Because *you* know the history, and *I* know the history, but there’s plenty people old enough to vote who never heard about it. Jeb Lund, in Rolling Stone, on how “the letter sent by 47 Republican Congressmen to the Iranian government is part of a long history of right-wing mayhem“:
Two weeks before freshman Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and 46 Senate Republican co-signatories sent a Missed Connections letter to Iranian hardliners (“Saw you in Tehran . . . thought you might want to get together and sabotage nuclear arms control talks?”), sparking accusations of treason, I got to see Cotton in action at the Conservative Political Action Conference. I already knew him as a bad liar who still thinks Iraq was involved in 9/11, wants to prosecute New York Times reporters and fears the inevitable partnership between Mexican drug cartels and ISIS, but homeboy can work a room…
Cotton’s short-term strategy works on the campaign trail and in accordance with the necessities of neoconservative foreign policy. And his interference represents little more than another enactment of the theory of government espoused by his party. To admit that everything he believes in is either completely idiotic or extremely dangerous doesn’t take away from the fact that Tom Cotton, grossly enough, has a point.
Interfering in presidential foreign and military policy works…
Among all the conservative cries of “Munich! Munich!” these days – both Bolton and Cotton parroted it at CPAC like a Teddy Ruxpin shorting out in a pool of blood – you don’t hear a lot about Republican anti-interventionism in the 1930s, when Hitler was on the cover of Time, Mussolini was praised for his contempt of labor and anti-Semite industrialist Henry Ford was being given the highest civilian honor Nazi Germany could bestow. Japan just sneaked up on everyone, and Hitler is always Chamberlain’s fault, with Republican Senators like Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft skating on the butcher’s bill. Acknowledging this history tends to cloud the whole narrative of GOP moral clarity and the unalloyed necessity for the United States to defend itself under any circumstances. Still, whatever you think of the reasoning or outcome, this binding of the president’s powers in military and foreign affairs was wholly legal.
Besides, illegal works too, and Cotton knows this. In 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon dispatched a friend of his campaign named Anna Chennault to tell the North Vietnamese to back away from peace talks with the Democratic Johnson administration, promising the Vietnamese a better deal… Nixon condemned the Johnson administration for failing to even get the Vietnamese to the bargaining table; Nixon and genocide-and-assassination hobbyist Henry Kissinger admitted to each other that the war was unwinnable as early as 1969; and in the meantime 22,000 more Americans and hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese and Cambodians died. But, hey, Nixon won the 1968 election by a 0.7 percent margin, and Kissinger went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize…
The Iran-Contra affair was ultimately a vastly more explicitly illegal enterprise at every stage than Nixon’s clownish burglary, campaign ratfuckery and slush funds – and yet the response to it, from a nation still disgusted by the post-Watergate bummer process of honest self-evaluation, was bipartisan compartmentalization and hyper-partisan pardon. (In the latter case, quite literally, as George H.W. Bush pardoned multiple Reagan administration conspirators and saved the nation from accountability.) The response to Iran-Contra codified the Nixon paraphrasis of If the president does it, it’s not illegal into something between best practices and standard operating procedure…
…[T]he threat that successful negotiations present to Cotton and his ilk cannot be overstated. They’ve spent roughly 35 years trying to inflate a regional power nearly 6,500 miles from Washington D.C. into an existential threat to the entire United States, and the last thing they can afford is for the American voter to awaken to the histrionic bullshit nature of that campfire horror story… Nothing inconveniences Cotton and neoconservatism in general more than the obdurate realpolitik truth that there is no more forceful ally that America could find against ISIS than the Islamic Republic of Iran…
In its Constitutional idolatry and boundless bellicosity, Cotton’s Republican Party has arrogated to itself the presumption that anything it does is explicitly American. The normative conditions of patriotism are whatever they want to do at any given moment, because only they have the courage to defend you from enemies abroad with guns and enemies at home via a fundamentalist reading of the texts and hadith of Our Founding Prophets (which, conveniently, also mentions guns). Anything outside their chosen agenda is met with the word no, which is the finest distillation of their agenda for anyone other than their own…
Culture of Truth
Polls in Israel are open now…. who will carry the Jewish vote??
east is east
My name is Tom Cotton. People call me Tom Cotton.
srv
The least one of these guys could do is rename themselves Winston Reagan or Reagan Churchill or something.
jl
Tom Cotton is very concerned the Iran has taken Tehran!
