AUDIO: Robert Scheer Hosts Dennis Kucinich—an Unpredictable American Original

[eridani]

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/audio_robert_scheer_and_dennis_kucinich

In the third episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer’s new KCRW podcast, eight-term Ohio congressman and two-time Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich raps about the underbelly of U.S. politics going back to his days as Cleveland’s “boy mayor” in the late 1970s.

Scheer and Kucinich recount how their early interview in Playboy magazine—which both admit may have cost Kucinich a mayoral re-election—led to a long friendship. In an illustration of how strange the political realm can be, Kucinich tells how former Republican Speaker John Boehner, a fellow Ohioan, tried unsuccessfully to aid him when Ohio Democrats “working on behalf of certain interests” redrew the lines of his district to ensure his congressional defeat in 2012.

As a veteran of the struggle against the corporate and political machine, Kucinich asks whether today’s “oligarchs who run our politics will simply claim ownership of everything and have it privatized.” On a lighter note, he talks about the effect his friends Woody Harrelson and Willie Nelson have had on his life, and hints with some vigor that he is not ready to step off the stage of electoral politics. As he puts it, “Stay tuned.”