so damaging to our national security interests is that this is now exposed. And it's frankly exposed -- yes, so whoever it was that leaked the documents certainly should be indicted and tried, but it is the incredible competence of a system that would have put some 250,000 very sensitive documents on a network at which where hundreds of thousands of people had access in circumstances where you could download these things on a thumb drive.
And this material, we tend to think, well, the intelligence material, that's what we really need to protect. And that wasn't on this (INAUDIBLE) system, but the fact is the most important intelligence that we get usually comes from diplomatic cables. And anybody who looks at these cables can immediately understand their importance. It's not that you --
HILL: So -- what you're saying really is --
GALBRAITH: Go ahead.
HILL: That this is even more damaging than perhaps actually getting more of the facts because who in their right mind would tell us anything, knowing that this can get out like that?
GALBRAITH: Well, precisely. And again, it certainly is in our interest to have Saudi Arabia being privately on our side, even if it's taking a public stance against us. And to be able to communicate that to us. So that is some of the damage.
It certainly will damage the personal relations that our diplomats have, at least the currently serving diplomats have in the countries where they're serving. Although over the long term, foreign countries will rightly assume that we will correct the mistake of having such a wide distribution. New diplomats will come in because after all diplomats rotate and new relationships will develop, but it's very damaging right now.
SPITZER: You know, Ambassador, it seems to me that there have been two dimensions of trust that have been injured by this dump of the WikiLeaks documents. One is between our diplomats and the diplomats from other countries, and they're trusting whether they can trust us to their conversations secret.
The other dimension is between our own government and the American public which will now look at our policies in Afghanistan and other places around the world and say were we being told the truth by the State Department and others?
How do you repair that one? The trust that has been now broken with respect to Afghanistan where you were so correct in your critique of Karzai and we were told something else by our government?
GALBRAITH: All this does is confirm that our diplomats on the ground were telling people in Washington this, and that in spite of that, we saw Karzai come to the U.S. in May. There was a love offensive for him. He was praised as a great leader and we're committing 100,000 troops to propping up his government when we know that we can't succeed.
That really is a problem and that ought to be part of the public debate. Unfortunately, it is not.
SPITZER: That is the piece of it that actually deeply troubles me. Because as you point out, these communiques are confirmatory of so much of what has been said by you in particular and so many others. And yet it is not part of the official conversation where we are now extending out until 2014, our military efforts over in Afghanistan.
It's something that just doesn't seem to make sense to me or to many others who are watching the progress or lack thereof.
So will these communiques perhaps crystallize and force the White House to undertake a much more serious reevaluation of the premises behind our Afghan policies?
GALBRAITH: Well, the first point is that we have 100,000 troops committed to a strategy that won't work. And that is a waste of resources, $120 billion, the lives that are lost, and frankly it's even wrong, immoral to send people to a mission that you don't believe can be accomplished.
But the reason we don't have a political -- we don't have a debate about it in this country is frankly political. The Democrats are very happy with President Obama. And of course he's done in my view many wonderful things. This is the one big mistake he's made.
And the Republicans -- the Afghanistan war is the one Obama policy that they support. So we don't have the kind of debate that we had over Iraq. And the country is really suffering because this is very expensive. And again, without an Afghan partner, we can't succeed.
We don't need to debate whether it's important or not. It could be very important. If it won't work, it's not worth doing.
HILL: Ambassador, you've written communiques like this. You've read plenty of them. I know that there is always this effort to sort of be noticed, especially when you're out in an embassy and you're working in a foreign country. Hey, Washington, I'm here and I'm working.
Is there any tendency to inflate things or make -- when you write these communiques, to -- you know to just beef them up a little bit perhaps more than they -- you know, that they really are? Just so you get noticed. I mean can we take them at face value or could some be a little bit inflated?
GALBRAITH: A diplomatic cable is a lot like newspaper story. You put your most important material in the opening paragraphs and in the headlines because that's what you want people to read. And that's why they make such compelling reading and of course it's why it's so embarrassing now that they've been leaked en masse.
SPITZER: Well, Ambassador Galbraith, thank you so much for a great conversation.
GALBRAITH: Thank you.
