25 Years Ago

If you had to pick a point along time-line of the modern United States and say "There! Right there is when it should have been clear to anyone with a brain that something deep and spinal has ruptured inside the American Experiment!" the moment when our political and media elites decided to let the Reagan Administration get away with treason would be an excellent candidate.

This bundle of high crimes, cartoon characters and lies to the American people about matters of life and death came to be known as Iran-Contra, and Charlie Pierce does an excellent job of summarizing the whole, sordid Beltway trainwreck of it.

Here's a snip:

...
The George H.W. Bush administration might never have happened, for all that would have meant to George W. Bush's eventual career. Criminalizing the constitutional crimes that are the inevitable result of the theory of the "unitary executive" might have encouraged the nation to ignore the ravings of an authoritarian lycanthrope like Richard Cheney.

I can remember what happened instead. Washington decided, quite on its own, that "the country" didn't need another "failed presidency," so what is now known as The Village circled the wagons to rescue Reagan from his crimes. There was the customary gathering of Wise Men — The Tower Commission — which buried the true scandal in Beltway off-English and the passive voice. There was a joint congressional investigation that served only to furnish people like Oliver North with legal loopholes that prevented their incarceration. There was poor Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor, whom everybody wished would simply go away, but who pressed on, making a case that ultimately forced President Poppy Bush to pardon everyone except Shoeless Joe Jackson on his way out the door in 1992.
...

In addition to all of its other tragic and melodramatic elements, Iran-Contra came with at least two additiona features that deserve to be underscored.

First, few remember that Iran-Contra led to a suicide attempt by a high ranking government official:

The Iran-Contra Affair came to light in November 1986, and a political scandal ensued. Disheartened, feeling abused by his former colleagues, and in depression over the embarrassment for the President that his actions had contributed to, McFarlane attempted suicide with an overdose of valium on February 9, 1987, saying he had failed his country.

In 1988, he pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress as part of the Iran-Contra cover-up. He was sentenced to two years’ probation and a $20,000 fine but was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992 along with the other key players in the scandal, during the lame duck period of Bush's presidency.

Second, Iran-Contra is one more metric ton of irrefutable evidence to shove down the gullets of certain Conservative death-bed converts who persist in insisting that the GOP just suddenly and inexplicably lost its mind last Tuesday, but before that everything was Jake.