The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment - at one point taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its Christmas card list.
Now it's happening again - except that this time it's even worse. Let's turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: "Imam Hussein Obama," he recently declared, is "probably the best anti-American president we've ever had."
To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he's an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly.
So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?
Anyone who remembered the 1990s could have predicted something like the current political craziness. What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don't consider government by liberals - even very moderate liberals - legitimate. Mr. Obama's election would have enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact that he isn't, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage.
By the way, I'm not talking about the rage of the excluded and the dispossessed: Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich....
If I were President Obama, I'd be doing all I could to head off this prospect, offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.
The maddening thing is that absolutely none of this should come as any kind of surprise. In 1993, Clinton took office, and tried to make nice with Republicans in an effort to build a spirit of bipartisanship. He attacked the left (his infamous "Sister Souljah moment") to show them how much he thought like them. He ignored the late-breaking information--in a pre-election indictment of Cap Weinberger--that Bush I had been totally in the loop on Iran/Contra, He ignored a whole raft of other outstanding scandals (some of which, lile BCCI, also involved wealthy Democratic elites). He got NAFTA passed, when no Republican President could possibly have pulled it off. And for all this placating and more--including a wholesale change of tone that prevented Democrative Congressional leaders from moving aggressively as well--what did Clinton get as his reward? An endless stream of wild-eyed accusations, half-baked investigations, and de facto all-out war.
There is one thing Krugman said that I'd like to correct, though:
What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don't consider government by liberals - even very moderate liberals - legitimate.
We didn't just learn that from the Clinton years. That's an eternal truth of conservatism. It's hard-wired into both rightwing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation. You can find it in the refined prose of Edmund Burke, as well as the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. And you can find it in the hidden history of the 1980s that Clinton & company helped bury in the utterly delusional belief that doing so would buy some sort of political peace.
The most open outrage was that Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh--a life-long Republican--uncovered evidence that George H.W. Bush had lied when he claimed to be "out of the loop" about the Iran/Contra scandal. As investigative reporter Robert Parry wrote in his review of Walsh's book, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up:
The Republican independent counsel also infuriated the GOP when he submitted a second indictment of Weinberger on the Friday before the 1992 elections. The indictment contained documents revealing that President Bush had been lying for years with his claim that he was "out of the loop" on the Iran-contra decisions. The ensuing furor dominated the last several days of the campaign and sealed Bush's defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton.
Walsh had discovered, too, that Bush had withheld his own notes about the Iran-contra affair, a discovery that elevated the president to a possible criminal subject of the investigation. But Bush had one more weapon in his arsenal. On Christmas Eve 1992, Bush destroyed the Iran-contra probe once and for all by pardoning Weinberger and five other convicted or indicted defendants.
"George Bush's misuse of the pardon power made the cover-up complete," Walsh wrote. "What set Iran-contra apart from previous political scandals was the fact that a cover-up engineered in the White House of one president and completed by his successor prevented the rule of law from being applied to the perpetrators of criminal activity of constitutional dimension."
But the cover-up likely could not have worked if the other institutions of Washington -- Congress, the courts and the press -- had not helped. Those institutions aided and abetted the White House both directly, through decisions that undermined the cases or reversed convictions, or indirectly, through incessant heckling of Walsh's investigators over trivial complaints.
Like the cover-up, the historic reversal -- from the constitutional protections of Watergate to the flouting of law in Iran-contra -- was complete.
Because this happened long before most of the current crop of online progressive activists were politically active, there is virtually no recollection of it. Yet, this must rank as one of the most blatant and audacious sanctioning of high-level criminality in American history. One cannot help but think that one of the reasons the Republicans came after Clinton with such a vengeance was that one of their own had been so publicly exposed as a high criminal, and the mere fact that Clinton had publicly chosen to look away and ignore that fact did nothing to assuage their rage.
Is it any wonder that, given Obama's refusal to learn from history, he seems poised to repeat it?
But that's only half the story here. Because there was a second, more hidden outrage, concerning high crimes--potentially including treason--and the theft of the 1980 election, a scandal known as "The October Surprise". Parry, who broke the first stories around the Iran/Contra scandal, was even more closely tied to this second outrage, since he was the one who discovered damning evidence of the Bush/Reagan campaign negotiations with Iran to delay the hostage release that had been buried by the House investigative committee headed up by Lee Hamilton. I've written about this before, but in recent months Perry has discovered that Hamilton was probably ignorant of the report from Russian intelligence, which it now appears was buried by the chief investigator, E. Lawrence Barcella.
Here is a key part of that report, though hardly all of its most damining information:
On the supply of American arms to Iran according to available information, the Chairman of the R. Reagan election campaign, William Casey, in 1980 met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership, in particular with the arms dealers Djamshed and Kurosh Hashemi. The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris. At the meeting in Paris in October 1980, in addition to Casey, R. Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration for Jimmy Carter and former CIA Director George Bush also took part.
In Madrid and Paris, the representatives of Ronald Reagan and the Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, taken hostage by Iranian "students" and members of the "Corps of Defense of the Islamic Revolution" on 4 November 1979 until after the elections that took place in November 1980. In exchange for this, the American representatives promised to supply arms to Iran. This was asserted, in particular, by a former Israeli intelligence agent, Ari Ben-Menash, a Jew born in Iran and arrested in 1989 in the U.S. for supplying arms to Iran (arrested in California on charges of exporting contraband C-130 aircraft from the U.S. to Iran and who was in prison for 11 months and then freed).
According to his calculation, the total value of the arms illegally delivered to Iran reached 82 billion dollars.
Data on attempts by the R. Reagan team to temporarily block the release of American hostages in Teheran are also contained in official statements of several Iranian figures, including Minister of Foreign Affairs Gotb-Zade in September 1980.
In contrast to all the vaporous imaginings that rightwingers like Beck spin hour after hour, imagine, if you will, what our politics would be like if MSNBC, say, were to air hour upon hour of programming about the Reagan/Bush team, and its involvement in the October Surprise and the Iran/Contra scandals. And then imagine that this was intertwinned with equally detailed coverage of the various Bush Administration scandals with which progressive online activists are much more familiar.
Imagine a world like that, and then imagine how easy it would be to enact a progressive Democratic agenda, if it simply a matter of common knowledge how profoundly anti-democratic, as well as corrupt, the highest levels of the Republican Party since 1980 actually were.
Now ask yourself, why is it that Democratic elites are just as uninterested in seeing that sort of world as their Republican counterparts.
STATE BLOGS
