February 21 - The End of the Bush Dynasty; Trump Takes on the Military Industrial Complex; Why Did South Carolina's Evangelicals Vote for Trump?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the end of the Bush era following the withdrawal of Jeb Bush from the Republican presidential race as one political dynasty appears to have outlived its welcome with the American people while the other political dynasty, the Clintons, picks up steam with a win in the Nevada caucuses ahead of next Saturday’s South Carolina Democratic primary which Hillary Clinton is favored to win. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, joins us to discuss the irony that the leading Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who is coming off a big win in South Carolina, is the only politician telling the truth about the fact that Jeb Bush’s brother did not keep us safe from 9/11, lied us into a disastrous war in Iraq that has destabilized the Middle East and almost tanked the economy.

Part 2

Then we look into another outburst of truth-telling from Donald Trump in his victory speech in South Carolina, a state with a large military vote, in which Trump announced he will make sure our military gets the weapons that the troops want, not what the lobbyists and defense contractors foist on us. Pierre Sprey, a veteran high-tech defense weapons and systems designer who was the primary designer of the F-16 fighter and A-10 ground attack warplane, joins us to discuss the latest failures of the world’s most expensive weapons system, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that is the epitome of the waste and fraud boondoggle that Trump is pointing to.

Part 3

Then finally an analyst of the religious right for over 30 years, Fredrick Clarkson joins us to discuss the paradox that South Carolina’s evangelicals, who make up 65% of the Republican vote, voted overwhelmingly for a thrice-divorced, expletive-prone casino owner over an openly theocratic candidate Ted Cruz, who frequently makes the claim that religious freedom is under assault in the United States as he campaigns under the Dominionist banner of Christian rightists who believe they have a biblical mandate to control all earthly institutions.