Iran-Contra Redux

For those of you old enough, do you recall the firestorm that ensued when it was discovered that the US was giving weapons to Iran, who then 'intervened' on our behalf to get hostages released?  Hostage-taking was a popular pastime for Middle Eastern terrorists in the 1980s.  This was THE big scandal of the Reagan Administration and it lingered for his second term and into the Bush presidency.  Reagan had proclaimed that the US did not negotiate with terrorists and yet Iran-Contra contradicted that.

 

The Obama Administration has gone one better.  Rather than trading arms to Qatar to get them to convince the Taliban to release Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl (which would have been about equivalent to that aspect of Iran-Contra), the administration has released 5 terrorists from Gitmo who will spend a 1 year parole in Qatar before being released to resume their terror careers.  Much as Iran-Contra was a breach of the Boland Amendment, the Bergdahl-Taliban swap broke the law when Congress wasn't kept in the loop.  Now, if we were trading a handful of mid-level Nazis to get back a General Patton, I might be inclined to support the president.  Instead, we have traded an interior minister/Taliban co-founder, a chief of staff, a provincial governor, a deputy intelligence chief, and a member of a joint Al Qaeda-Taliban cell for a deserter who should be court martialed.  Well played, Taliban.  Well played.

 

Worse still, President Obama hyped this with a Rose Garden appearance.  He's running a victory lap over this?  Is he daft?  The president does stuff like this on a regular basis.  He distracts the media from bad news by provided some new bad news.  There are so many scandals that it is impossible to cover them.  Like a school of fish, it is hard to focus on just one.  The media, which has a short attention span, is never given the opportunity to delve too deeply into a scandal.  What were we talking about before Bergdahl?  Oh yeah, the VA scandal.  What ever happened to the IRS targeting scandal?  Fast and Furious?  Collecting phone records of the Associated Press?  Naming a reporter a co-conspirator to tap his phone?  "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" scandal?  Benghazi?  How about the collapsing foreign policy where the US is being played by Vladimir Putin?  It goes on and on.  There is so much that the populace has thrown up its hands.