I believe that it (medal of freedom or what ever it is called) lost it's luster years ago. It is the best that the US can do short of knighthood, something we don't have. Pick a president, they all have had significant failings.

Right on the mark. Lobbying, speaking tours, book deals, corporate perks for their influence with their unindicted co-conspirators.

Quite well indeed. There may not be honor among thieves, but there are plenty of honorariums.

Heck, Ollie North and G. Gordon Liddy became popular radio hosts, and their claims to fame were helping Republican Presidents commit crimes.

Ollie North ran for office in Virginia, which he was entitled to do since he was not a convicted felon.

He can buy a gun, too.

Cool.

I have to admit...Liddy does crack me up. Its like he was called up from central casting. Kind of a Colonel Flagg....

HM, bleeding money from one set of totalitarians in order to overthrow another set of totalitarians hardly amounts to criminality. To call it so shows just what's wrong with your kind of thinking -- it's so morally confused it prefers to do favors for despots rather than work to their destruction and/or removal and their replacement by democracies, which are better behaved as history shows. Since when has "being nice to despots, that maybe they won't hurt us" ever brought success, peace, or indeed anything worth having? When you pay the Danegeld, do you get rid of the Dane? Republican Presidents, incidentally, are as far from despots as you're likely to get, at least in this day and age. Republican Presidents have this habit of crossing despots up, sometimes in the grand manner: Bush took down two despotisms in the same year, Reagan walked out of the Rejkjavik summit rather than accept Gorbachev's con-job, leaving Gorby to instead actually try and do something on his nation's own resources which were inadequate to keep the Soviet system and structure intact and effectual in foreign policy -- the Republican record in the past twenty-five years, if not the past fifty, is really rather reassuring. The Democrats -- well, they disappoint. They've not taken down a despotism since Truman. They've started wars, and haven't won a one of them, they prescribe socialist nostrums to fix things they say are broken, or they get kicked around by Soviets who assert themselves in foreign policy, leaving the likes of Jimmy Carter wondering what happened.

Some of this is no doubt due to this being the nuclear age: certain styles of warmaking have indeed fallen out of fashion. The Republican Presidents, however, seem better at succeeding at these constrained wars than the Democratic ones.

Remember, a political agenda can easily rewrite history. Gorbechev's con job? He was offering to end the cold war. But then wacko extremists would do anything to restart that war. And so we have Putin's candid warnings.

Meanwhile, Urbane Guerrilla uses his political agenda to rewrite history. What happened to Hati's Baby Doc Duvalier and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic? Amazing that they were not taken down because Clinton did it. We must rewrite history.

Amazing that a Democrat could accomplish same thing without physical invasions. Instead a Democrat talked both dictators out of power. Clearly Clinton must be evil because he did not kill people. Instead a Democrat talked both solutions.

If UG had a grasp of reality, then he would have done what he posted he would do on 9 Nov 2006 and again on 10 Feb 2007. Then UG discovered Barnett's book was about military reality; not about a wacko extremist political agendas where big guns solve all problems.

Urbane Guerrilla is caught and exposed rewriting history for a political agenda. But perverting history is what extremists do. No wonder extremists love what Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson preach.

BTW, after Urbane Guerrilla was caught having blamed Saddam for 11 September, notice UG then went quiet. Extremists will do anything to avoid reality. Going quiet was his only option.

UG – when are you going to discuss that Thomas Barnett book that shows why “Mission Accomplished” is a military defeat thank’s to George Jr and his cast of wackos. Why do you remain so silent? Why does your political agenda repeatedly clash with reality?

If you're talking about Iran-Contra, then you are justifying 'selling arms to an enemy' as 'bleeding money from one set of totalitarians'. Wow, is that the same thing as 'advancing to the rear'?

Again, if your first comment is in support of Iran-Contra, which was the ultimate 'Danegeld (ransom)', then your second comment on the dangers of such is remarkably inconsistent.

I am genuinely confused here. Was your first comment really in support of Iran-Contra?

BTW, I hope the shelf life of a TOW missile is less than 20 years or that Iran expended all of them against Iraq, or if we do invade Iran our troops will be on the receiving end of US-made weapons.


From Iran-Contra at Wikipedia

Bah, not to worry... they used up all those tow missiles water skiing.

It does if the method you use is against the law. Which it was. Hence the shredded documents, the amnesiac testimony, the 5th-amendment-immunity testimony, the convictions, and the pardons.

And the chick with the document padded bra. What was her name, Hall?

Guys, the Contras still won -- and we helped. This made a better Nicaragua, and it's still a better Nicaragua twenty years later. Is breaking laws written to keep us helpless at foreign policy actually a bad thing? I suppose it depends on what set of laws you think might be the highest. And how willing you are to get in trouble by one set while adhering to another.

Recall there was blatant and chronic Marxist-supporting going on in Congress at the time, and they passed Marxist-nasty-regime-supporting legislation. Senator Kerry was a committed partisan of the Marxists then, as his voting record irrefutably shows.

It is a better place today. We can't play the "what if?" history game, but these interventions bite us on the ass as often as they work out. Interesting aside ex-Sandinista Daniel Ortega is the President these days. Did we help more than we hurt? Maybe, but we did lose credibility with the under-class. It is a beautiful place, maybe American tourist dollars will soften hearts.