Heard about him in Killer Mike’s Reagan song. Great song
Oliver North, a retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel, played a key role in the Iran-Contra affair, a major political scandal during the Reagan administration. He was involved in the sale of weapons to Iran, with the profits being diverted to support the Contras in Nicaragua, despite a congressional ban on funding the Contras.
Giving this traitor a television platform instead of a prison cell, was one giant step in making Republicans feel untouchable, no matter how poorly they behaved. Even treason is excused, and rewarded.
George HW Bush pardoned him on the advice of William Barr, giving Barr the start of a career helping presidents avoid responsibility for their illegal activities.
Do they put anyone on screen for ratings?
Well Fox News has been, since inception, the propaganda arm of the GOP. So not only will they do anything to get and keep eyeballs, they have a deficit of ethics and ethical contributors. So if they need to spray paint a shit log and call it a gold nugget then that’s what they’re gonna keep on doing.
Those who do US crimes get airtime; those who expose them get canceled.
Those white and rich who do US crimes get airtime
You don’t have to be rich or white, you only have to be useful in furthering US state propaganda. Condi Rice is still gets plenty of airtime.
You don’t have to be rich
Proceeds to name multi-millionaire.
I was naming a non-white person. Also, people who carry water for US imperialism tend to be well compensated. You don’t have to be rich to do it, but you will likely get rich by doing it.
Context makes it look like you’re trying to name someone that isn’t “rich or white.”
RIce wasn’t born with a silver spoon. She’s rich now from her lifetime of work in the interests of US empire.
Does she? I havent heard that name in what feels like a decade
Maybe because you don’t watch mainstream media anymore. I don’t.
https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=EgIIBQ%253D%253D&search_query=condi+riceYou are correct i do not watch any mainstraim media or news. Everything has to come to me filtered through friends, family, or lemmy.
Lmao no fucking way, really?
It’s a wild tale. I once told the entire thing to a friend, who listened through the whole story, then said “Did that really happen?”
To be fair, he’s annoyed at them having missiles, he had no problem selling them as long as he could profit.
okay, no hypocrisy then
He wants Iran to not have missiles because then Iran will buy his missiles
Republicans don’t go to jail for committing crimes.
“He has experience so we can trust him!”
-Fox News viewers
I hope that’s the American Dad school house rock. The kids popping as he says landmines is a good stealth joke.
Ha, came here for this and was not disappointed.
Related to nothing but Ollie, I rode an elevator with him and some police in the US courthouse in DC during his trial
I was just a bike messenger at the time
What does “opportunistic shitheel with a side of bacon” smell like?
That I don’t remembers, but he was shorter and smaller than I expected
Don’t get me wrong. The Iran - Contra affair was a terrible circumvention of U.S. law and North deserved to go to prison and Reagan should have been impeached.
However, this post is a mischaracterization of that event.
This was part of an overall plan to get American hostages released.
That being said, we sold arms to Iran, who was fighting Iraq (a U.S. ally at the time), and one of the intermediaries we used was fucking Israel.
Yup, Israel helped us sell arms to Iran. So Iran can turn around and use them against an ally.
North was then made a fall guy.
I was younger when this happened but I recall, at the time, it was characterized as we just sold them parts for their airplanes and defensive arms.
Man, we just can’t stop fucking our face with our own foot.
This was part of an overall plan to get American hostages released.
It was part of an overall plan to commit treason in order to sabotage Carter by preventing the hostages from being released before the election so that Reagan would win.
You’re mixing up your Reagan-era Iran scandals.
First, there was the Iran Hostage Crisis, where Iranians stormed the US embassy and took a bunch of hostages in 1979. While I have no doubt there was Republican fuckery going on, Carter really didn’t do himself any favors with his handling of that. The hostages were finally released, after more than a year, the day Reagan was inaugurated
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis
Iran-Contra was a scandal where the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran (who was fighting Iraq, then an American ally), circumventing Congress. They then gave the money to the Contras, a group of rebels in Nicaragua, again circumventing Congress:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Contra_affair
You are correct that part of the goal was to release hostages, but those hostages were taken by the Lebanese well after Reagan’s first election.
This reminds me how there’s a world of difference between learning history and living it. In my mind’s eye, I can still see Walter Cronkite saying every evening that it’s the XXXth day of the Iran hostage crisis. And still I remember Ollie North’s trial. There’s no way I’d mix them up.
North wasn’t the “Fall Guy.” That makes him sound like a scapegoat, which he wasn’t, he was the guy managing the entire operation.
Also, it wasn’t part of an operation to get the Iranian hostages released. They had been released back in 1980, as soon as Reagan had been inaugurated. The Iran-Contra Conspiracy happened later, but the wound from that humiliating episode was still stinging in the American psyche. The fact that North was selling weapons to our bitterest enemy at the time is only one of the things that made this such an egregious violation.
Iran-Contra was about providing weapons, training, and support to the conservative soldiers fighting the establishment of a Russian-supported regime in Central America.
