Most of us will be happy/sad when the national presidential
campaign is finally tucked into bed. It has been a wearying 20 months. Ted Cruz
began the show by throwing his name into the presidential ring way back in
March 2015. Hillary Clinton, the Lucretia Borgia of the Democratic Party,
announced a month later in April. Donald Trump, the Genghis Khan of Republican
contenders, announced two months after Mrs. Clinton in June. Mr. Trump’s
announcement was followed by shrieks of laughter; but, as the philosopher says,
he laughs best who laughs last. Not only has the American campaign season lacked
substance and manners, it lasted far too long, a boon for the media that seek
to keep us aroused while it is hauling in cash by the truck load.
By the way, speaking of cash by the truck load, the reader,
I hope, will permit a brief parenthetical remark.
It always was a whisper in the whirlwind, but some readers
may recall the planeloads of cash President Barack Obama sent to Iran to
procure the release of American prisoners held by Revolutionary Guards who, 37
years earlier during the Carter administration, had kicked off the Iranian
Revolution by abducting and holding as prisoners for 444 days 52 American
diplomats and citizens attached to the U.S. Embassy. Capturing Americans and
holding them for ransom appears to be a major weapon in the Iranian diplomatic
arsenal. And it works every time.
The Iranians squeezed $1.8 billion out of Mr. Obama, who
said, winking heavily, that the payments in cash and gold of $400 million
delivered by plane secretly at night – instantly convertible into Hamas
terrorist salaries -- were not ransom payments. They were payments the United
States owed to Iran the assets of which were frozen by the United
States after Iran had violated the American embassy and its personnel. Mr. Obama was simply cleaning the ledger of
old debts. As always, when oleaginous politicians speak out of both sides of
their mouths, the real story of the ransom payment is much more interesting –
but it involves a mathematical calculation, and American eyes tend towards
half-mast when money is mentioned in news stories.
A Jewish publication, Mosaic,has the full story,
which reads like a chapter pulled from a spy novel written by a tax accountant:
“The president was returning $400 million in Iran’s “Foreign
Military Sales” (FMS) account with the Pentagon, plus $1.3 billion in interest,
but he failed to mention that in 1981, when Iran filed its claim before the
Claims Tribunal at The Hague, the U.S. had responded with a counterclaim for
$817 million for Iran’s violations of its obligations under the FMS program. In
2016, with both the claim and the counterclaim still pending, it was possible
that Iran owed billions of dollars to the U.S., not the reverse.”
That’s right, dear reader: After the credits and debits in
our national ledger had been balanced, IRAN OWED THE UNITED STATES A DEBT. The
United Stated owed Iran NOTHING, nada, zip. In mob lingo, “we was had” – by Mr.
Obama, who needed a nuclear deal with Iran to close an upcoming election, not
the first time in the Obama administration that the campaign tail wagged the
foreign policy dog.
Should this datum appear prominently in the current presidential
campaign? Why, of course it should. And yet it whispers to us from the whirlwind.
Instead, we are warned by Congressman-for-life John Larson
of the 1st gerrymandered District that the KKK may steal the
election in Connecticut.
Mr. Larson is seeking his 10th term in the U.S.
House of Representatives, and he worries, we are told by Neil Vigdor of the Connecticut Post:
“White supremacists are mobilizing across the country —
including right here in Connecticut — to keep African-Americans and other
communities from voting on Election Day,” Larson wrote. “This is a disgusting
attempt at voter suppression, and it will not stand.”
Which is the more likely: that elections in Connecticut will
be overturned by guys in white hoods, or that Democratic voters in the 1st
District, realizing that a Democratic President has disgraced himself by paying
a bride in convertible cash to the enemies of “the Great Satan” – that’s us –
will shake off their usual political habits and cast their votes in less than a
week for Matthew Corey, Mr. Larson’s Republican opponent?
Actually, both are equally improbable. And that is what is
wrong with our politics. It is a sclerotic system – Mr. Trump, the hyperbolist,
calls it a “fixed” system – that allows for little change precisely at those
moments in our history when the American public is screaming for change. Term limits
would address this problem and lead to a reinvigoration of small “d” democratic
government, but neither the media, comfortable with the politicians it
reflexively endorses both in its editorial and news pages, nor the politicians
so favored want democracy, which is unafraid to disturb the political universe.
And so, instead of democracy, we get the KKK marching on the Capitol building
in Hartford, their burning crosses alight in the dark night, and Congressman
Larson standing before them, risking all and protecting ballot boxes with his
fearless body.
Comments