Journalist Robert Scheer: "I've never liked government"

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Journalist Robert Scheer: "I've never liked government"

"Ideology is less important than integrity. That's my view. And the reason I'm here is that I think there are plenty of libertarians who have integrity," says author and journalist Robert Scheer.

Scheer is the Editor in Chief of Truthdig.com and the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street. Thaddeus Russell recently sat down with Scheer to talk about journalism, liberals, libertarians, Ronald Reagan, and limited government.

About 19.30 minutes.

Produced by Alex Manning. Camera by Alex Manning and Tracy Oppenheimer.

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Comments

[SIV]

Never go full cosmo...

In July 1970, Scheer accompanied as a journalist a Black Panther Party delegation, led by Eldridge Cleaver, who also wrote for Ramparts, to North Korea, China, and Vietnam. The delegation also contained people from the San Francisco Red Guard, the women's liberation movement, the Peace and Freedom Party, Newsreel, and the Movement for a Democratic Military.

In an April 7, 2010, article he wrote that Harry Truman perpetrated "the most atrocious act of terrorism in world history when he annihilated the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

[Warty]

You're on a roll today, dipshit. I mean, a really dumb fucking roll, but I guess it's still a roll. You should be proud of how dumb you've managed to be. Nobody can say you never did anything, you know?

[Marc F Cheney]

Eldrige Cleaver the conservative Republican?

[SIV]

He was a Maoist back then.That was a Maoist junket that Scheer covered.

[Hawk Spitui]

I suspect at this point the union of a Venn diagram of cosmotarians and one of progressives would be pretty close to 100%.

[Apatheist ?_??]

The ones in SIV's head, yes.

[Calidissident]

To be a cosmotarian, don't you have to claim to be a libertarian? Scheer is a self-described liberal

[SIV]

Reason is a libertarian magazine.
You're typing in it.

[Calidissident]

So interviewing someone of a different political persuasion makes a magazine cosmotarian?

[darius404]

Really Cali, you just need to ignore him. He's much like a rightwing version of Shriek/Buttplug, he's just going to keep pissing on himself and anything nearby.

[radar]

I don't get involved in all the cosmotarian hubbub, but regardless, Robert Scheer's beliefs (unless they've dramatically changed recently) are pretty fucking repulsive. He might make for a handy strange bedfellow when it comes to foreign adventurism, but for the most part he's an unrepentant Marxist (if not full-blown Communist).

[PapayaSF]

The "Truman as the world's greatest terrorist" thing is enough for me to write off Scheer.

[EDG reppin' LBC]

Didn't watch the video. But I used to listen to Left, Right, and Center on KCRW every week till about 6 months ago. Scheer is a govt fellating crypto-communist. Straight up.

[SIV]

I didn't have to go to wiki to know that. Scheer was assigned reading in one of my Commie Studies classes back at ol' State U.

[MikeTheTank]

This is a pretty good clip from an old interview Scheer had with Ron Radosh:

Our interview went on and on, and Scheer absolutely refused to discuss any other topic except for Kim and North Korean communism. At one point I asked him incredulously, "Bob, do you really believe this crap?" Scheer responded with complete earnest that he did ? that Kim had charted out a path that other nations should take as an example of the art of the possible. When I returned to New York and played the tape for the producers at Pacifica-WBAI, it was too far out even for them, and they refused to air it.

Scheer spent decades of his career sucking the dicks of 3rd world marxist dictators and now he wants us to believe he some kind of fucking friend to libertarians? He ran a commune in the 1970's dedicated to bringing a slice of North Korea to the US. And the interviewer lets him off the hook?!?

Some of the gems from the interview:

Ramparts wasn't a ideological magazine?!?
Communism wasn't a threat to the West during the Cold War?!?

Any kind of "alliance" between libertarians and pricks like Scheer will leave your asshole hurting more than that feeling you got voting for Obama. Scheer's the kind of leftist who will drive the bulldozer over you grave after you served your purpose of putting him in power.

[scareduck]

Yeah, this kind of crap was why the LAT's opinion pages were unreadable in the 80's and 90's, when he got paid to pollute them with garden-variety reactionary lefty bullshit. At least now they're pretty much Pravda for the state's Democratic party, in that you can read it to see what the bosses think of the day's events.

[XM]

Michael Hiltzik, David Lazarus and David Horsey are still employed by the LAT, so that editorial sections are still unreadable.

[amiadsd]

Manning and Tracy