Many people regard the incompetence, corruption - the sheer cravenness - of the Bush Administration as unprecedented in American history. But there is a robust argument that he was outshone in propagating evil and idiocy by the Administration most responsible for shaping modern times - that of Ronald Reagan.
Yesterday, I posted about how Reagan massively shifted tax burdens from the rich to the middle class, looted the Social Security trust fund, and began digging the country into a debt hole that makes the Marianas Trench look like one of W's golfing divots.
Today we look at Reagan's foreign policy, and at Iran-Contra in particular. While the economic record is enraging, the foreign policy record is even more painful. But I think it might be instructive to relive in some detail how Reagan and his crew of evil clowns escaped accountability for Iran-Contra. (You know that Karl Rove has studied those events carefully, looking for pointers.)
My point in these diaries is
not to argue that scumbags tearing down our country for their own twisted ideological and/or profiteering agendas is somehow the norm in American politics. My point is that the Reagan Administration set a new low, and that our failure to confront its excesses at the time, set the stage for the outrages of W and crew.
So once again, I invite you to sit back, buckle your seatbelt, and come along with me for a ride. For a few more minutes, we will return to those systematically airbrushed days of yesteryear, when deeply flawed, corrupt men (and women) set off the spiraling unraveling of American Democracy.
We are going back (once more) to the Reagan era, which officially began 25 years ago this weekend.
Foreign Policy
"This President is treated by both the press and foreign leaders as if he were a child....It is major news when he honors a political or economic discussion with a germane remark and not an anecdote about his Hollywood days." - Columnist Richard Cohen
A taste of Reagan foreign policy:
- June 8, 1982 - In the wake of an embarrassing mix up at the UN regarding a US vote on the Falkland Islands war, Jeane Kirkpatrick describes the nation's foreign policy as "stumbling from issue to issue almost on a Mad Hatter basis."
- Comments Secretary of State Al Haig, "Do I think US foreign policy is inept?.... At times it is. At times its not. At times its even brilliant. At times its rather stupid. It would be very hard to ask me to label it." On June 25, 1982, Reagan would "accept Haig's "resignation" - which came as a surprise to Haig, as he had not actually submitted a letter of resignation. [THINGS HAVE CHANGED: Can you imagine a Cabinet Secretary being held accountable for rank incompetence nowdays?]
I'll try to break Reagan's foreign policy into three discussions: 1) Central America (where we defeated a phantom red menace), 2) the nuclear stand-off and 3) the Middle East (where Reagan fueled the Iran-Iraq war, helped create a hostage-based-economy in Lebanon, and pointlessly sacrificed hundreds of marines over several years). Along the way, we'll give credit where its due in creating Al Qaeda, and examine how Reagan single-handedly won a 40-year conflict, the Cold War - without missing a single nap.
I drew heavily from books and articles by Paul Slansky (The Clothes Have no Emperor), Marc Green and Gail MacColl (Reagan's Reign of Error), Garry Wills, and William Greider - most things with a date reference come directly or are paraphrased from the first two sources).
"I'm a Contra, Too"
March 6, 1981 - "We think we are helping the forces that are supporting human rights in El Salvador" - Reagan referring to his support for the ruling right-wing junta, reckoned to have been responsible for the majority of 12,000 murders in El Salvador the previous year.
December 21, 1982 - Congress passes the Boland Amendment, barring the CIA and DoD from funding the overthow of the Nicaraguan government. This started the gears turning on the activities that would lead to the Iran-Contra scandal.
In 1984, a CIA manual came to light "Operaciones Socologicas en Guerra de Guerrillas" that advised Nicaraguan Contra rebels how to blackmail citizens into supporting their cause, arrange the deaths of fellow rebels to create martyrs, and how to kidnap and kill government officials. This, in itself, should have been a major scandal.
March 3, 1985 - Reagan compares the Nicaraguan Contras to the founding fathers of the American Constitution.
Reagan said all that needed to be said about the Sandinista menace at a Texas fundraiser in 1986:
"...And by the way, I think you know I've mentioned in the past that Nicaragua is only a 2-day drive from the Texas border... The Communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua has made a lot of mistakes, but even they know better than to get themselves in a tangle with a bunch of Texans. Even with all the tanks and gunships from the Soviet Union, my guess is that the Sandinistas would make it about as far as the shopping center in Pecos before Roger Staubach came out of retirement -- [laughter] -- teamed up with some off-duty Texas Rangers and the front four of the Dallas Cowboys, and pushed the Sandinistas down the river, out across the Gulf, and right back to Havana where they belong."
