And the HATE continues to be preached in the CHURCH

[Mariner]

Remember that demographic analysis I posted here a few weeks ago? It showed the religious right were something like 9% of the country and the religious left 8%. They were almost exactly the same size, though the religious right makes itself much more visible, and makes many people thing they are more numerous than they are. Furthermore, the analysis suggested that the religious left was the fastest growing of all the religious groups in the electorate.

Mariner.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Remember that demographic analysis I posted here a few weeks ago? It showed the religious right were something like 9% of the country and the religious left 8%. They were almost exactly the same size, though the religious right makes itself much more visible, and makes many people thing they are more numerous than they are. Furthermore, the analysis suggested that the religious left was the fastest growing of all the religious groups in the electorate.

Mariner.

No. DOn't remember. I trust you though. The religious left is growing? We're not talking about crystal worship.

 

[dilloduck]

Few liberals are christians. They're just trying to "commandeer the language of the christian moral highground", in their terms. Psychos been trying to do it lately. It's funny, no?

Cmon RW--If they used thier OWN language everyone would easily see through them. I actually think the libs DO have a plan---it's not just one they are willing to let everyone know. I wonder why?

 

[Abbey Normal]

As a non-christian about the only thing that I have to say about this is, Bullsh*t. I have yet to hear one christian call somebody a 'raghead' or a 'N-Word'. This is baseless accusation without substantiation. It is total garbage written only to get a rise from those of the christian persuasion.

This is total trollish behavior and on the first order too. A post only made to draw an emotional reaction is by its very nature from a troll.

I've never heard this either at church either, No1. I smell a troll.

 

[GotZoom]

Another hit and run by Psycho.

He logs off a few minutes after starting this thread and hasn't been heard from since.

 

[Abbey Normal]

Few liberals are christians. They're just trying to "commandeer the language of the christian moral highground", in their terms. Psychos been trying to do it lately. It's funny, no?

I think it all started in earnest after those 2004 exit polls that said morals were an important issue with Bush voters. That really hit the libs hard in the gut.

 

[Mariner]

Democratic Party got what it deserved following Clinton's infidelities and disrespect for the office. Republicans did a good job of running with the moral values thing, but they're looking les wholesome over time, between DeLay, Abramoff, Randy Cunningham, and the vast self-serving pork in their budgets.

At a certain point, the populace may turn on them again, as they did after the revelations of how many in the "Family Values" group in the mid-90's had had affairs or divorces themselves. Remember that great cartoon, the "Republican First Wives Club"? Remember Newt Gingrich divorcing his wife on her deathbed? That has to be approximately as ethically low as Ciinton's actions. So too, Reagan's arms for hostages deal. And then there's the grandaddy of all connivers, Richard Nixon. So, Republicans shouldn't count on being seen as the clean party if their current actions don't back it up.

Marner.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Democratic Party got what it deserved following Clinton's infidelities and disrespect for the office. Republicans did a good job of running with the moral values thing, but they're looking les wholesome over time, between DeLay, Abramoff, Randy Cunningham, and the vast self-serving pork in their budgets.

At a certain point, the populace may turn on them again, as they did after the revelations of how many in the "Family Values" group in the mid-90's had had affairs or divorces themselves. Remember that great cartoon, the "Republican First Wives Club"? Remember Newt Gingrich divorcing his wife on her deathbed? That has to be approximately as ethically low as Ciinton's actions. So too, Reagan's arms for hostages deal. And then there's the grandaddy of all connivers, Richard Nixon. So, Republicans shouldn't count on being seen as the clean party if their current actions don't back it up.

Marner.

That REALLY WAS newt's personal life. Contrary to lying dem opinion, Clinton's mess was not about personal issues; it was about perjury. Dissed and dismissed.

 

[musicman]

So too, Reagan's arms for hostages deal.
Marner.

I like this topic. Let's talk about it.

What did Reagan do wrong?

 

[Mariner]

that it was all about perjury--then how come any right wing commentator ever had to mention a blue dress? Come on, you know well that the image of Clinton as an unfaithful husband having sex in the oval office was the perfect foil for the incoming Republicans, to portray themselves as straight arrows. Why else did Bob Livingston publicly admit infidelity? That was his private life, wasn't it?

