A Little History for the Youngun’s

By Robert Coutinho

Just recently Republican Representative Devin Nunes suggested that, should the Republicans gain the needed seats to get control of the House of Representatives, they should impeach President Joe Biden, while giving no particular reason for why. This was a fascinating proposition coming from someone who purposely interfered with any investigation into whether or not President Trump had been given help with his first presidential election by Russia, whether or not the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russians, and other possible nefarious activities.

Devin Nunes was, during the time of 2017 through 2018, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Thus, he had access to virtually all of the spy information gathered by all House of Representative sources, which would include those who gained information from administrative sources. To say that his claim is likely a bit hypocritical, at best, is similar to suggesting that the Pacific Ocean is a bit wet.

In order to give the reader some background on the Republican Party’s desire for revenge motive, I will try to give some history of the malfeasance-factor involved in past presidential administrations. I invite comments from many of our older writers who lived through more of the early stuff than I did (I was pretty young during Nixon’s time), but I will try to give you some feel of how things were—from a peon’s point of view.

Tricky Dick:

Richard Nixon (R) took over as president in 1969, after Robert Kennedy was shot, thus leaving Hubert Humphrey as the de facto final Democratic Party nominee for president. There were riots at the Democratic National Convention. It was a bad scene. Martin Luther King had been assassinated as well. Hippie culture was going strong and was being magnified in its actual importance (sound familiar?) Nixon seemed like a bad, but acceptable alternative to the status quo.

Funny thing about Nixon and his Vice President, Spiro Agnew; they were both crooks. Now I say this not because I want to belittle their reputations, but because you need to understand that they were both crooks. Their first impulse upon finding anything out that was illegal and damning to their administration was to act like…guilty people would act. In other words, they would do everything they could to silence the investigators, deny the facts, distract the attention of the people, and cover up the crimes. This was true even if they were not the participants of the crimes.

So enamored with this style was Richard Nixon, a former governor from California, that when he became president, he set various federal agencies to harassing his political enemies; these included reporters, politicians, musicians, whatever. (Interesting side note: Nixon was Eisenhower’s Vice President back in the 1950’s. When he first ran for president in 1960, Eisenhower did not endorse him because he believed Nixon should not be trusted.) Now, when you sic the FBI, IRS, and various other agencies on journalists and civil rights activists, you are going to get a bit of a bad reputation. This is especially true before they even had cable television.

Well, long story shortened, Spiro Agnew was receiving kickbacks from Maryland contractors for state projects. These dated back to the time when he was a governor and a county official. He was still getting paid while he was the vice president. In 1973, this all came out and he was forced to resign. Due to the 25th Amendment of the Constitution, a new Vice President was appointed; Vice President Gerald Ford.

Then two Washington Post reporters started reporting about a burglary by some Republican-Party political operatives during the 1972 election. Keep in mind that Richard Nixon cruised to an easy win in 1972. He had opened up relations with Red China. He had created the Environmental Protection Agency. The voting age was reduced to 18. He had, in 1968, started the Republican use of the “Southern Strategy,” which properly read means that they used weasel words to say to people in former Confederate states that they would help those states keep White Supremacy over the Blacks. Nixon took 49 of 50 states electorally. However, the break-in was for the purpose of trying to achieve obtaining more seats in the House of Representatives.

Since Nixon was using the euphemism of “Law and Order,” to signal his Southern Strategy, he found out who did the burglary, dismissed them, set his Justice Department on them and asked for them to be given the maximum! Just kidding. You did read what I said about crooks, right? Yeah, he was not at all involved in the planning or execution; but he involved himself in the cover-up. Not only that, but Nixon had the habit of taping all of his meetings. When the House of Representatives (controlled for decades by the Democratic Party) demanded those tapes, Nixon claimed presidential privilege. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. Since this was NOT Donald Trump’s Supreme Court, they told Nixon he had to hand over those tapes.

