Comment by pjc50
4 hours ago
> The House and Senate Armed Services committees have long had an interest in ensuring that unfiltered news went to the troops who are fighting for our country and deserved to read the truth, not propaganda. In the late 1980s Congress was alarmed at attempts of military personnel to “suppress unfavorable news” of the Iran-Contra affair and other issues. Congress mandated that Stars and Stripes be editorially independent and created the position of ombudsman in 1991 to monitor the situation and report to Congress at least once a year.
Funny how the same situations of recent history keep resurfacing. Not only "Iran", but we should recall the details of Iran-Contra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
> further funding of the Contras by legislative appropriations was prohibited by Congress, but the Reagan administration continued funding them secretly using non-appropriated funds
Oh look, it's presidential power contradicting Congress again!
> "what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages."
US attempts to deal with Iran, has incoherent strategy, gets rolled, lies about it.
> Eleven convictions resulted, some of which were vacated on appeal. The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the presidency of George H. W. Bush
Misuse of the presidential pardon power, again, which enables the president to direct people to commit crimes in the sure knowledge that they will not be held accountable to the law or other branches of government (Americans call this "checks and balances" for some reason).
One of those people was Oliver North, who turned his experience providing arms illegally to enemies of the United States into a long career at propaganda organizations the NRA and Fox news.
And so here you are again.
One would expect that system would learn and change, and we wouldn't have trump fucking up half of global economy so beautifully on his morning whims just to get rich as a side business of being potus (or reverse, probably).
Something tells me that after this dark period is over, there won't be many lessons learned and things changed for the better in the system. 'Great system' not being so great after all (which it isn't, there are much better and more democractic systems implemented all around the world).
Republicans as usually will shield just about anybody including mass rapist and murderer just to not lose face, and democrats will just again have this inept look with 'we couldn't change a damn thing because XYZ but we asked nicely'.
> One would expect that system would learn and change
The system did learn and change: they got a lot better at exploiting it. The effort to stack the Supreme Court with Republican partisans took decades.
> 'we couldn't change a damn thing because XYZ but we asked nicely'
They literally can’t do anything. The constitution is structure so the party not in power can only obstruct legislation (filibuster). The current Supreme Court is literally rewriting the constitution or how the constitution has been interpreted for over one hundred years. They’re the bigger threat (to the US at least)