SPITZER: Still to come, conversations with Oscar-winning actor, Richard Dreyfuss. A fascinating guy. You won't want to miss it. We'll be right back.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. MIKE PENCE (R), INDIANA: Who would be there to create jobs if the Fed wasn't flooding the market place with printed money and the federal government wasn't spending money we borrow from China and into the economy?
Here's a crazy idea. How about the American people?
(END OF VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SPITZER: Congressman Mike Pence describes himself as, quote, "A Christian, a conservative and a Republican in that order." Today, Congressman Pence gave a speech at the Detroit Economic Club laying out his plans to restore the economy, essentially saying government should get out of the way.
Many believe he's getting ready to run for the White House in 2012 and in fact at a Value Voter Summit earlier this year, he came in first place.
In our "Constitution Avenue" segment tonight, Congressman Pence joins us from Birmingham, Michigan.
Thank you, Congressman, for being with us. And thank you for coming back on the show.
PENCE: Thank you, Elliot.
SPITZER: You know back -- let's go back to 2008 when the economy was going off the cliff, over the cliff. My recollection is, and you've said this in many of your speeches you opposed the government bailout for General Motor and Chrysler.
You opposed all the money that went to Wall Street, you opposed all the government guarantees in the commercial and the financial markets.
What would you have done to stabilize an economy that was collapsing into a depression at that moment?
PENCE: Look, I think that there was a way we could have approached the crisis in the financial institutions the way that we approached similar crises back in the 1980s. Take these institutions on an individual basis, engage in an FDIC-style workout in each of those institutions.
And frankly with regard to General Motors, I know the administration has been very busy touting the positive news. We're all encouraged by the progress General Motors is making, but a lot of people I think around the country still believe -- and that IPO gives evidence -- is that it was the bankruptcy reorganization that GM went through that's made them a more attractive investment today.
SPITZER: Right.
PENCE: And not so much the taxpayer handout.
SPITZER: Well, Congressman, without going back into the GM situation, I don't think there was any way the private financial markets could have done what government did then. There wasn't the capacity, because they tried. Let me ask you a different question, though. Back in 1929...
PENCE: I don't know if that's really true, Eliot.
SPITZER: Well...
PENCE: I mean, the truth is that a pre-packaged bankruptcy that would have been then made available to the very people that are participating in the IPO today may have had a similar result, and we wouldn't have the federal government, as we have right now, still owning 33 percent of General Motors even after the IPO.
SPITZER: I've read at least part of your speech. I'm not sure I got the entire transcript. But what I see in your speech is you want to eliminate what we call fiscal policy, which is government spending to increase demand. You want to eliminate the Fed's role. You have a bill to eliminate the Fed's focus on job creation. So what you would be left with as government levers is really nothing at all to promote job creation, other than cutting taxes and limiting spending. Am I correct about that?
PENCE: Well, I got to get you the long version of the speech.
SPITZER: All right, maybe I got the Cliff Notes, but...
(CROSSTALK)
PENCE: ... actually see a little more -- no, that's all right. Look -- look -- yes. But with regard to the Fed, sure. I think that the Fed's latest decision, the QE2 decision to put $600 billion in printed money in the marketplace, is the wrong decision. I mean, the Fed -- the Fed can print money, but they can't print jobs. And an effort on their part to generate some inflation as a means of keeping long-term interest rates down I think is bad policy.
What we ought to be doing is focusing the Fed on price stability, which is their historic mission until Congress changed it in 1977, get them back on price stability, and then say to Congress, Your job is to pursue policies -- and this administration -- your job is to pursue policies that get Americans back to work. And you know, the onus ought to be on the elected officials and the policy makers to get the economy moving again.
SPITZER: Congressman, I think historically there, there's certainly some validity that Congress has always focused on the job creation through stimulus packages, and the Fed has focused on worries about inflation. But when the concern is deflation, as it has been, they need to stimulate demand. And what they're worried about is there not being enough demand in the economy. That's what this quantitative easing is designed to address.
And so it really is the flip side of their addressing the inflation concern. And the Fed would say, Hey, we've got to do this, or else the economy's going to implode. And you, Congressman, are proposing that all the levers of government be taken away. Who would be there to create jobs?
