Reading about the eleventh hour confession of Ben Barnes, former Lt. Governor of Texas - that he accompanied John B. Connally to the Middle East ahead of the 1980 election to hamstring President Carter’s negotiations for the release of American hostages in Iran - should come as no surprise.
Yet it feels stunning when you begin to connect the dots.
Peter Baker and the New York Times have confirmed what many (including my own grandmother) had suspected for over forty years.
Anyone who has truly been paying attention knows this foul play stretches back at least fifty years as a modus operandi in Republican politics.
Beginning with Henry Kissinger thwarting a peace deal in Paris in 1968 to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War - because it would have hurt Nixon’s election prospects.
This later became known as the ‘Chennault Affair’ - and was only fully revealed many years later.
Most don’t still fully comprehend the depths of this scandal because Nixon became defined for his criminality and cover-up during his next election - the much more well known Watergate scandal.
In both cases, the aim was to attain power, as it was with Reagan’s interference in President Carter’s foreign policy towards Iran.
This also puts me in mind of Bill Barr and John Durham flying around Europe in 2019, asking the Italian government to find dirt on Hunter Biden to aid President Trump’s re-election campaign.
Or Trump’s infamous ‘perfect phone call,’ shaking down President Zelensky to aid his political prospects.
Ironically, Barr and Durham were actually told there was no dirt on HRC or the Bidens but the Italians did have some information on President Trump’s involvement with organized crime and money laundering.
Information they subsequently brought back to DOJ and made sure was not pursued with any vigor - to further protect the president and his re-election prospects.
In which case the Attorney General of The United States essentially became a personal fixer for a mob boss. Hiring and firing people within the department based on how much benefit or threat they were to the precarious legal standing of POTUS.
Because even in office, Trump could not stop committing crimes, much like Nixon and Reagan.
Bill Barr, cut his teeth, starting at the C.I.A., in the era of the behind-the-scenes subterfuge designed to hurt President Carter’s reelection effort.
Which made further victims of the hostages themselves - by being held in torturous captivity for another four months until Reagan won the election and was sworn-in - finally being released on Reagan’s inauguration day, January 20th, 1981.
No doubt prolonging the suffering of their families as well, treating human beings as collateral damage in their quest for power.
The clandestine deal also essentially gave the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime kompromat over Ronald Reagan for his entire presidency.
It’s no accident that as soon as Reagan took office his administration began secretly facilitating arms sales to Iran in defiance of an embargo: this occurred from 1981 to 1986.
This would later explode into the Iran/Contra affair where Reagan’s shadow cabinet also used the C.I.A. to smuggle cocaine into the United States.
In that sense, the behind the scenes manipulation on the hostage crisis was Reagan’s original sin - pulled from a playbook that had become well established and allowed to flourish in the shadows of America’s foreign policy.
All the prominent players from that era show up again and again in Republican politics.
Elliot Abrams even resurfaced during Trump’s administration, as a U.S. Rep. for Iran and Venezuela.
Bill Barr became Trump’s fixer after establishing his bona fides by getting most of the bad actors from the Iran/Contra affair off the hook.
Even though in the case of someone like Abrams, they were guilty of abetting war crimes (see the massacre at El Mozote for context of what happened with all the bullets and bayonets we provided the El Salvadoran death squads).
Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney also came out of the Nixon era of back room ‘dark arts’ to gain and hold power, honing their skills to the point of becoming neo-con ninjas who would both later go on to use that skill set on the world stage for profit and plunder.
This was also the age of Manafort, Stone & Black, the young turk GOP insiders willing to accept cash from the world’s despots and oil barons to buy political expediency and amass power inside the beltway.
They sold access to the world’s worst for money and to further the twisted cult of reactionary politics.
This, of course, came to a head for Manafort and Stone with the election of Donald Trump; essentially placing a Putin sycophant inside the Oval Office.
For four long years every chance Trump got to side with Putin he took: the world is far more dangerous place because of the former president’s avarice and obsequiousness.
Dangerous because of these men - and the fact that the infrastructure they established is still very much in place - buttressed now by the wealthiest 1% and the world’s oligarchs.
Not to mention a conservative-stacked SCOTUS and the radicalization of American citizens, an off-gas effect of such a toxic political structure.
Our combustible position has to be examined and dismantled with the skill of a surgeon and the steady hand of a bomb squad technician.
The fuse has been lit but if we follow how it snakes and curves we may be able to stomp out the sparks before it ignites the charge.
In many ways connecting the dots has never been easier - that is why I find myself pointing out the same cast of characters time after time.
The same neo-con names have now become contract players in a burgeoning franchise of neo-fascist dogma that has led to several wars and at least one attempted insurrection.
All of which had no real purpose other than protecting a criminal president and profiting from deceit on behalf private companies, such as Halliburton/KBR in the case of the Iraq war.
Beginning with Operation Desert Storm in 1990, we began to see the emergence of the toxic iconography that masked and sanitized the back room dealings of the power players hiding in the shadows.
The brutal cosplay of screaming eagle tattoos and tactical militarized aesthetics so popular among the paunchy MAGA morons who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
They have been sold lies for decades, until the point their leader became nothing more than a cartoon character.
Trump is a criminal in any rational mind; to MAGA and the GOP he is a virile warrior for the truth.
But there is no truth in the GOP and apparently no fair elections either.
They would like to keep it that way: we must not allow it.
Kessinger , another corrupt political
Again Noel, you succinctly addressed the very grimy and sordid doings of the GOP.
I really wish you were invited on more mainstream media. I simply cannot figure out why?
Anyway I follow your posts on FB and Twitter as well, where I go under a nom de plume.
Oh and many belated Birthday wishes to you 🎂☺️