Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1986 Editor's Choice: 19
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I feel much better now...maybe
[Read the article: Lying to Congress has become a Republican principle, literally]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thanks to zack and Paul Rosenberg for the links, I started feeling much better about my recollections. I have been really having a problem with all the talk that Dick Cheney may have undergone brain damage during his heart attacks, and emerged a changed and mean man. I remember a triumvirate of mean small-spirited men running the Republican Congressional delegation back in the Iran-Contra days: Bob Dole, Bob Michel, and Dick Cheney. Far as I'm concerned, I thought he'd always been mean. I'd also remembered when Elliot Abrams was refused by a Congressional committee after it came out that he'd lied to them, they refused to allow him to testify.
But inasmuch as Sy Hersh reports that he convened a group to learn the lessons of Iran-Contra, to wit, how not to get caught on the secret funding Hersh talks about, I also remember watching almost all of the Iran-Contra hearings and thinking that these guys planned, using as a model the Watergate stuff, how not to get caught. Witness Reagan's defiant statement (which at the time I thought was a triumphant declaration of victory over the 18 minute gap and the Nixon tapes) "I don't remember and you can't prove it." (said to John Tower's "Blue Ribbon Panel").
Anyway, I was elated that my memory was not as bad as it was beginning to seem until -- I read Jack Hughes comment that the current hard core support is the same as the support for the Nazis during Weimar. That means this thing isn't even close to over.
Which leaves me with the question, why was the architect of the Iran-Contra cover-up running the Iraq Study Group?
One more memory, if you'll indulge: The Old Mole ran a very long, documented piece in the late '60s that there was evidence that people connected with Nixon were in the pumpkin patch planting evidence before the big shocking "discovery" in the Alger Hiss case. I had always assumed this was why Jimmy Carter cleared him. No?
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Nixon wasn't savvy during HUAC proceedings
[Read the article: Lying to Congress has become a Republican principle, literally]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...if Alger Hiss was not guilty. Occam's Razor alone says he was, and Nixon was savvy enough to detect the signs of lying when the elegant and smooth Hiss testified.
No. Nixon claimed the discovery of a microfilm of classified information hidden in a pumpkin in a field in Hiss' back yard.
BTW, Occam's razor states that things should not be multiplied unnecessarily. It is the Law of Parsimony that states that the simplest theory is, all else being equal, the correct one.