Villago Delenda Est
George H.W. Bush basically preempted Lawrence Walsh from flipping key Iran-Contra figures who were about to spill the beans on George H.W. (“I was out of the loop”) Bush…who was actually up to his patrician eyebrows in the utter illegality and immorality of Iran-Contra.
The Republican Party has been flirting with fascism for nearly a century now.
Tommy
Tom worries me as a liberal. As I said here last night I went to watch videos of him. The man might not share a single view of the world as I do but he is clearly not stupid. So many on the far right I can often write off as stupid, dumb and mock them. This guy isn’t dumb. That worries me.
Kropadope
As long as said president is Republican. A Democratic president can be perfectly within the law, still the Rs and their media enablers will grasp at any straw of perceived impropriety they can find. If they can’t find one, they’ll make it up.
This doesn’t just apply to Iran, but their entire project of totalitarianism-sold-through-pants-pissing and communism-by-proxy. Media enablers profit from war, it draws eyeballs. The giant conglomerates that own the MSM outlets would be perfectly happy for a society where private industry has overshadowed the government and the Constitution is meaningless.
@Villago Delenda Est:
They’ve been married for about 30 years now. Right around the time I was born.
momus
I should like to point out that the Mr. Lund’s article or exerpt errs at one point. It was not the North Vietnamese which were told by Ms. Chennault to back away from peace talks. It was the South Vietnamese leadership.
opiejeanne
@Tommy: He’s scary; as scary as Walker. I wouldn’t put it past the Republicans to have him run for something bigger, maybe VP on the ticket in 2016.
Bobby B.
Whenever a new Republican “appears”, we all dance and screech around him like the apes around the monolith in 2001. Then Chuck Todd interviews him.
Kropadope
@Bobby B.: It’s not our fault that each of them finds his or her own individual opportunities to make conspicuous fools of themselves.
Chris T.
“If the president does it, it’s not illegal” is now “If a Republican does it, it’s not illegal”…
Tommy
@opiejeanne: I often note here my parents are not the most liberal people you will find. But as a kid growing up I was never allowed to say stupid shit. If I did I was called on it. Corrected. Cotton is somebody that does not on the face seem dumb. As I said that worries me.
Kropadope
@Tommy: A smart person like him will be able to sell the perpetual war caucus’s lies far more convincingly. I was just listening to this speech that he gave. The rate at which the untruths and logical fallacies flow is mind-numbing, which I suppose is the point.
Baud
@momus:
They obviously chose wisely.
Kropadope
@momus:
So, was this Nixon’s original Southern Strategy?
Zinsky
This is a great article, although a little hard to read at times. The author brings up many historical events that I had either forgotten or did not know at all, such as the undercutting of the Vietnam peace talks by Nixon and his henchmen, which foreshadowed the October Surprise by Reagan, Bush I, et al in 1980. These Republican vermin have been sabotaging US foreign policy for over 50 years now – it is disgusting and should be indictable. Read the article over at RollingStone.com and click the links – they are well worth reviewing!
Booger
@Bobby B.: Yeah, but look how that turned out. Millions of years later we flew on Pan Am to use Bell payphones in a Hilton Hotel in space!
brantl
@Tommy:
He tried to pass a law, that if you supported “tururism” in any way, your blood family would go to jail. Yes, he’s really that stupid.
