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kpete

(71,900 posts)
Mon Mar 16, 2015, 11:18 AM Mar 2015

ROLLING STONE: None Dare Call It Treason: Tom Cotton, Iran and Old GOP Ideas

Iran-Contra was "a vastly more explicitly illegal enterprise at every stage than Nixon's clownish" dirty tricks

By Jeb Lund March 16, 2015

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.......In the increasingly Manichean atmosphere of American politics, there will always be some politically exculpatory explanation. Nixon had to do it to stop the Democrats from "stabbing the troops in the back," or Both sides do it, so why should I care?

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The Reagan administration in some ways played these events out in reverse, beginning with what some people believe was a Reagan campaign conspiracy to sabotage hostage crisis talks in Iran and ending with the indisputably real violation of the Boland Amendment – a series of legally binding additions to congressional bills that prevented the Reagan administration from giving aid to the Nicaraguan contras. The Reagan administration had already used the CIA to try to overthrow the Sandinista government, and in this case a Democratic Congress exerted its ability to deny a Republican president the means to further his military and foreign policy. The Reagan administration's response was to fund the contras by illegally sell arms to the same Iran (hello again!) that candidate Reagan had excoriated and that he would subsequently arm Iraq against.


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. Everything between Bush and the neocon crowd's "noble lies" about Iraq, to Obama's refusal to indict them, to Obama's technocratic insistence that he and his team think really hard about the Kill List before turning Yemeni kids booking down the street into hamburger flows from this concession made by Americans to government malfeasance. So go ahead, yell at Iran's government, lick the Supreme Ayatollah's cheek and whisper te quiero, hombre, call the president a pussy. Do whatever the fuck you want.

This is the world Tom Cotton lives in – where you can undermine a president legally or illegally, and it won't matter. The record will be interpreted as needed by believers. You can even do something illegal with the same Iran that in your next breath you claim endangers us all. A crime enumerated in black and white will be forgiven by 50 percent of the voting audience just on sheer mistrust of the other 50 percent, and as for the rest, appealing to America's "vital national security interests" will do most of the work.

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Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/none-dare-call-it-treason-tom-cotton-iran-and-old-gop-ideas-20150316#ixzz3UYu3Gz6e
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ROLLING STONE: None Dare Call It Treason: Tom Cotton, Iran and Old GOP Ideas (Original Post) kpete Mar 2015 OP
This is a terrific article - one of the best I've read in a long time The Velveteen Ocelot Mar 2015 #1
k and r and bookmarking for later. niyad Mar 2015 #2
K&R nt myrna minx Mar 2015 #3
K & R, good read... mrdmk Mar 2015 #4

The Velveteen Ocelot

(115,276 posts)
1. This is a terrific article - one of the best I've read in a long time
Mon Mar 16, 2015, 11:34 AM
Mar 2015

about the way Republicans think about government. Well-written, too; and occasionally hilarious:

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?&quot , 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.

CPAC is a bubble of conservative neuroses, improbably packed into a weekend at a Maryland resort called the Gaylord. American power abuts the certitude that everyone in America is going to die tomorrow. The triumphalism of the American Dream, indivisible from conservatism, is as axiomatic as the fact that America has been destroyed by homosocialists. Sitting next to noted death walrus John Bolton, Cotton fit right in.

The CPAC conference room was standing-room only, stuffy with faint sweat, hot worsted wool and heavy breathing for boilerplate comments you could have predicted before you crossed the threshold. Cotton – who looks appropriately like Anthony Perkins in Psycho – proudly likened America to Rome, an empire that slowly tore itself apart over for-profit foreign wars, external threats leveraged to drown out domestic discontent, revenue diverted from infrastructure. Listeners murmured approvingly. Cotton asserted the need to send America to war to "defend its national interests" against "trans-national terrorist groups." By his utterly meaningless definitions, we need to fight anyone, and we need to do it anywhere, and it is our right. A thrill went through the audience.


"noted death walrus John Bolton"

But it's also depressing, because what the hell can anybody do to fix this?
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