The House of Representatives, for the first time in over 100 years, voted for Articles of Impeachment against the President of the United States of America. Before a trial in the Senate could occur, Senator Barry Goldwater (R) went to the White House and told President Nixon that he had to resign for the good of the nation (and the good of the party, too, but that was kind of implied).
Gerald Ford was sworn in as president and remains the only president to never have been elected to office by the people (the people elected other vice presidents).

Ford eventually gave Nixon a pardon, believing that the nation needed to move on. The actual burglars were tried and given jail time. Most people, including most Democratic Party politicians, were satisfied. In 1976 (200th anniversary of the nation) there was a new presidential election; the Democratic-Party nominee was a former governor of Georgia, James Earl Carter. He was a devout Christian, and after the serial lying of Richard Nixon, he was probably what the country really wanted and needed.

Well, watch out for what you want and need when you have skeletons in your closet! Way back when, Iran had declared its oil fields to belong to the country (in the 1950’s). The U.S. and Britain backed the king’s son in a regime change (which pretty much meant a change from a budding democracy to a dictatorship) and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi took over. Pahlavi was not all that bad, economically speaking, for his people—at least from a statistical standpoint. Their income and standard of living grew enormously during his reign. Iran’s military became the 5th most powerful in the world. He had close relationships with the United States and Britain—two very wealthy and influential powers.

However, power corrupts and absolute power absolutely corrupts. In January of 1979 he fled his own country, rather than fight a revolution and kill hundreds of thousands of his own people, and an extremist, hardline, Shi’a Muslim cleric declared an Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became the most powerful person in Iran.

I say that because as far as I can discern, even today, there is no set power structure in that place. They have elections. They vote for a president. However, there is an Islamic Council that can override decisions by the elected government. Who, on the council, makes the final decision, how that decision is decided, when they decide (and how) to overrule, how one gets on that council and all sorts of other questions are beyond the understanding of mere mortals like me.

Some Iranian college students broke into the United States Embassy in Tehran, Iran, took a bunch of diplomats hostage and would not release them unless the United States sent The Shah back to Iran. This was very quickly impossible since Pahlavi left the U.S. and went to Egypt (where he died from cancer—he was getting some treatment for it in the U.S. for a time), but that did not stop Khomeini and the students from demanding at least SOMETHING from the Great Satan. The U.S. was the Great Satan. Since this went on day after day through the 1980 election period, Ronald Reagan (R) got elected as the next president. Ronald Regan was formerly an actor who starred in a movie about a chimp, “Bedtime for Bonzo.” To be fair, he also had been a governor of California—just like Richard Nixon.

Republican President Ronald Reagan’s time to screw up:

I come from the state of Massachusetts. I was born in California, but my parents saw what was happening and escaped by in 1964 or 1965. My mother’s parents and sisters escaped soon after that! I am not trying to say that there is something wrong with governors of California, or with the state itself, that causes Republican former governors to have a questionable time as president—I am only suggesting that we take a really hard look before considering putting any Republican from California in any position of serious national authority ever again (remember Devin Nunes above?)

Ronald Reagan ran on the platform of Lower Taxes, Increased Defense Spending, Eliminate the Debt and Deficit. He absolutely hammered President Carter about the deficit. He insisted that Carter was going to enslave our great-great-grandchildren due to the deficit. It was a whopping $79,000,000,000 plus chump change. Yeah, that is seventy-nine billion dollars. Oh, for the good old days.

When Reagan finished eight years later, his people were, more or less, singing “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.” The Reagan Administration had deficits over three hundred billion dollars most of their years. So much for truth in advertising.

Now on to the good stuff—and by that, I mean some of the really bad stuff.

Another thing that Reagan had vilified Carter for was the hostage crisis. When I was a growing, young man, I was not a particular supporter of Mr. Reagan (having grown up in a house where the word, “conservative,” was used as a pejorative), but since he got elected anyway (an election I was not allowed to vote in, as I was one year too young), I hoped that at least he would declare war on the treacherous Iranians once he got the hostages back. Nope. In fact, taking Americans hostage became a cottage industry in the Middle East in the early 1980’s. It was getting to the point where you really had to wonder if it was worth covering the news in that place at all.