Woodrowfan
I agree with Tommy. Cotton is a dangerous man. (so is Cruz). They’re not dumb, they’re fanatics. And both are just one wardrobe change away from being an open Brownshirt (and not the kind from Firefly). The republicans are just one good demagogue away from being something very, very dangerous.
Matt McIrvin
Well, it is kind of like Democratic opposition to civil rights in the 1950s (which Republicans like to bring up to prove somehow that Democrats are the real racists): not terribly relevant to today’s party except possibly at a few fringes.
Splitting Image
I have trouble taking Tom Cotton seriously because his namesake is Sam Gamgee’s father-in-law. The fictional character is the smarter of the two.
debbie
@Tommy:
But he’s over-confident. That’s what will get him.
rea
In 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon dispatched a friend of his campaign named Anna Chennault to tell the North Vietnamese to back away from peace talks with the Democratic Johnson administration, promising the Vietnamese a better deal
Not accurate, although the truth isn’t any better. Anna Chennault was sent by Nixon to tell the South Vietnamese to back away from the peace talks, promising that Nixon would get them a better deal.
Cervantes
@momus:
Yes.
@rea:
Yes again.
Makes me wonder what Lund was thinking.
BobS
@Zinsky: Robert Parry at consortiumnews.com (which is down at the moment) has a section that thoroughly covers the October Surprise as well as the ensuing Iran Contra crimes (he’s also written several books –Trick or Treason, Lost History, Secrecy and Privilege — that cover the same material). He’s been one of the few American reporters who has gotten things right consistently over the past 4 decades — there’s no reason to think his coverage of ongoing events in Ukraine is any different, although he portrays a somewhat different picture than some of the neo-conservative apologists you’ll read in threads here.
Cervantes
@BobS:
Does he offer new evidence not considered by anyone else?
Cervantes
@Splitting Image:
If I had a nickel for each time I was told in the ’60s and ’70s that Reagan was not smart enough to take seriously …
BobS
@Cervantes: His investigative work in the early 90’s uncovered substantial supporting evidence (including evidence suppressed by congressional investigators). He’s also the reporter who essentially broke the Iran Contra story nearly 10 years earlier.
wvng
@Kropadope: I agree with your concerns. Until I watched him I pretty well wrote him off as an extreme wingnut – which he is. But he presents really well, and unless the media interviewing him call him on his incessant lies (he might make multiple Mitt seem honest) he will get away with it. And, as Chuck Todd informed us, if they call out lies well their guests won’t return.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Were is the big we have to go to war, outside the neo-con twits? And as far as the neo-cons go, it’s war forever as long as they don’t have to fight it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Villago Delenda Est:
Let’s not forget stupidity too. They were trading arms to the Iranians, who were the junior Soviet Union back then, for hostages.
Cervantes
@BobS:
True enough.
Yes, he did much of that work for PBS.
I know what he uncovered earlier, and I know how it has been ignored, dismissed, and suppressed. My question was about new evidence, if any.
BobS
@Cervantes:Parry continued his investigation of the October Surprise after his work on Frontline, which is when he discovered that congressional investigators had suppressed evidence (which is noteworthy in and of itself) such as the link between the Reagan campaign/administration and Iranian arms dealer Cyrus Hashemi.
karen marie
@Matt McIrvin: But Democrats do not have a continuous pattern of opposing civil rights that extends to today. The Republican activities in the ’30s is a data point.
rikyrah
@Tommy:
The man who said, The Iranians have already overrun Tehran, doesn’t strike you at at least ignorant, if not stupid?
Cervantes
@BobS:
Yes, I agree. Thanks.
schrodinger's cat
I am not afraid of Tom Cotton or Ted Cruz. Republicans get away with blue murder is that Democrats behave like scaredy cats and try to play nice with whichever crackpot the GOP throws up, that most of the media is in Republican pockets, helps too.
ETA: I like how Obama treats Republicans these days, like spoilt children.
