On the other hand, Saddam Hussein certainly was up to his butt in nasty Islamist terrorism. My caller was simply factually wrong to say otherwise. Start with the $25K payoffs for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers that Hussein made publicly and proudly. That would include, for example, supporting the activities of Hezbollah, which was responsible for the 241 US Marines slaughtered in Lebanon. This alone was a pretty good start of a reason for taking this guy out. Then there are all the training camps and money and terrorist stuff left, right and center.
For this fellow's benefit though, I noted and re-iterate here that the Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik is anti-war. Indeed, Michael Badnarik will be the only anti-war candidate on the Indiana presidential ballot.
As Mr Jackey noted later privately, you're going to get nailed whichever side you come down on in regards to Iraq. One of our LP congressional candidates had been on the day before opposing the war, and apparently got just as much hostility. My esteemed opponent Senator Bayh has a surfire solution for avoiding angry voters: he has refused to come on WFIE- or pretty much any other public setting where he might be asked questions of any kind. It works for him.
The main non-Iraq question was a woman, best I can remember wanting to know what I propose to do to make prescription drugs cheaper. Now, there might be some things around the edges that government can reasonably do, most obviously things in the range of tort reform.
However, I basically had to tell her that it's not the job of the federal government to set drug prices, or provide drug benefits or welfare of any kind. At the risk of sounding like a big meanie, the government just can't solve every problem. Nor is it constitutionally authorized to try.
On the other hand, if we privatized Social Security, and you were not having 15% of your income confiscated and simply squandered, but instead invested in your own accounts, why you'd probably have quite a bit of money. You wouldn't be needing to come begging to Congress for free drugs.
Thus I managed to wrap up the appearance with my top issue, Social Security reform.
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