Musicman. OK, here's a summary of the events. I've never heard anyone contest that Reagan traded arms for hostages. I thought it was well-documented. But I wasn't around USMB back then, so who knows what people here think...

People & Events
The Iran-Contra Affair
written by Julie Wolf

Ronald Reagan's efforts to eradicate Communism spanned the globe, but the insurgent Contras' cause in Nicaragua was particularly dear to him. Battling the Cuban-backed Sandinistas, the Contras were, according to Reagan, "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers." Under the so-called Reagan Doctrine, the CIA trained and assisted this and other anti-Communist insurgencies worldwide.

Assisting involved supplying financial support, a difficult task politically after the Democratic sweep of congressional elections in November 1982. First Democrats passed the Boland Amendment, which restricted CIA and Department of Defense operations in Nicaragua specifically; in 1984, a strengthened Boland Amendment made support almost impossible. A determined, unyielding Reagan told National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, "I want you to do whatever you have to do to help these people keep body and soul together."

What followed would alter the public's perception of the president dramatically. How "Iran" and "Contra" came to be said in the same breath was the result of complicated covert activities, all carried out, the players said, in the name of democracy.

In 1985, while Iran and Iraq were at war, Iran made a secret request to buy weapons from the United States. McFarlane sought Reagan's approval, in spite of the embargo against selling arms to Iran. McFarlane explained that the sale of arms would not only improve U.S. relations with Iran, but might in turn lead to improved relations with Lebanon, increasing U.S. influence in the troubled Middle East. Reagan was driven by a different obsession. He had become frustrated at his inability to secure the release of the seven American hostages being held by Iranian terrorists in Lebanon. As president, Reagan felt that "he had the duty to bring those Americans home," and he convinced himself that he was not negotiating with terrorists. While shipping arms to Iran violated the embargo, dealing with terrorists violated Reagan's campaign promise never to do so. Reagan had always been admired for his honesty.

The arms-for-hostages proposal divided the administration. Longtime policy adversaries Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz opposed the deal, but Reagan, McFarlane and CIA director William Casey supported it. With the backing of the president, the plan progressed. By the time the sales were discovered, more than 1,500 missiles had been shipped to Iran. Three hostages had been released, only to be replaced with three more, in what Secretary of State George Shultz called "a hostage bazaar."

When the Lebanese newspaper "Al-Shiraa" printed an exposé on the clandestine activities in November 1986, Reagan went on television and vehemently denied that any such operation had occurred. He retracted the statement a week later, insisting that the sale of weapons had not been an arms-for-hostages deal. Despite the fact that Reagan defended the actions by virtue of their good intentions, his honesty was doubted. Polls showed that only 14 percent of Americans believed the president when he said he had not traded arms for hostages.

While probing the question of the arms-for-hostages deal, Attorney General Edwin Meese discovered that only $12 million of the $30 million the Iranians reportedly paid had reached government coffers. Then-unknown Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council explained the discrepancy: he had been diverting funds from the arms sales to the Contras, with the full knowledge of National Security Adviser Admiral John Poindexter and with the unspoken blessing, he assumed, of President Reagan.

Poindexter resigned, and North was fired, but Iran-Contra was far from over. The press hounded the president: Did he know about these illegal activities, and if not, how could something of this magnitude occur without his knowledge? In an investigation by the Reagan-appointed Tower Commission, it was determined that, as president, Reagan's disengagement from the management of his White House had created conditions which made possible the diversion of funds to the Contras. But there was no evidence linking Reagan to the diversion.

Speculation about the involvement of Reagan, Vice President George Bush and the administration at large ran rampant. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh investigated the affair for the next eight years. Fourteen people were charged with either operational or "cover-up" crimes. In the end, North's conviction was overturned on a technicality, and President Bush issued six pardons, including one to McFarlane, who had already been convicted, and one to Weinberger before he stood trial.

Although laws had been broken, and Reagan's image suffered as a result of Iran-Contra, his popularity rebounded. In 1989 he left office with the highest approval rating of any president since Franklin Roosevelt.


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reagan/peopleevents/pande08.html
* * *

Mariner

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Mariner, Have you noticed that Ollie North is a star now?

 

[musicman]

Mariner: This is by no means all I have to say on the subject of "Iran-Contra" - but is, rather, a brief introductory glimpse of what President Reagan was up against:

"Barely three months after being sworn as a senator, [John] Kerry made his mark, and he made it big, as one of the leading opponents of President Reagan's effort to defeat Soviet-sponsored revolutionaries in the American hemisphere.

