The above is a pretty funny video and I recommend it to you all. But I didn't just post it because it's hilarious. There is a larger point here. Specifically, if you read an Andrew Brietbart blog expecting anything even remotely approaching the truth in history or politics, you may as well be straddling the hood a fucking Datsun on Sepulveda Boulevard yourself. All of the "Big" blogs are like dating sites for people who shouldn't be allowed out of their homes without electronic monitoring. If, however, you enjoy having your stupidity force-fed to you, I can't recommend the House of Brietbart more highly. You'll feel at home there.
I bring this up because I read the most remarkably dumb fucking thing I think I've ever seen on Brietbart's Big Peace this week. It's an "article" - and I use the term loosely - by some yutz named Kevin Mooney called "Oliver North’s ’80s Counter-Terrorism Efforts vs. Gaddafi Instructive to Post-9/11 Era." The headline alone nearly made me shit myself with laughter.
As much as I like to think that I excel at encapsulating stupidity for you folks here, I just can't do it this time. There's just too much of it. You really need to read the whole piece for yourselves.
Mr. Mooney spends a great deal of post drawing on the mitigating evidence from Colonel North's 1989 criminal trial. Oddly, he spends no time at all detailing what North was actually on trial for. Which is usually a pretty god clue that the guy that you're dealing with is a liar, a scumbag, an idiot, or a special bundle of all three. Pretty much all Mooney says about the trial is that the charges against Ollie were either dismissed or overturned on appeal. The report of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh is pretty enlightening on why some of the charges against North were dropped;
"North was indicted in March 1988 on 16 Iran/contra charges, along with Poindexter, retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord and Albert Hakim in a 23-count indictment. After the cases were severed and the central conspiracy charges were dropped due to classified-information problems, North stood trial beginning in February 1989 on 12 counts.I'm a weird guy in thinking that you can't claim to vindicated if you aren't tried because the government doesn't allow the evidence against you to be heard. You'd be surprised how often that stance keeps me from getting laid. Really you would.
Yet North still managed to get himself convicted of three counts: Aiding and abetting obstruction of Congress, shredding and altering official documents, and accepting an illegal gratuity from former National Security Advisor Richard) Secord. The "illegal gratuity" in question was a security fence around his home, the proceeds of which were diversions from the Contra payments, which were themselves diverted from the Iranian arms sales.
Colonel North's convictions were reversed for the simple reason that he was given transactional immunity by the Select Joint Committee investigating Iran-Contra. That immunity made it almost impossible, given North's televised - and immunized - testimony before Congress, to prosecute him criminally. Walsh should've resigned the second North's immunity was granted by Congress because it destroyed any number of Iran-Contra prosecutions.
But let's be clear about one thing. Oliver North wasn't vindicated on a single fucking thing. He got off on numerous technicalities. From a factual perspective, the good Colonel is no different than a rapist who was acquitted because it was dark outside that night. Actually, that's not true. Most rapists don't admit to, and try to justify, their crimes on national television.
Mooney never comes right out and says what the "counter-terrorism strategy" in Iran-Contra actually was. And you know what? I wouldn't either, because it was phenomenally goddamn silly.
In the 80s, a dozen or so Americans were being held by Iranian-supported terrorist groups in Beirut. President Reagan then decided to negotiate with the sponsors of that terrorism, Iran. He did this by having North sell them weapons - through Dick Secord, John Poindexter, and North - through, of all countries, Israel. This was being done while Reagan was also extending financial assistance to the country that Iran was at war with, Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Oh, and Iran-Contra was illegal from top to bottom. Because President Reagan only signed a back-dated presidential "finding" and never informed the relevant congressional authorities of the Iran arms sales, he was in violation of the National Security Act of 1947. The Contra diversion of funds from the Iranian arms sales - and the administrations solicitation of funds for the Contras from several foreign countries - violated the Boland Amendment, which specifically prohibited such horseplay under color of law.
Iran-Contra was as criminal, if not more so, than even Watergate. Reagan should have been impeached just for the things that he admitted to, such as trading arms for hostages through a third country without notifying Congress, and backdating intelligence findings. Can you imagine the outcry from Brietbart's legion of Big Shithead blogs if, say, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama tried anything like Iran-Contra?
Besides, The arms diversion, and the subsequent Fence That Ollie Built, are things that the President specifically denied any knowledge of. Not only did Reagan deny it on television to the American, but he denied it under oath.
Remember, it was the Reagan administration themselves that threw North under the bus, and Nancy Reagan herself condemned him - specifically by calling him a fucking liar in public - during his 1994 Senate race.
Kevin Mooney's deliberate (and extremely poorly executed) obfuscation did succeed i what I believe in what I think it's purpose was - making the heads of smart people hurt.
But even there I have a remedy! Fantastic tits!
Those fucking things are a damned near perfect and always make me feel better in all the places that count. It is my hope That I'll soon be promoting a website where you'll be seeing a whole lot more of those magnificent milkbags. I love them and the Two Feet of Terror that they belong to, if only because they always clear my head of the shitheadery that people like Kevin Mooney put out there,
That's why Miss J is a much better hero than Oliver North.
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