PENCE: Well, who would be there to create jobs if the Fed wasn't flooding the marketplace with printed money and the federal government wasn't spending money we borrow from China into the economy? Here's a crazy idea, how about the American people? How about we embrace the kind of tax reform that I talked about today here at the Detroit Economic Club?
I think it's time not only to preserve all the current tax relief on the books, Eliot, which you know is my position, but I think it's time for some dramatic, bold tax reform in the form of a flat tax. I think a flat tax, which is now in place in 20 countries around the world -- for crying out, Russia embraced a flat tax about four years ago. A flat tax is exactly the kind of pro-growth policy that would be an enormous tax cut for working Americans. But it would be built on the principle that we want to encourage savings, we want to encourage investment, and that Americans should only have to pay taxes on their income once.
SPITZER: All right, Congressman, I know your time is short. And unfortunately, we have to move on. So much more to talk about. Hope you'll come back, and I wish you well. And by the way, when are you going to announce for the presidency?
PENCE: Good to be with you, Eliot.
SPITZER: Oh, come on! You got to answer that last question for us. All right, we'll...
PENCE: I'd say here in Detroit, you know, we've been encouraged and humbled by what we've heard from people around Indiana, around the country. We're going to take the next couple of months and prayerfully consider where we can best contribute.
SPITZER: All right. Well, Congressman, thank you. And I look forward to having you back on the show with more time to pursue all these issues.
PENCE: Thank you.
SPITZER: We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SPITZER: Back with guest host E.D. Hill. Welcome.
HILL: Thank you.
SPITZER: Now it's time for "Fun With Politics." You can file this one under, Careful what you wish for. With a quarter million diplomatic documents leaked to newspapers over the weekend, who do you think got stuck making all the apologetic phone calls?
HILL: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And it was impossible not to think immediately of that controversial ad she had...
SPITZER: Yes, remember it well.
HILL: ... during the convention (ph) campaign. It implied that in a crisis, You do not want Obama taking the 3:00 AM emergency phone call. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 3:00 AM, and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone in the White House and it's ringing. Something's happening in the world. Your vote decides who answers that call, whether it's someone who already knows the worlds leaders, know the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world. Who do you want answering the phone?
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I'm Hillary Clinton, and I approved this message.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SPITZER: At the time, Hillary's scare tactics were parodied on "Saturday Night Life." Quite a vicious job they did on that one.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: First of all, go to our key allies, the British, the Germans, the French, and show them our intelligence.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hold on. I'm trying to write this down.
(LAUGHTER)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The French -- go on. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Russians will back down. Helping Iran is a clear violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The what treaty?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (INAUDIBLE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Al Sharpton?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SPITZER: But as things worked out, Hillary's the one who ended up pulling all the all-nighters, working like a telethon volunteer, trying to plug the WikiLeaks. Secretary Clinton, we feel your pain.
HILL: We certainly do. Let me take that note again? That is France and Great Britain and...
SPITZER: That list of countries she's calling keeps going, just like...
HILL: The what?
SPITZER: ... just like calling her donors back when she was in politics. My goodness.
HILL: Coming up: We loved watching him follow his passion in "American Graffiti," "Jaws," "Mr. Holland's Opus." Find out about the new passion or Richard Dreyfuss when we come back.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RICHARD DREYFUSS, ACTOR: The war on terror is like saying it's a war on the flanking movement. It's a tactic. That's all it is. It doesn't tell us anything. And we have started to live in this "Alice and Wonderland" common senselessness. We say things that are stupid, like the "war on terror."
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SPITZER: Tonight, in the culture of politics, a question. What do you do once you've battled a great white shark, had a close encounter of the third kind and run for president?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RICHARD DREYFUSS, ACTOR: (INAUDIBLE)
My name is Bob Rumsen (ph), and I'm running for president!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HILL: And that is just an sampling of his amazing body of work. But if you're Richard Dreyfuss, what do you do? You find something else. Joining us now, Richard Dreyfuss. Welcome.
DREYFUSS: Thanks.
SPITZER: You know, you look at those clips, it is just amazing. Every one of those movies is iconic. I mean, do you wake up in the morning and say, I've done enough, I can quit?
DREYFUSS: I did.
(LAUGHTER)
SPITZER: And then what happened?