The junior senator stopped at nothing: working with the nation's sworn ideological enemies, making damaging, distorted and often baseless allegations about U.S. covert operations, accusing his own government of sponsoring terrorism, and even damaging an FBI operation against a Colombian cocaine cartel.

That April 1985 journey to Nicaragua would become a trademark of the Kerry school of statecraft: making common cause with enemies of the United States -- and allowing himself to be used by them -- in order to win political battles at home.

The enemy of the 1980s was not Osama bin Laden and his allies, but the Soviet Union and its proxy regimes and guerrilla forces around the world. In addition to the strategic nuclear-missile threat it posed to the survival of the United States, the U.S.S.R. at the time was also the world's primary sponsor of international terrorism.

It was not without concern, then, that [President] Reagan, with the help of a bipartisan majority in Congress, financed an anticommunist guerrilla army in Nicaragua, made up mainly of peasants disenfranchised by the Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninist junta that had taken power shortly before Reagan was elected to office. That junta had by now sponsored communist guerrilla and terrorist groups from neighboring countries and presented a threat to the entire region. But Kerry, ever the defender of the communist left, didn't buy it.

To prevent the junta, known as the Sandinista National Liberation Front, from consolidating power, Reagan strongly backed the resistance fighters, whom the Sandinistas dubbed "contras," to pressure the regime either to hold free and fair elections or be overthrown.

U.S. involvement in resisting the Soviet-backed revolutionary movements in Central America was a politically emotional issue at the time, and the highly charged atmosphere forced Reagan to tread carefully on Capitol Hill.

Seeking the release of a $14 million appropriation from the previous year for the Nicaraguan resistance, and faced with public opposition, Reagan offered to limit U.S. aid to the "contras" to humanitarian assistance only, provided the Sandinistas agreed to national reconciliation and free elections that would have broken their total grip on power. The president told Congress that if the Sandinistas failed to comply by the deadline, he would use part of the $14 million to arm and militarily equip the growing insurgent army.

Reagan's compromise with Congress wasn't good enough for Kerry...[h]e announced he and Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, would go to Managua, the Nicaraguan capital. The pair of Vietnam-era radicals held two days of secret talks with Sandinista junta leader Daniel Ortega, timing the visit just before a scheduled vote on release of the $14 million to the freedom fighters...

According to the New York Times, Harkin and Kerry said "that they were seeking commitments that could help defeat President Reagan's request."...

The Globe reported from Managua, "After marathon meetings with the senators that spilled into the early-morning hours, Ortega reasserted Nicaragua's commitment to Central America as a zone free of nuclear weapons and foreign military bases, including those of the Soviet Union and Cuba."

Kerry foreign-policy aide Richard McCall and Sandinista officials hammered out a working paper that Kerry said he would present to President Reagan. Ortega reportedly was at their side for the last three hours of the meeting.

The final three-page product, which Kerry called a "peace proposal," included Sandinista promises of a cease-fire, as long as the United States cut off all assistance, including humanitarian aid, to the anticommunist forces and their families...

But the plan was phony. It was nothing more than a "restatement of old positions," a State Department official said at the time. "There is no mention of any dialogue with the unified democratic opposition, which we consider essential to internal reconciliation. Without such a dialogue, a cease-fire proposal is meaningless, essentially a call for the opposition to surrender."...

Nevertheless, on the floor of the Senate in an emotional April 23 speech, Kerry presented the document as something new..."I share with this body the aide-mémoire which was presented to us by President Ortega," he told his colleagues -- without mentioning his own role and that of his aide McCall in its drafting.

He took Ortega's word for everything..."Here," he pronounced to the Senate, "is a guarantee of the security interest of the United States."

Kerry continued: "My generation, a lot of us grew up with the phrase 'give peace a chance' as part of a song that captured a lot of people's imagination. I hope that the president of the United States will give peace a chance."

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., who was also at loggerheads with the administration over Central America, took the unusual step April 23 of rebuking his colleagues and accusing Kerry and Harkin of breaking the law and "transgressing" against the Constitution by holding unauthorized negotiations with a foreign leader.

With Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., heaping praise on the Managua trip, Goldwater said Kerry and Harkin "negotiated over there ... and now they're trying to force the president of the United States to negotiate with the president of Nicaragua. I honestly think two members of our body are violating the [federal] code when they undertake to negotiate" and are "usurping a section of the Constitution" giving only the president the right to negotiate with foreign leaders, Goldwater said. "To transgress against the Constitution is wrong, wrong, wrong."

Kerry shot back that he was "a veteran of Vietnam who fought and was wounded in that conflict."

He added that Secretary of State George P. Shultz had encouraged the trip, quoting from a letter to House Speaker Tip O'Neill, D-Mass., encouraging "congressional travel to Nicaragua and Central America."

But collaboration with the Sandinistas wasn't what Shultz had in mind.

Speaking before several thousand State Department employees two days after the above exchange on the Senate floor, Shultz took an indirect swipe at Kerry and Harkin. He zeroed in on policy critics who previously had pooh-poohed what would happen to Southeast Asia as they demanded and achieved an end to U.S. support for those embattled peoples.

Referring to "the fate of the people of Cuba, South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos," Shultz said, "those who assure us that these dire consequences are not in prospect [in Central America] are some of those who assured us of the same in Indochina before 1975. The litany of apology for communists, and condemnation for America and our friends, is beginning again."

"Do we want another Cuba in this hemisphere? How many times must we learn the same lesson?" asked Shultz. "Broken promises. Communist dictatorships. Refugees. Widened Soviet influence, this time near our very borders. Here is your parallel between Vietnam and Central America. Just as the Vietnamese communists used progressive and nationalist slogans to conceal their intentions, the Nicaraguan communists employ the slogans of social reform, nationalism and democracy to obscure their totalitarian goals."

White House spokesman Larry Speakes told reporters, "The very hour the House was rejecting the aid package [to the Nicaraguan resistance], President Ortega was going to Moscow to seek funds for his Marxist regime."

White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan went further, accusing congressional Democrats of "supporting communism" in Central America...

Most of Kerry's Senate colleagues ignored the plan and voted for aid to the Nicaraguan resistance. The House, however, voted against the aid. Kerry was thrilled. So was Ortega, who immediately announced a trip to the U.S.S.R. to petition for $200 million more in Soviet support.

Kerry didn't blame the Sandinistas for going to Moscow, of course. Instead, he blasted the Reagan administration for rejecting his "peace offer."...

This, then, was the context of John F. Kerry's very first national-security initiative in the U.S. Senate".

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38529

 

[musicman]

The article to which I linked focused on John Kerry's seemingly native treason and political opportunism - but he was by no means alone. House Democrats, led by majority leader Jim Wright, were in either close physical proximity, or constant, embarrasingly adoring correspondence with, Ortega. They were either completely duped by this communist, so eager to derail President Reagan that they ignored national security interests (imagine THAT from a Democrat!), were abject idiots, or complete traitors; pretty useless in any or all of these events.

More importantly: preceding and subsequent history shows them, along with all the nuclear freeze activists, "no nukes' musicians, and hysterical Hollywood "Day After" trouser-wetters, to have been on the wrong side of every national security issue since the advent of the Cold War. I'm surprised the left has the nerve to so much as open it's yap - but then, A) they have no shame, and B) with the MSM/DNC at the helm, the truth is ultimately mutable and malleable, is it not?

As to "arms for hostages", that's a lie. President Reagan had established a dialogue with moderate factions in Iran which served his, and the next two presidential administrations, very well. (This relationship may yet prove helpful to President Bush, as well - or, maybe, already has). Selling them arms was neither illegal nor contrary to American interests, and in no way constituted an "arms for hostages swap". These moderates, in the context of their friendly relations with President Reagan, merely agreed to use whatever influence they had with radicals in Lebanon to secure the release of American hostages. There was simply no wrongdoing here.

Oh - and the Boland Amendment? That was struck down as an unconstitutional interference with the President's ability to conduct foreign policy. Congress ultimately reinstated funding to the Contras. Daniel Ortega was ousted in free elections. Soviet aggression in the Western Hemishere was thwarted. History has redeemed President Reagan and exposed the Democrats as full of shit, out of touch, and perfectly willing to play politics with our national security.

 

[musicman]

Clarification: The Boland Amendment was repealed amid arguments that it was demonstrably unconstitutional, not actually "struck down" by any court.