I feel like everything I write today is rambling and incoherent, more so than usual, so I am just going to sit back and watch the idiot box until Captain Kirk hangs out with Shawn and Guster tonight on Psych.
Republican Anniversary of the Week: Iran-Contra
Now that reports of Iranians storming embassies indicate that our national newspapers of record have been permitted to shake up the normal somnolence of their readers, an optimist might wonder if any aspiring journo would dare to mention the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Iran-Contra scandal. Few Balloon-Juice readers are optimists, but it did surprise me slightly how much the whole disgraceful interlude seems to have passed from the national public memory. Peter Kornbluh, of the National Security Archives, published an excellent precis in Salon:
It has been 25 years since President Ronald Reagan stepped up to the microphone in the White House press room and made the announcement that launched one of the greatest scandals in modern American politics.
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Reagan announced that his administration had sent “small amounts of defense weapons and spare parts to Iran” not to trade arms for hostages, but to improve relations and support moderate mullahs. There was “one aspect” of the operation that, the President said, he had been “unaware of.” His attorney general, Edwin Meese, then stepped forward to describe how “private benefactors” had transferred profits from those sales to counterrevolutionary forces, the contras, fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. No U.S. officials were involved, according to Meese, in this “diversion” of funds that linked two seemingly separate covert operations…
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The list of the “other… more important ” aspects of the sordid story that became known as “Iran-contra” scandal is a long one but worth recalling 25 years later. The Reagan administration had been negotiating with terrorists (despite Reagan’s repeated public position that he would “never” do so). There were illegal arms transfers to Iran, flagrant lying to Congress, soliciting third country funding to circumvent the Congressional ban on financing the contra war in Nicaragua, White House bribes to various generals in Honduras, illegal propaganda and psychological operations directed by the CIA against the U.S. press and public, collaboration with drug kingpins such as Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, and violating the checks and balances of the constitution.
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“If ever the constitutional democracy of the United States is overthrow,” the leading political analyst of the scandal, Theodore Draper wrote at the time, “we now have a better idea of how this is likely to be done.”…
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Charles P. Pierce, in Esquire‘s Political Blog, nicely summarizes the “lost opportunities of Iran-Contra“:
… Iran-Contra was a straightforward constitutional B&E. The Reagan people wanted to fight a war in Central America. Congress did its constitutional duty and shut off the money. The administration then broke the law by arranging private funding for its pet war. One of the ways it did that was to sell military hardware to the government of Iran, which sponsored not only terrorism, but also the kidnapping of various American citizens abroad. All of this was in service to a private foreign policy, devoid of checks and balances, and based on a fundamental contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law…
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Iran-Contra was the moment when the country decided — or, alternatively, when it was decided for the country — that self-government was too damned hard, and that we’re all better off just not knowing. It was the moment when all the checks and balances failed, when our faith in the Constitution was most sorely tested, and when it was found most seriously wanting. Iran-Contra is how all the crimes of the subsequent years became possible. It is when the Constitution became a puppet show.
I was in my mid-20s then, old enough to understand the depths of Republican treason and dishonesty exposed by the Walsh investigation, and young enough to be outraged by the unseemly haste by which both wings of the Permanent Government Party and its media courtiers swept all evidence of global criminality out of the public eye. Mistakes were made! Honorable men — opinions differ! And yet even the truncated clown-show proceedings permitted to enter the official records established, to me, what prosecutors call “a pattern of misconduct”: One October Surprise might be dismissed as the abberation of a paranoid drunk misleading a band of well-meaning innocents, but repeating Nixon’s ‘mastercoup’– putting American lives at risk for nothing more valuable than a presidential campaign — made it clear that the Republican Party was deliberately degenerating from a political party into a criminal junta. I have always been a proud Democrat, but it was the whole sordid, murderous Iran-Contra scandal which convinced me that (to quote Driftglass and the Rude Pundit):
Anyone who votes for a modern Republican is voting for a Bad Person.
Republican Anniversary of the Week: Iran-ContraPost + Comments (57)
End Your Relationship
If you have a few minutes to kill this morning, read through the explanation of why one would want to use a product called Find His Porn:
When should I use it?
If you feel he’s hiding something then now is probably a good time. Find His Porn scans your hard drive thus the time required is dependent on how big the hard drive and just how much porn they have stashed away. We suggest finding a time when he’s not home so you have ample time to run the tool and look at the results.