The war against the red menace on our doorstep fizzled out with a Costa Rican brokered truce agreement in March, 1988. But Central America will come up again later.
Scare-Mongering
"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." -- Ronald Reagan during a microphone check, August, 1984
"We're in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor. Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country." - NY Times, April 12, 1980
Throughout the 1970s, Reagan made a series of unsupported, or, more often, inaccurate statements falsely-attributed, arguing that the Soviet Union had superior conventional forces to the United States, and that this was a deep, dark secret being covered up.
By the 1980s, he preferred to emphasize Russian nuclear superiority - the missile gap. In 1982 he argued that the Soviets had 945 warheads aimed at Europe and that "we" had "no deterrent whatsoever," somewhat discounting the 590 warheads explicitly targeted at the USSR, 1000 warheads on bombers, and 4,500 warheads not formally committed to NATO defense, but generally targeted at the East Bloc.
Reagan repeatedly warned that Soviet industry was "hardened" to nuclear missile attacks, and that Soviet civil defense preparation programs had practiced evacuating Russian cities (Reagan claimed "20 million young people" were taken to the country to "give them training in just living off the countryside.") He also babbled on many occasions about how sea-based nuclear missiles were recallable, and on several other occasions mused about Armageddon. But lest the Russkies attack, he had an answer.
Help Us Obiwon Kenobe...
On March 23, 1983 - Reagan made his Star Wars speech, borrowing from his 1940 film "Murder in the Air", whose hero, Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft, gets involved with "the Inertia Projector" a death ray that can shoot down planes.
More than $200 billion later, we're no closer to a "nuclear shield" than we were then. (Remember when Reagan tried to argue he would share SDI technology with the Russkies before deploying it?)
But the spending on Star Wars won the Cold War, didn't it?
Allow me to make a claim that some might find controversial: Reagan winning the Cold War is the mother of all bullshit frames.
There are many problems: 1) It wasn't that cold, 2) if victory was mainly about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Reagan's main role was showing up, 3) its decreasingly clear whether the ideology drove the arms flows, or the arms flows drove the ideology, and 4) 15 years down the line, well, does it feel like a victory to you?
- First, let's focus on the "war" part. It wasn't very "cold" to millions of people around the world who were killed and maimed in proxy wars driven by competing US and Soviet funding, arms, military advisors, and - in a half dozen countries - actual armies engaged in combat. We should be a bit more circumspect about the sheer toll of human misery unleashed in places like Afghanistan (1-2 million killed, 9 million refugees).
- Vis Reagan's agency, what do you suppose are the odds that Reagan could have even defined the key principles of the doctrine of "containment," cemented by Truman and Eisenhower officials, to which most "hawks" would have ascribed the grand victory (that is, before every rightwing intellectual was on the payroll of the Heritage Foundation or its ilk and sworn with blood oaths to advancing the Reagan cult of personality)?
- Third, at root, were we "cold"-fighting these wars as part of an ideological struggle, or, really, just supplying weapons? (Do the arms merchants win the wars, too, when they're finally resolved? Or do the merchants only win if the wars never stop?)
One could argue that the Reagan master-stroke of jacking military spending through the roof - partly to better enable arms shipments to hot zones - per
Eisenhower's warning - permanently militarized our society. In that sense, perhaps Reagan did win - crushing any prospects of an alternative agenda more focused on supporting the general welfare here at home - and creating this giant maw that can only be fed if we are in a permanent state of war.
The Moment of Victory
If we were to focus specifically on the "winning" moment - the collapse of the East Bloc and the Soviet Union - how about this conjecture:
Do you suppose future historians might give the leaders of Solidarity in Poland, political leaders such as Gorbachev, or any of the rest of the ~450 million citizens of the East Bloc any credit for shedding Soviet domination and dismantling their totalitarian governments with remarkable speed and remarkably little bloodshed at the end of the 1980s? Do you suppose that the 20 years of economic decline that preceded the collapse mattered?
Or was it Reagan's repetition of the phrase "Evil Empire" and unswerving procurement of extraneous nuclear warheads and warships - that were nothing more than rounding errors on the fundamental equation of nuclear stand-off, based on massive arsenals and mutually assured destruction?
