Barack to the Future: Mark Steyn on America Alone in 2006

When PJM launched its Freedom Academy Book Club recently, the powers that be asked me to upload my recent author interviews to the site. However, I decided to go one better, and include in the mix some of the many interviews I’ve recorded since I began podcasting in 2006, and producing PJM’s Sirius-XM radio show, which ran from the fall of 2007 through the end of 2010.

Most of these interviews simply involved cutting away the rest of the show and possibly adding new intro and outro music. However, the earliest interviews from 2006 were in pretty rough shape, with ground loops, clicks, hiss, and the like, before I had powerful tools such as Izotope’s RX plugin to clean up the noise inherent in a telephone recording.

Audio-wise, one of the worst was recorded back in September of 2006, when I interviewed Mark Steyn on his then-new book, America Alone, which grew out of his earlier magnum opus 6000-word article published simultaneously in the New Criterion and the Wall Street Journal, “It’s the Demography, Stupid.” But Mark’s comments are so interesting, as we compare the current innervated state of what was once called “The War on Terror,” with Iraq abandoned by Mr. Obama after it was secured by President Bush’s surge, Afghanistan soon to be abandoned after Mr. Obama’s own surge, Israel on its own, Iran about go nuke, Putin eating Obama and Kerry’s lunch in Syria, Benghazi, the debacle that was the “Arab Spring,” etc. No wonder Mark titled the sequel After America, whose cover featured a cadaverous Uncle Sam sporting a toe tag.

In other words, the fall of 2006, which at the time seemed like the nadir, the perigee of the Bush administration, now seems increasingly like the Good Old Days. So let’s flash back to that era, to see where the War on Terror stood, and how the left ran America off the rails in the years since.

Click here to listen; a downloadable version of the interview is also available:

For many more author interviews, including conversations with Mark Levin, David Limbaugh, Jonah Goldberg, James Lileks, Alvin Toffler, Mitt Romney, Norman Podhoretz, Virginia Postrel, Roger Kimball, and many more, along with interviews hosted by Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith, Stephen Green, and Col. Austin Bay, stop by the PJ Media Freedom Academy.