In 1983, during the Lebanese civil war (if you did not know that Lebanon had a civil war at that time, don’t feel bad—what constitutes civil wars or bad Tuesdays in the Middle East are usually just how many people got up on the wrong side of the bed that day), the United States and France had sent “Peace Keepers” to Beirut, Lebanon. A group decided that they did not like the presence of U.S. marines in a Middle East hell hole, so they blew them up—killing 241 Americans, including marines, sailors, and soldiers. There was another attack on the French paratroopers that killed a bunch more people as well.

Who was to blame? This got bandied about for a while. I was in college; it was October and November; I was also in the Army Reserves. Eventually, Ronald Reagan decided to fall on his sword and take responsibility for the loss of lives. He ordered the evacuation of the rest of the American personnel in Beirut. Then he resigned in disgrace and Vice President George H. W. Bush became president. Oh wait! Sorry!

He did not resign. Everyone just let it go at that. 240+ dead servicemen, who had no discernable reason to be there in the first place, and, …, …, crickets? Benghazi had eight, yes EIGHT, congressional investigations—we lost 4 people. Here we lost 60 Benghazis’ and the Republicans didn’t care?

That would be bad enough, but this is the Republican Party. When they do things, apparently they have to do things that are beyond reasonable doubt as to illegality.

Remember how the Iranians were not too keen on us, due tothe whole Shah thing and all? Funny thing there, they have a neighbor called (currently) Iraq. Iran (pre-revolution) had been America’s ally; Iraq was USSR’s ally. Iran had American military equipment; Iraq had Soviet military equipment. Iraq also had Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein wanted a port on the Persian Gulf that was not sunk into a swamp. He did not want to have to drain 400 square kilometers of swamp to get it. He attacked Iran, figuring that nobody was going to help out the bad guys who had taken an embassy.

(Side note: you can attack Pearl Harbor after sending your fleet across the Pacific Ocean for a week while supposedly negotiating in good faith. You can force march POW’s mercilessly to their prison camps. You can break a 5-year non-aggression pact. But you can NOT attack an embassy! You can demand that the embassy close—giving the diplomats a few days to get aboard a ship or plane, but you CAN NOT ATTACK AN EMBASSY. If that rule is not enforced as the most sacrosanct rule in all of the world, there can be no international dialogue. There can be only war.}

Getting back to Iran—and sort of Iraq. At the beginning of the war, the Iranians found out why you should not anger the country that made all of your military equipment. Yeah, you have the equipment, but you do not have a source of spare parts. Iraq soon started to make some gains. However, the Iraqis soon found out why you do not attack religious fanatics. Iraq’s forces found out that mountainous and hilly terrain does not accommodate tank warfare, and crazed infantry can be very effective against even battle-hardened troops (especially troops that are not actually well-trained, and well-equipped for the type of warfare they are facing).

I know; I know; nice bit of information, but what does this have to do with impeachment? Reagan was never impeached. Yeah, but…

Also during this time, there was a bit of raping, killing and other normal dictatorial stuff going on in Central America. In one of the worst of these countries, Nicaragua, the people finally threw off the rule of one of the worst dictators the area has ever seen (and I include the leader of Haiti who declared himself a god). Since the Sandinista-led government declared itself a Socialist nation, and courted relations with Cuba, along with the rest of the countries in the Western Hemisphere, the Reagan Administration was livid. Caspar Weinberger seems to not have owned a dictionary, so he had no knowledge of the difference between Communism and Socialism, so the Sandinista government was considered to be as bad as the Castro government.