But, hey, we're no longer threatened by nuclear annihilation, right? Hmm. Just where are those thousands of warheads that remain in the Russian arsenal pointed? If they're pointed at, say, the possible Penguin menace in Antarctica, how many minutes does it take to retarget them? Has anyone really taken inventory of all those piles of partially dismantled Soviet warheads sitting around in Russian warehouses lately?
How about the hundreds of warheads in the Chinese arsenal? How many is North Korea up to now? Recall that it was the nuclear bogey that facilitated W's world historic blunder in Iraq (and please note that W invaded the only country in the "axis of evil" that did not have a viable nuclear program, in the process completely undermining our standing and ability to deal with those that do?).
When Iran joins the nuclear club, look for the Republicans to thunder angrily, emotionally, self-righteously, about how Bill Clinton lost Iran - and probably pick up an additional 30 Congressional seats in the process.
That Cold War Winning Formula
Then there's the nature of the "victory." Philosophically, we "won" on the strength of our 1) freedom and 2) capitalist system. We've apparently concluded that the latter mattered a lot more than the former. Fifteen years later, Russia and many of the other Cold War losers - its hard to dispute that the people of these countries were big-time losers for most of the 20th century - have retreated back toward generic totalitarianism.
China has concluded that Russia's big mistake was allowing political liberalization in the first place. Russia has indicated that it agrees and is trying to move to the Chinese model. And make no mistake: generic totalitarianism in Russia is apparently fine by us, too, as long as they don't try to bring back the hammer and sickle iconography.
Likewise, here at home, on our "winning" side, Republicans have evidently concluded that, with the global PR value diminished, its now OK to for us to chuck the "freedom" part of the Cold War winning formula domestically, too.
One day history will recognize that one of the world historic achievements of the Bushniks will have been to convince large parts of the world that Democracy is neither inevitable nor even superior to other forms of government. This is really a profound transformation in global public opinion that the Bushniks have advanced extensively and convincingly, if, presumably, inadvertently.
The Mujahedin in Afghanistan
The best argument for Reagan having had a meaningful impact lies in the fallout in the Soviet Union from their own world historic blunder in Afghanistan, artfully prompted by the maneuvering of the CIA and Pakistani intelligence. (William Casey and friends got so out of control at one point that they came within a hair's breadth of triggering a Soviet invasion of Pakistan.) Perhaps more importantly, the conflict was perpetuated by $500 million a year in covert US aid (matched by the Saudis) and supplemented by state-of-the-art weapons like stinger missiles - which, with their toll on Russian helicopters, are considered by many to have fundamentally determined the outcome of the war.
Of course, in the process, Reagan's boys built the financial, communication, and training networks that would later become Al Qaeda, which would later murder more than 3,000 of our citizens on 9/11, and fuel Islamic radicalism across the muslim world - and, conveniently enough, provide justification / marketing materials for a new series of deployments and proxy wars.
The Middle East
"Our policy will be one of swift and effective retribution." - Ronald Reagan, January 27, 1981, discussing Administration policy toward hostage-taking
Immediately after "winning" the Cold War, we immediately plunged into the first of these - the first of who-knows-how-many - in the Persian Gulf. Let's look at Reagan's legacy in that region.
The day before Reagan's inauguration, President Carter had announced an agreement with Iran that "will result, I believe, in the freedom of our American hostages." A Reagan aid criticized the deal saying "This administration will not negotiate with barbarians or terrorists." Hold that thought.
Lowlight: Beirut, Grenada, and the Art of Misdirection
Remember in 2004 how the terror alert would go up every time some officious-kitten special task force or commission released an airbrushed report on Administration incompetence surrounding 9/11 and/or abuse of intelligence leading up to Iraq? The Bushniks learned this technique from a master:
- October 23, 1983 - A truck bomb at a barracks in Beirut kills 241 US marines. A year earlier Reagan had committed the Marines to an indefinite stay in pursuit of an ill-defined mission.
- October 24, 1983 - The very next day, Larry Speakes, commenting on political strife on the island of Grenada, is asked about press speculation that the US might intervene. He calls this speculation "preposterous."
- October 25, 1983 - To divert attention from the growing uproar over the disaster in Beirut, President Reagan launched an invasion of Grenada. He claimed US medical students there were in grave danger (looming tequila shortage at the poolside wet-bar?).
- October 26, 1983 - American medical students from Grenada kiss the tarmac upon landing in South Carolina. Scoffs school bursar Gary Solin, "Our safety was never in danger. We were used by this government as an excuse to invade Grenada." President Reagan says US troops "got there just in time" to prevent a Cuban takeover.
