The Hypocrisy of Iran Contra II

by Tom Trinko


Because Obama will do just about anything but tell Americans what really did happen at Benghazi, it's hard to be sure which Benghazi stories are true and which ones aren't.  One thing that is obvious, though, is that liberals are once again maintaining one standard for themselves and a completely different standard for everyone else.


Among the things we know:

• There was no riot, and the American filmmaker's anti-Muslim movie trailer had nothing to do with the tragedy in Benghazi.

• Government representatives, including Hillary, either lied through their teeth to the American public or were so poorly informed as to be negligent in their jobs.

Among the things that may be true:

• We've heard that hundreds of man-portable surface-to-air missiles went missing from Benghazi on that horrible night.

• We've heard that those missiles were, at least in part, destined for Syrian rebels.

If in fact Obama was running a missile-smuggling operation to Syrian rebels, that would be eerily similar to the Iran Contra situation.


In Iran Contra, Reagan sold weapons to the Iranians that helped them avoid being defeated by Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- which had attacked Iran -- as well as secured the release of several American hostages.  The money raised by the arms sales was used to support the freedom-fighters in Nicaragua, who eventually overthrew the Communist dictatorship in that country and re-established democracy.

Needless to say, freeing American hostages, keeping Iran and Iraq weak by letting them fight each other rather than the West, and restoring democracy in Nicaragua deeply offended liberals.

As a result, liberals unleashed a massive, to use liberal terminology, McCarthy-like witch hunt in order to ensure that the U.S. would never again us the money of Islamofascist regimes to turn back a Communist revolution in Central America.

Americans heard unending complaints from liberals about how evil it was that Reagan had actually achieved multiple foreign policy objectives at low cost.  Of course, in pre-9/11 times, the liberals' main concerns weren't about Iran and Iraq, but about the horror of the failure of the Brezhnev doctrine, which basically said "once Communist, always Communist."

While liberals claimed that the law was broken, the reality was that people like Col. Oliver North found a way to legally work around the laws passed by liberals to protect the Communist regime in Nicaragua.  This, of course, made the liberals even more upset -- how dare Reagan actually promote democracy?


Similar liberals, if not the very same ones, are today telling Americans to move on past Benghazi, echoing Hillary Clinton's words: "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

Perfectly reasonable people can argue about the wisdom of aiding the increasingly Islamofascist Syrian rebellion -- certainly no one is saying that Assad is a good guy -- but it seems hypocritical for liberals to support Obama covertly working to help Islamic radicals take over Syria when they condemned Reagan for helping the Contras return democracy to Nicaragua.


Just as Iran Contra didn't actually involve violations of the law, President Obama has unilaterally declared that supplying weapons to the Syrian rebels is "essential to the national security interests of the United States," so his actions are not illegal.

However, given that Syria has never been a threat to the U.S. but that a Syria run by Islamic terrorists would be, it is unclear how arming the rebels is "essential" to America's national security.  Especially since liberals deemed a Communist regime in the middle of Central America intent on exporting its revolution to other countries and backed by the full power of the Soviet Union to be of no concern to U.S. security.

Liberals' positions on these issues reflect three core truths about liberalism:

• Liberalism is about getting and holding political power at all costs, irrespective of any specific beliefs -- which is why closing Gitmo and the war in Afghanistan ceased to be liberal issues when Obama was elected.

• Liberals feel more affinity to Communists, Islamofascist regimes, and even Assad's or Saddam's dictatorships than they do to the Tea Party -- which is why liberals object to overthrowing dictatorships unless the dictatorship isn't harsh enough for them. (Take Franco vs. Mao, for example.)

• Liberals care more about gay marriage, abortion on demand, and higher tax rates than they do about terrorism or threats to America from abroad.

Liberal support for Obama's concealing covert aid to the Syrian rebels rests on those three core truths of liberalism.

Liberals won't criticize Obama, no matter what -- not because he's black, but because he's liberal.  To get and hold power, liberals will tolerate pretty much anything.  We know this because feminists defended Bill Clinton's misogynistic misuse of his power as president, and as governor of Arkansas, because while Clinton compromised with the Republicans on pretty much everything, he refused to compromise on abortion.


Additionally, liberals don't really care about the situation in Syria other than as a stage to show how caring they are, unless Syria might become another Iran. 


The same liberals who are now howling for Assad's blood were, a few short years ago, toasting him and his wife as "good" Muslims.  When the rebels in Syria were not Islamofascists, liberals were silent, as they were when the people of Iran tried to have their Arab spring.  Yet when the Muslim Brotherhood looked to take power in Egypt, liberals, starting with Obama, were highly supportive.


We can't know what is going on in the minds of liberals, but their actions show a lack of interest in establishing democracy and an enthusiasm for tyrants such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the ayatollahs in Iran.

Finally, liberals are the daughters of isolationism; they can't conceive of any existential threats to the U.S. coming from abroad.  As such, they fixate on ensuring that their hedonistic lifestyle -- legalized drugs, abortion for any reason at any time, etc. -- and their power over the lived of others -- no 32-ounce sodas for you -- are not only legal, but in fact endorsed by the full power of the government.  Confronting Obama on Syria would reduce liberals' ability to legalize a whole new underclass of poorly educated welfare-dependent non-English-speaking voters.  Without that new underclass, liberals fear the loss of political power and even threats to abortion or gay marriage.


In order to end liberals' lock on the perceptions of so many Americans, we need to restore the past.

Liberals live in a world where the only past is made up by the failures -- mostly imagined -- of whites, Republicans, and conservatives and the successes -- usually outright fabrications, such as the claim that Democrats led the fight against racism -- of liberals.  They constantly project that world to the low-information voters though the media and the government-run schools.

If Americans were told about all of history, they would be able to see the rot at the core of liberalism and realize that the truth is that liberals are not selfless, but extremely selfish.

Liberals support Obama in Syria not because of their desire for democracy -- if they did, they'd have supported Reagan in liberating Nicaragua -- but because they view any threat to Obama's power as a threat to liberals' ability to enforce their lifestyle choices on all Americans.

Tom Trinko

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/the_hypocrisy_of_iran_contra_ii.html

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