Years ago when Richard Nixon was
President I attended a rather progressive, very pro-Vatican II, parish in
Fresno, CA. Although I only half
believed it, we were assured by some political activist that our phones had
been tapped by the FBI because we were thought to be anti-American.
At first I was pretty distressed
because I had a really peculiar faint clicking on my phone, this being before
the age of digital anything. A very good
friend of mine suggested that if in fact my phone was tapped, let’s give the
listeners something to do. So a couple
of times a week we would scour our cook books for really long recipes, call the
other one, and read the recipes in a sort of conspiratorial voice. Occasionally one of us would say, “Oh, I
can’t finish this now. Someone is
coming.” Fortunately I had a really long
cord on my phone and a dog who would bark whenever the front doorbell rang, so
I would go push the button, the doorbell would ring, the dog would bark, and I
would say, “The doorbell rang and the dog is barking. I have to go”. I never knew whether my phone was tapped, but
it was fun to pretend, anyway.
We all know what eventually
happened to Nixon because of all of his shenanigans.
Sometime after Nixon we managed,
in our united idiocy, to elect Ronald Reagan.
We got all sorts of bad stuff with Reagan, but the very worst was the
Iran-Contra Scandal. While Carter was
President, Iran took 51 Americans hostage and held them for 444 days. This scandal was one of the major reasons
Carter lost the election, and on the day Reagan was sworn in, Iran released the
hostages. Well, this old cynic even then
smelled a rat, and a rat it was!!
“The Iran-Contra Affair involved
a secret foreign policy operation directed by White House officials in the
National Security Council (NCS) under President Ronald Reagan.” And I have lost who the quote is from, but
all one need do is google Iran-Contra Affair and all sorts of history comes
up. The point I wish to make is that The
Iran-Contra Affair was directed by the White House, and its chief person was
Oliver North who had his own office in the White House basement. This scandal broke all sorts of laws, was
ethically devoid of any, and Ronnie Baby managed to brush it off. Eventually he claimed he couldn’t remember
anything because he had Alzheimer’s!!
How convenient was that? By the
way, G.H.W. Bush was also involved in Iran-Contra. Poppy Bush.
From the National Security
Archive, dated 11/25/11, Washington D.C., “President Ronald Reagan was briefed
in advance about every weapons shipment in the Iran arms-for-hostages deals in
1985-6, and Vice President George H. W. Bush chaired a committee that
recommended the mining of the harbors of Nicaragua in 1983, according to
previously secret Independent Counsel assessments of “criminal liability” on
the part of the two former leaders posted today by the National Security
Archive.” “This posting was on the 25th
anniversary of the 11/25/86 press conference during which Ronald Reagan and his
attorney general, Edwin Meese, informed the American public that they had
discovered a ‘diversion’ of funds from the sale of arms to Iran to fund the
contra war, thus tying together the two strands of the scandal which until that
point had been separate in the public eye.”
Now this was a scandal! The President was directing it, a law passed
by Congress called the Boland Amendment was broken, there was talk about mining
the Nicaraguan Harbor. According to the
Archive’s, the criminal liability charges were drafted by a lawyer, Christian
J. Mixter. “On the contra operations,
Mixter determined that Reagan had, in effect, authorized the illegal effort to
keep the contra war going after Congress terminated funding by ordering his
staff to sustain the contras “body and soul.”
But he was not briefed on the resupply efforts in enough detail to make
him criminally part of the conspiracy to violate the Boland Amendment that had
cut off aid to the Contras in October 1984. Mixter also found that Reagan’s
public misrepresentations of his role in Iran-Contra operations could not be
prosecuted because deceiving the press and the American public was not a
crime.”
Then we get down to G. W. Bush,
or W and the politicized Department of Justice under the W administration. To take pertinent facts from a Huffington
Post article, written by Matt Apuzzo and Pete Yost, 7/21/10, “Bush DOJ’s firing
of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias Was Inappropriately Political But Not Criminal,
Obama DOJ Says”. David Iglesias, New
Mexico US Attorney, was fired because he refused to buckle under to the head of
the New Mexico Republican Party who had complained to the White House that
Iglesias was soft on “voter fraud”.
Eglesias and nine other US Attorneys were fired, and the resulting
scandal required that US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resign. Then “New Mexico Pete Domenici , R, also
became a focus of the investigation because he made three phone calls to the
attorney general and on to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty complaining
about Iglesias. McNulty didn’t mention
Domenici’s phone calls when questioned by Congress, leading to accusations over
a coverup.” The decision that this was
inappropriately political but not criminal, was, in my opinion, a crock.
I bring all of this up because of
what has been happening this week in Washington, and the three supposed
scandals. The IRS scandal appears to be
a few rather dim-witted IRS bureaucrats trying to figure out a way from out
from under the thousands of 401©4 applications from groups that were obviously
going to try to use these organizations for politics. After having been in public office, I used to
quip that the last person to know anything about how the county was run would
be the Chairman of the Board of Supervisors, and at the time we only had 2700 employees. This particular decision never rose to
Obama’s level. Some potential
organizations may have been frustrated, but no one was killed, and no laws were
broken. Obama took the right action to
see to it that this doesn’t happen again because it could happen to your
organization, regardless of who you are.
Relative to the Benghazi e-mails
having been re-written many times. My
God, that is what good writers do! They
write, leave it alone for a while, read it out loud to someone, send it over to
another agency to make sure you aren’t stepping on toes or saying something out
of line. I would be more distressed if
these e-mails hadn’t been reviewed and rewritten. This is truly a non-issue.
And finally, the DOJ should have
discussed what it was doing to try to locate the leak in its own department to
the press prior to issuing the subpoenas to the phone company for the telephone
numbers to and from the reporters. But it
is hardly an impeachable offense after Congress demanded that the DOJ do
whatever it could to find the leaker!
These last three items are not
scandals. They are serious mistakes that
need to be cleaned up, for sure, but hardly on the level with Watergate,
Iran-Contra, or lying us into a war that killed so many thousands of people – ours
and theirs, and indulging in torture.
People are always ranking on the
Catholic Church, and for some things it definitely needs ranking on, but then
on other matters it has now, and had, good things to say. Theologians used to divide sins up into
venial and mortal. A venial sin was
really not all that bad – one should not do it because it didn’t make the
sinner a better person. But a mortal sin
put our immortal soul in danger. What
has happened this past week has been some serious venial sins, but definitely
not mortal.
The Republicans need to get a
life!!
No comments:
Post a Comment