Cervantes
@rikyrah:
That’s not what he said:
We can deal with his larger (and repugnant) message with all its inaccuracies, or we can read his words (the ones in question) as an implied and inarticulate(d) call for “regime change,” or we can paraphrase him not-quite-accurately and thereby dismiss him as “ignorant” and “stupid.”
MCA1
Let’s put it this way: if Cotton were the Koch-banked governor of Wisconsin, I would not be sleeping well these days. Walker’s sufficiently lunkheaded and minor league that I don’t worry much about his presidential aspirations. Cotton’s extremely intelligent and polished – he’s coming at the world from a completely flawed set of premises in our perspective, but there’s no denying his native smarts. Hopefully arrogance and southernism get him before he rises too much further.
Joseph Nobles
What Young Master Cotton meant by his ‘Iran already controls Tehran’ is that he’s still fighting the Iranian revolution.
Chris
This is one part of the Munich/Rise Of Fascism myth that somehow gets left out of the popular mythology. The popular myth is simply “fascism rose because pacifists and appeasers and other people who were too chicken to do anything about it.” The other side of the coin – “fascism rose because a ton of people in the corporate, political and social ‘establishment’ of both Germany and the West thought the fascists would be make awesome street muscle for use against the communists… and the socialists… and the unions… and anyone, really, that we don’t like” – continues to go unmentioned.
liberal
@Cervantes:
Sorry. It still sounds completely idiotic.
liberal
@MCA1:
Huh? He’s just another conservative who can speak in complete sentences. That doesn’t necessarily make him smart. Nor does attending Harvard and Harvard Law.
VOR
@Joseph Nobles: Simpler than that. He is appealing to people who don’t know Tehran is the capital of Iran.
Zinsky
@BobS: Yes, thank you. I am quite familiar with Robert Parry, one of the top two or three investigative reporters in the U.S. I have all of his books and try to throw some money his way every year when his website has a fundraiser. To answer Cervantes, Parry has a ton of information about the October Surprise that no one else has reported, including details about the trip to Madrid that William Casey and Poppy Bush surreptitiously took to convince the Iranians to hold the hostages until the day of Reagan’s inauguration to make people believe that brain-damaged geriatric POS had something to do with compelling the hostage-takers to free them. If Poppy had been executed by firing squad, as is required of convicted traitors, we might never have had to deal with his brain-damaged, idiot son, Dubya!
Citizen_X
@Matt McIrvin:
What’s not, Republican anti-interventionism? Agreed. But Republican sympathy for Fascism? Been a constant ever since those days.
liberal
@Zinsky: Re this part of the thread, I don’t get it. I thought the October Surprise thing was pretty much proven.
liberal
Upside of the Cotton letter: maybe we can get them to endorse the view that TPP will need 2/3 of the Senate for passage.
Elie
@Tommy:
He is not dumb, but he is cra-cra… and that effs you up sooner or later. Many a crazy person has been brilliant IQ-wise. The threat is in how much he can convince others of his views — which when examined are seriously crackpot and his defense of those views also sounds crackpot, though they seem to have a certain logic that appeals to some. I am hoping for him to get lots and lots of exposure — the best way to surface the turds in the punchbowl of his ideology. Exposure never helps crazy.
BobS
@liberal: In the mainstream press it’s still frequently referred to as the October Surprise “conspiracy theory”, a phrase that is meant to relegate something to the looney-bin realm of public discourse. Even more predictably, it’s also regularly denounced by those defending the legacy of Reagan and the right in general, e.g. Daniel Pipes, Ann Coulter, National Review, etc,
MCA1
@liberal: He was magna cum laude as an undergrad, and clerked for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals after law school, which would indicate he was likely in at least the top quartile of his law class. These things are not handed to people who grow up the child of everyday people in Shitsville, Arkansas.
Cervantes
@MCA1:
Bill Clinton did grow up in Arkansas the child of everyday people (at best). And yet he was given a scholarship Georgetown and elected class president; was selected to work in William Fulbright’s office in the U. S. Senate; won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford; and then earned a J. D. at Yale.