Lowlight: Shift the Blame (It's Carter's Fault)
- September 20, 1984 - A suicide bomber drives into the US embassy annex in Beirut killing two Americans, the third such attack in 19 months.
- On September 26, 1984, Reagan explained that the latest Beirut bombing was actually the fault of Jimmy Carter, who he claims presided over "the near-destruction of our intelligence capability." Carter, unable to hide his contempt, notes Reagan's repeated efforts "to blame his every mistake and failure on me and others who served before him."
- On October 5, presidential spokesman Larry Speakes is asked if President Reagan has read the House report on the latest Beirut truck bombing. "I don't think he's read the report in detail, he says. "It's five-and-a-half pages, double-spaced."
Lowlight: Smear the Critic"
Quoth VP Bush: "We went to Lebanon to give peace a chance...and we did. We saw the formation of a government of reconciliation [read: let the Syrians take over for 20 years] and for somebody to suggest, as our two opponents have, that these men died in shame - they better not tell the parents of those young marines."
The two opponents, of course were Mondale and Ferraro. They had, of course, said nothing of the sort. Instead, they had attacked (in their own milquetoast way) the lax security policies that facilitated the attacks and contributed to the deaths.
- June 14, 1985 - TWA Flight 847 is hijacked to Beirut by Lebanese Shiites, leading to a 16-day crisis (most are released, though one Marine is killed). During a sound check prior to announcing their release, Reagan says, "Boy, after seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do the next time this happens."
- October 10, 1985 - Reagan suggested that having PLO leader Yassir Arafat try the hijackers of the Achille Lauro might be a good idea. Aids quickly sent him back out with a retraction.
- January 25, 1987 - Four university professors are kidnapped in Beirut, bringing to 14 the number of Americans taken hostage under President Reagan, who - remember? - promised "swift and effective retribution" for such incidents. In fact, though the media saw no need to make a big thing of it, several hostages languished in captivity far longer than any under President Carter.
Reagan's response to the failure of his Lebanon policy:
"Anyone that's ever had their kitchen done over knows that it never gets done as soon as you wish it would." (Charitable souls might forward this one to W to help explain post-Katrina reconstruction delays.)
A Crack in the Teflon?
It turned out that Reagan did have a policy initiative in place, though. On August 30, 1985 - What may have been the first -- and may have been just the latest -- in a series, of US arms shipments to Iran (via Israel) is made. Two weeks later, an American hostage being held in Lebanon is released.
On October 5, 1986, three American mercenaries died on a supply run to the contras when their cargo plane was shot down by Nicaraguan forces. Survivor Eugene Hasenfus, who had violated orders by wearing a parachute, was captured in the jungle. The White House, the State Department, the Defense Deepartment and the CIA all claim non-involvement.
Four days later, Hasenfus, imprisoned in Managua, on the other hand, would claim the CIA was overseeing his mission. That same week, George Bush denied any involvement in Contra resupply, despite having met twice with former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez whose job that resupply had been. The next week, Hasenfus claims Bush has been aware of the Contra operation.
On November 3, 1986 - In Lebanon, pro-Syrian magazine Al Shiraa reports that the US has secretly been supplying arms to Iran. This report fundamentally "broke" the Iran-Contra story.
Let's follow some of the lies and unravelling:
- November 4, 1986 - Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaker of the Iranian Parliament, says that former NSC adviser Robert "Bud" McFarlane and four other Americans, carrying Irish passports and posing as members of a flight crew, recently traveled to Iran on a secret diplomatic mission to trade military equipment for Iran's help in curbing terrorism. Rafsanjani says the men brought a Bible signed by President Reagan and a cake in the shape of a key, which was said to be "a key to open US-Iran relations."
- November 7, 1986 - "In the name of God, would you please just be responsible and back off?" - recently released hostage David Jacobsen at the White House, berating reporter for asking President Reagan questions about the secret Iran arms deal.
- On November 13, 1986, Reagan addressed the nation:
"For 18 months now, we have had under way a secret diplomatic initiative to Iran. That initiative was undertaken for the simplest and best of reasons: to renew a relationship with the nation of Iran; to bring an honorable end to the bloody six-year war between Iran and Iraq; to eliminate state-sponsored terrorism and subversion, and to effect the safe return of all hostages..."
(He apparently hoped that if he mentioned the hostages last, people wouldn't think their release was the prime motivation for the deal.)