Well, while the Republicans controlled the Senate, this could, more or less, fly. However, when Tip O’Neal decided to grab the purse strings, things got a little dicey. At first, the U.S. sponsored a group of rebels—the Contras—to fight the Sandinista government. Since this dragged on for months and then years, Congress eventually put a rule in place that allowed that the U.S. could buy ONLY humanitarian aid for the Contra Rebels. This meant that they could not buy weapons, ammunition, maps, that sort of stuff. Only Congress can designate where funds are spent—so this was an absolute.

Naturally, the Republican Administration decided that rules are for suckers. Some of the people down the chain came up with a double-whammy, win-win idea. It was permissible to get other countries to give money to the Contras for weapons. Iran needed help against Iraq. The Contra rebels needed weapons and ammunition. We wanted help getting American hostages freed from Islamic terrorists who seemed to be friendly and/or were taking their marching orders from Iran. So, the people who talk so tough about never negotiating with terrorists, came up with this plan: we sell TOW missiles (the best anti-tank missile in existence at the time) to the Iranians at four times the cost; we reimburse the treasury for the cost of the missiles, we insist that Iran help us get our hostages free, and we take the profits and give them to the Contras for weapons! What could go wrong with that!!??

I really wish that I was kidding you. At any rate, when the fecal matter hit the rotary coolant device, President Reagan, having learned from the fiasco of the Nixon debacle, CLEANED HOUSE. He fired everybody who even knew what had happened but had not immediately told him. He was super angry. I mean, he was looking to replace almost his entire military and intelligence infrastructure!

Sorry, no, that was if this were a Democratic president. They tried to cover it up.

Eventually questions arose as to who knew what when, etc. A lieutenant colonel was given immunity and brought before the Congress to spill his guts (on national television). I have very little use for Lt. Col. Oliver North. I think he was a dishonorable officer. However, I will give him this—he told the truth during those hearings. One of the really good points he made (one that was ignored in the Abu Ghraib scandal) was, “Do you think that I, as a Lt. Col. Could just call up the Pentagon and ask for 200 TOW missiles? They wouldn’t even give me the time of day!” I may not have quoted that to the exact quote.

In the end, George H. W. Bush eventually gave out pardons to all the players in the Iran-Contra scandal—whatever their crimes might have been! So now we have moved on from just pardoning the president in the Watergate Scandal, to pardoning the lesser players (since the president was not implicated) in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Then comes a Democratic-Party President named Clinton:

The Republican politicians were evidently tired of being the party of criminals, so when they got control of the House of Representatives, they started up a criminal search on Bill Clinton on the flimsiest of excuses. The Whitewater affair, as far as I can tell, was a failed real estate investment that the Clinton’s had invested in. Apparently, the primary investor or creator of that was later found to be a crook and since Clinton was the Governor of Arkansas there is always the question of whether or not he helped out that crook.

When the investigator, Ken Starr, was given his marching orders, he was given permission to follow any lead to anywhere it went, regardless of its purpose. So, unlike Robert Mueller’s very strict guidelines with Trump, Starr was allowed to find out if Bill Clinton had been stealing soap from the Capitol Men’s rooms, if Starr wanted to.

Eventually, Starr discovered that President Clinton pressured a former intern, with whom he had had an illicit, sexual encounter, to lie about that encounter, in a civil court case. He probably did not want to have to admit the scandal to the public, and probably did not want his wife to find out—especially not the hard way. Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House, jumped on this and rammed through Articles of Impeachment.

Now, keep in mind, with Richard Nixon, the offense had to do with the integrity of our elections. That is a pretty serious deal when it comes to the functioning of our government. With Reagan—concerning the Iran-Contra affair, it had to do with the separation of powers. The president does not have the right to raise his own funds and hire his own army—for a reason. With Clinton, um, well, um, yeah, he did ask a woman to lie about a consensual sexual act. That’s not good. There is no reason to believe he used the power of his office to do that.

How is this supposed to constitute a threat to our Republic? I mean, it’s not as if he sent a mob to attack Congress or lied to get us into an international shooting war or anything!

Oh…wait…