For the sake of argument, I’ll accept without comment the sexist assumption that it’s only women who are concerned that men are hiding porn. Let me save the women of the world some agida and a few bucks. If your man says that he doesn’t look at porn, he’s hiding it. And even if he’s not hiding it, do you really want to see what he looks at? The reason that the saying “men are pigs” is a cliche is simply because it’s true.
But let’s say you’re still curious. If, as in the demonstration video for Find His Porn, you find that your man has visited a midget porn site, what does that tell you? Does he have a midget fetish or was he just looking for a WTF moment? Are you going to ask him after you’ve prowled through his browsing history while he was out of the house?
Even though it promises to tell you something new about your man, in the end, Find His Porn at best just gives you information, not insight. In that respect, it’s like a lot of other products targeted at women, like Cosmo magazine, that are chock full of supposed “secrets” about men, like “We Like Chick Flicks”. Sorry, no: most men would rather watch porn than a chick flick, and you don’t need to spend $19.95 on Find His Porn to find that out.
Also, too: in case it isn’t obvious, I’m now following Dan Savage on Twitter, and that’s where I learned about Find His Porn.
Wednesday Morning Open Thread
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Many thanks to commentor THE for introducing me to a new and entrancing musical instrument!
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Today is the last chance to send your pet photos to [email protected] (or click on my name, near the top of the right-hand column) for the Balloon Juice 2012 Calendar, once again for the benefit of Charlie’s Angels Animal Rescue.
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What else is — or should be — on the agenda today?
Sheblowsalot
When Emma Sullivan began the process of humiliating Sam Brownback and his staff — I wholeheartedly agree with the Jim Newell headline “Tweeting Teen Completes Total Victory over Crybaby Kansas Governor” — I immediately wondered what vapid Village idiot will be the first to use this as pretext to lecture teh kids about rudeness and manners blah blah blah. It’s Ruth Marcus.
Emma Sullivan, you’re lucky you’re not my daughter. (Dangerous sentence, I know: My daughters might agree.)
If you were my daughter, you’d be writing that letter apologizing to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for the smartalecky, potty-mouthed tweet you wrote after meeting with him on a school field trip.
Also, that smartphone? The one you posed with, proudly displaying the tweet in which you announced that Brownback “sucked” and added the lovely hashtag #heblowsalot? Turned off until you learn to use it responsibly.
[….]It is until we parents insist such language is not acceptable, explain that it is possible to disagree civilly — and insist on an apology when our children fall short.
If only we could disagree more civilly about the need to lie our way into unnecessary wars, to destroy Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, to torture, to eulogize mass-murdering tyrants. What a wonderful world this would be.
Tell me again that I’m wrong to wish for a meteor or a revolution.
Update. Also too:
After Willie Horton ads, Swiftboating, GOP convention-goers waving purple band-aids to mock a veteran’s war wounds, birtherism, Ann Coulter saying the “only choice was whether to impeach or assassinate” President Clinton, Coulter claiming 9/11 widows were “enjoying their husband’s deaths,” Rush Limbaugh mocking Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease, ads falsely claiming Barack Obama favored “comprehensive sex education for Kindergartners,” Rand Paul supporters trying to stomp the head of a protester, ads claiming Kay Hagen was “godless,” Michelle Bachmann calling for an investigation of ‘un-American views” among the Congress, “If ballots don’t work, maybe bullets will,” “Obama hates white people,” ‘GET OFF MY PHONE YOU LITTLE PINHEAD!” “YOU LIE!”, wingnuts at FreeRepublic calling 11-year old Sasha Obama a “street whore” for wearing a peace sign on her t-shirt, outright lies about “death panels,” “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy,” cheering for executions, booing soldiers in war zones for being gay, comparing poor people to stray animals you shouldn’t feed, “’we’ve got one raghead in the White House, we don’t need a raghead in the governor’s mansion,” supposed “Christians” suggesting that people pray for the President using Psalm 109:8 (“May his days be few; may another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow”) as a text, Limbaugh calling the First Lady “uppity,” and on and on and on, all without a single peep from the Right…They can take their whiny-ass bullshit about liberal “rudeness” and peddle it somewhere else. We ain’t buyin’ it here.
Open thread
No horse play, please.
Post Turkey Open Thread
After eating turkey and leftovers for every meal since Thursday, I am so excited to eat tacos tonight that I am salivating.