"During the course of our secret discussions, I authorized the transfer of small amounts of defensive weapons and spare parts for defensive systems to Iran.... These modest deliveries, taken together, could easily fit into a single cargo plane... We did not - repeat - did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we."
In sum, Reagan claimed that the arms for hostages swap wasn't really a swap because we didn't give them too much stuff, and besides, the stuff we did give them hardly counted as weapons. Reagan would continue denying and distorting for months. His aids had advised him to admit it was a mistake, but Reagan rejected this tack.
In fact there were at least 4 arms shipments comprising more than 90 tons of weapons, and maybe as many as 20. They corresponded with the release of particular hostages from Lebanon - and surely encouraged others to take more hostages, which happened.
The Legacy of the "October Surprise"?
Of course, some suggest that shipments to Iran had been going on for a long time, connected to an "October Surprise":
"In the course of hundreds of interviews, in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, I have been told repeatedly that individuals associated with the Reagan-Bush campaign of 1980 met secretly with Iranian officials to delay the release of the American hostages until after the Presidential election. For this favor, Iran was rewarded with a substantial supply of arms from Israel." (Gary Sick, NY Times, April 15, 1991)
- November 18 - "79% Reject President's Explanation of Iran Deal" - Los Angeles Times
- November 21, 1986 - The shredding machine in Oliver North's office jams. He was less successful at destroying computer files, which would show that he had shared secret information with the Iranians. "Ollie was running his own covert operation within the authorized covert operation." Investigators would also discover that the $10 million solicited for the contras by Elliott Abrams from the Sultan of Brunei - which had been missing for nine months - was mistakenly deposited to the account of a Swiss businessman after Oliver North transposed two digits in his arms networks' secret account.
- November 25 - A grim President Reagan appears in the White House briefing room to say he "was not fully informed on the nature of one of the activities" undertaken as an off-shoot of the Iran arms deal. He announced that NSC Advisor John Poindexter had resigned and NSC staffer Oliver North had been fired, and then introduced Attorney General Ed Meese to explain why.
"Certain monies which were received in the transaction between representatives of Israel and representatives of Iran were taken and made available to the forces in Central America which are opposing the Sandinista government there," says Meese. "We don't know the exact amount yet. Our estimate is that it is somewhere between $10 and $30 million.... The President knew nothing about it."
Later the same day, Reagan calls North and tells him this is going to make a great movie some day.
At this point - more than two months into the revelations, anchor-weasel Peter Jennings opined that "The Iran affair is now a scandal." Reagan's approval rate fell in November from 67% to 46%.
Key Tactic: Launch A Bullshit Commission
- December 1, 1986 - On the same day Reagan introduced the members of the Tower Commission, Time publishes an interview in which Reagan calls North a "national hero," dismisses the furor over the growing scandal as a "beltway bloodletting", and blames the press for interfering with the release of more hostages. "There is a bitter bile in my throat," he says. "This whole thing boils down to great irresponsibility on the part of the press."
- December 6, 1986 - Reagan finally concedes "Mistakes were made," though he does not suggest who made them and implies that it certainly wasn't him.
- December 7, 1986 - Reagan is reported to have had three long, rambling conversations with noted expert on White House scandal containment, Richard Nixon.
- December 10, 1986 - CIA Director William Casey evokes laughter a number of times with his repeated use of the phrase "I don't know." Casey has a malignant brain tumor removed 8 days later, and, conveniently (suspiciously?) never recovers from the surgery, dying in early 1987.
- December 20, 1986 - "Meese Now Says Reagan, Under Sedation After Surgery, May Have OKD First Arms Deal" - New York Newsday. A few weeks later, the White House would release the Presidential finding - signed by President Reagan on January 17, 1986 - authorizing the sale of arms to Iran and ordering the CIA not to tell Congress. Also released, is the 3 page memo justifying the policy, which Reagan had not bothered to read.
- January 16, 1987 - "The President has absolutely convinced himself that what happened has absolutely nothing to do with hostages.... Not one is going to talk him out of it, and its not clear that anyone is even going to try" - unnamed White House source
- January 20, 1987 - Contra Arms Crews Said to Smuggle Drugs - NY Times
There was fairly
compelling evidence that the CIA had gotten into the cocaine-smuggling business to support the contras (with former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega as a key link). Needless to say, this part of the story, potentially particularly embarrassing to the President who started the "War on Drugs" was lost in the vortex of simultaneously imploding scandals.