DREYFUSS: I remembered I'd made a promise to myself when I was 12, which was I'm going to be a movie star, and then I'm going to be either the senator from California or New York, and then I'm going to teach history. And the only thing that changed was that I didn't want elective office, but I want...
SPITZER: I was going to say I'm already calculating when you could run for the Senate. But that's all right.
(LAUGHTER)
SPITZER: You're on to something arguably bigger than that...
DREYFUSS: Yes.
SPITZER: ... and that is what you call the Dreyfuss Initiative. Tell us what is it and what motivates it.
DREYFUSS: I think every people know -- has a right to know who they are and why they are who they are. And we may not -- we may be the subject of Jay Leno jokes about how stupid we are about history, but we all know the cultural mythology of America, all of us, even the newest arrivals. We all know that our grandparents came here fleeing oppression and they came here for safe haven and because we were a political miracle. And our kids don't know any of that anymore because we don't teach it.
HILL: But what would the initiative do? What would you like to see?
DREYFUSS: The curriculum is very simple. It starts with glory tales and myths. And then it's reason, logic, clarity of thought, critical analysis, civility, dissent, debate and opposing views.
SPITZER: One of the things that always bothers me is that you probably couldn't get people today to sign the Bill of Rights.
DREYFUSS: Right.
SPITZER: You couldn't get them to embrace the notion of the 1st Amendment as something that is integral to what we are. So how do you breed that tolerance for disagreement, dissent and countervailing opinions? DREYFUSS: You have to make people fall in love. And I mean that. When I was growing up in the '50s, and my father had been a veteran of the Second World War and crippled because of it, and then at the beginning of television, they drowned us in American movies between 1931 and 1950. And at the end of that, you were besotted. You were in love with America because we were the good guys.
SPITZER: OK, so let's fast forward. Could the threat of terrorism have become another civics lesson? And has it been a civics lesson? Have we learned the right lessons from it?
DREYFUSS: We learned the wrong lessons from it. We are learning the wrong lessons from it because we're lying about it.
SPITZER: So how do you push back against that?
DREYFUSS: Well, first of all, at "The Wall Street Journal" this morning, they said, Do you think it would be better if we had said that we were at war with extremist Islam? And I said, Of course because that would have given the opening to the majority of Islam to go against the extremists. Instead, their silence has allowed us to think that they agree with the extremists. And that silence is hurting us.
The "war on terror" is like saying it's a war on the flanking movement. It's a tactic. That's all it is. It doesn't tell us anything. And we have started to live in this "Alice and Wonderland" common senselessness. We say things that are stupid, like the "war on terror."
SPITZER: Well, look, President Obama, to his credit, has sort of taken that language out of his lexicon, and he is much more careful in his use of language. Has that been a step forward?
DREYFUSS: Well, actually, now, two things. I think Obama is far less than we hoped he would be. He's much more of a traditional politician. But he was also grabbed very early by the smartest politicians in Washington, from the Pentagon, grabbed by the wrong generals. And he -- there's an old truism, Power never turns power down. And the only way that you can turn power down is when some institution, whether it's the PTA or the newspapers or the Congress, says, We are against torture, that means you're for it. If you don't say, We're against it, we're for it. And the signing letters of Bush are being used by President Obama.
HILL: If you were to pick the couple of concepts -- because, you know, the reality is people come up with great ideas and a little bit of it, if they're lucky, gets through, gets into practice. What is the most important thing that you think kids, or any American right now, needs to either learn or spend a bit more time thinking about?
DREYFUSS: I want every history teacher who ever hears this broadcast or who knows any other history teacher to put up on the wall of their classroom one statement, very simple, that says, We want a more rigorous training in how to run the country before it's our turn to run the country. Because if we don't, someone else will, and that wasn't the intent of the Founders.
If every history teacher put that sign up -- and there's nothing partisan about what I just said -- and all the kids signed it and I had half a million signatures, I'd show you how powerful they were. It's time to pay attention here!
HILL: Yes, but kids don't. It's not sexy.
DREYFUSS: It's not just kids. It's not just kids. It's their parents and it's because...
HILL: You're right.
DREYFUSS: ... the catastrophe hasn't happened. It's like global warming. How many years did it take for us to begin...
SPITZER: It's like boiling the lobster slowly.
DREYFUSS: Yes.
SPITZER: But now that you're on task, people will pay attention. And you have a book that makes this point. So tell us about the book and how the book will crystallize support for this.
DREYFUSS: This is not my book. This is a book written by a guy from India who came to America in 1964 and fell in love with America. He fell in love with the idea of America -- which, by the way, is not only unique and singular, it is the best answer to a question that everyone has asked for 13,000 years -- How can people live together in some sense of decency and freedom and mobility and intellectual freedom? The United States of America is the best answer to that question so far.
And what was revolutionary about our Revolutionary War was that we said for the first time in history that the ruler and the ruled could be one thing. And you realize that we're the only country in history ever bound only by ideas. We are not bound by common ancestry or religion -- ideas, ideas of the Enlightenment.
And if we're not taught, every generation, we're not bound. And we're subject then to be taken by our own criminals and criminals from overseas.
SPITZER: Don't go away. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HILL: You're well known for being fairly outspoken for liberal causes. You've -- you've called for impeachment of certain people. You've called for the election of certain people. How do we know that this isn't sort of just a ruse to put a liberal agenda in another classroom?
DREYFUSS: It's a ruse. You found me out.
(LAUGHTER) DREYFUSS: First of all, I never called for the impeachment of the president. I called for the Senate and the House to open hearings into the possibility of impeachable charges. And that's simply calling for the Senate and the House to do their constitutional duty. And that was interpreted as calling for the impeachment.
If anyone had been awake and alert and breathing during the last 20 years, they already know that impeachment of the president is a basically meaningless gesture. So I was not calling for the impeachment. I was calling for the Senate and the House to wake up to the fact that the executive was now running under a separate and new and ahistorical theory called "executive sovereignty."
And when I asked what that was, they said that means the president is above the law. And I said, Not in this country, pal.
HILL: Thank you very much for spending time with us. Richard Dreyfuss.
SPITZER: Richard, thank you.
HILL: When we come back, with some final thoughts on a man who made fear of flying funny. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
JOE JOHNS, CNN ANCHOR: Hello. I'm Joe Johns. More of PARKER- SPITZER in a moment. First the latest. There's breaking news out of northeastern Wisconsin. Here's what we know. A student with a gun is holding at least 18 students and a teacher hostage in a classroom at Marinette High School. He's released five students. Local emergency officials say no injuries have been reported, and the police are at the scene. We'll bring you more details as we get them.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is blasting the Web site WikiLeaks for releasing hundreds of thousands of confidential diplomatic cables. Clinton said the document dump endangers people's lives and threatens national security.
And tonight on "360," why Senator John McCain is now finding fault with the Pentagon's long-awaited report on lifting "Don't ask, don't tell." Is McCain playing loose with the facts? We're "Keeping Them Honest."
That's the latest. Parker-Spitzer is back after this.
SPITZER: Before we say good night, a postscript. Frank Drebin didn't die this weekend. For those of you who don't know the name, Frank Drebin is the bumbling detective in the "Naked Gun" movies. The man who brought him to life was Leslie Nielsen, and he passed away at the age of 84.
HILL: But that's not important now. Surely, you must be joking. You know, every American can probably relate a million...
SPITZER: Line after line. HILL: ... of these lines. He was brilliant! He started as a serious dramatic actor, and then somewhere along the line, he gets cast in "Airplane," and boom, brilliant comedic actor...
SPITZER: (INAUDIBLE)
HILL: Yes, where you just repeat line after line after line of his.
SPITZER: He once said he was just a lucky guy who got cast the wrong way. But we don't think so. Thanks to Leslie Nielsen, Frank Drebin will live forever. Let's look at some of his highlights.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Everyone should have a friend like you!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SPITZER: Got to love this stuff.
HILL: You know, thank you for making us laugh and making our lives just that much more enjoyable. And thank you for making me feel at home.
SPITZER: Absolutely.
HILL: Don't call me Shirley.
SPITZER: I won't even think about it.
(LAUGHTER)
SPITZER: All right, thanks so much to all of you for being with us tonight. Join us tomorrow night. Good night from New York. "LARRY KING LIVE" starts right now.