- January 20, 1987 - Bud MacFarlane goes on Nightline to deny having anything to do with the cake they took on their secret mission, saying it was North's idea. Three weeks later, on the eve of his testimony to the Tower Commission, Bud MacFarlane would take 20 valiums in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.
- January 22, 1987 - 62% of the American public think Reagan is lying about the Iran-contra scandal. A few days later, Reagan acknowledges to the Tower Commission that he authorized the sale of arms to Iran in August, 1985, corroborating MacFarlane's testimony, and directly contradicting Donald Regan's. A few weeks later, he would tell the Commission that, after discussion it with Don Regan, he now remembered that he did not authorize the arms sale in advance. (In reciting his recollection from a staff-supplied memo, he mistakenly reads his stage-instructions aloud.) Nine days later, he would write a letter to the Commission: "The simple truth is I don't remember - period." (Reagan, of course, had promised to resign at the slightest sign of senility.)
- January 28, 1987 - Bush, discussing the wisdom of selling arms to states that sponsor terrorism argues that "sometimes the exception proves the rule." Two weeks later Bush would acknowledge that they were not really dealing with Iranian moderates, despite earlier insistence - the supposed moderates, it seems, could not deliver.
- March 4, 1987 - Reagan goes on national TV with a 12 minute speech acknowledging Iran-Contra "happened on my watch" and says nobler aims "deteriorated into trading arms for hostages."
By this time, however, the focus had thoroughly shifted from whether the whole thing was an egregious violation of the law and violation of the Constitution that should result in impeachment to a pathetic drama about what, specifically, Reagan could remember.
The Fizzle
- July 15, 1987 - John Poindexter claims he kept the President uninformed of the fund diversion in order to provide future "deniability." Pundits conclude that Reagan faces no chance of impeachment, upon which most people lose interest in the hearings. He would conclude his testimony a week later having said "I can't recall" 184 times. Ed Meese would use variants of the phrase "I can't recall" 340 times in testimony where he also explained that he did not take notes in his early interviews about the diversion of funds to the Contras because he did not realize it would become a criminal proceeding.
- November 18, 1987 - By the time the Iran-Contra Hearing report comes out, the scandal has completely dissipated. Reagan Chief of Staff Howard Baker said the President did find the report "personally hurtful," though it appears he never actually read it.
So, in sum, how did it turn out?
Everyone got off.. North and Poindexter were indicted on multiple charges and convicted on several, but the convictions were later vacated upon appeal on the grounds that their Fifth Amendment rights may have been violated - the lawyers successfully argued that the convictions were tainted by information from the convicts' testimony to Congress, which had been given under a grant of immunity.
Several former State Dept. and CIA officials (most notably Elliot Abrams) would plead guilty in 1991 to withholding information from Congress (mainly about aiding the Contras). In 1992, Caspar Weinberger, defense secretary under Reagan, was indicted on the same charge. However, in 1992, 6-8 years after the fact, Bush pardoned Weinberger and all the other officials who had been indicted or convicted for withholding information on or obstructing investigation of the affair.
Summary
In sum, by wrapping themselves in the flag, putting out a bewildering array of contradictory stories and details, flip-flopping back and forth on what the dottery old man actually knew, and flat-out stalling, they were able to ride-out the storm and avoid accountability for appalling constitutional breaches and disastrous policy decisions.
Reagan should have been impeached, period. His administration unapologetically broke the spirit and letter of multiple laws. It was his watch. He should have been held accountable.
Conclusion: Part II
Of course I'm leaving out a lot here (e.g., when Reagan declared, referencing his visit to a Bitburg cemetary, that the SS soldiers interred there "were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.") But what I've presented is already more than we can bear.
Democratic leaders are not innocent bystanders here. They have been hesitant and easily wrong-footed and duped across the entire 25 years since Reagan took office. They let Reagan off the hook for these unpardonable breaches. And then they played along, a decade later, as Republicans pursuing Clinton fundamentally reframed impeachment, itself, as nothing more than a tactic of partisan excess, not a fundamental, last-resort, self-correcting mechanism of Democracy.
This enables the con men today to portray the drive to impeach Bush as tit-for-tat partisanship. It is not.
Now its time to reset the hurdle where it belongs, to stand behind principle, and to argue, simply, with the confidence of righteousness: when elected officials deliberately break the law of our country, when they deliberately attack the Constitution of the United States of America, they will be removed from office, tried in a court of law, and, when convicted, be subjected to appropriate -- but real -- punishment.
This is a country of laws, not men. On this we must stand together, or, as a nation, fall apart.