The Neocons and Contragate
Rosenberg, Bernard
As we totter on the edge of a recession, Reaganomics, plus the foreign policy that went with it for seven happy-go-lucky years, seems just about totally discredited. So what else is new? Isn't...
...The ante is constantly being raised, the threshold of shame lowered...
...14 • DISSENT...
...Maybe the Code of Hammurabi would help to instruct Walsh on, say, obstruction of justice...
...Isn't it obvious to everyone...
...Crovitz tells us that President Reagan and his entourage did no wrong, committed no offense, criminal or civil, in implementing a good—if not, as it turned out—a neat idea...
...How could such a scholar fail to enlighten about "Crime, the Constitution, and the Iran-Contra Affair...
...If, after all, even many Republican congressmen admit it all smells bad, then surely . . . but not in Commentary as it moves toward Cloud-Cuckoo-Land...
...They confessed, these two worthies, to felonious guilt in conspiring to defraud the government, naming 011ie North as co-conspirator...
...Not just major office holders are exonerated by the gentleman with two degrees, but also such small fry as Carl "Spitz" Channell and Richard Miller, fundraisers who copped a plea, thinking they were culpable and therefore cooperating with Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh...
...Somehow, I'd feel better about this judgment if it were at least accompanied by a legal footnote from the age of feudalism...
...So misapprehending his function, Walsh has put every participant in the Iran-contra affair—never the Iran-contra scandal—on notice "that no charge may be too vague, technical or arcane for Walsh to bring against them...
...While there was, writes Crovitz, "obviously much shredding of documents" in 011ie North's office, "for this to be a crime, it would have to have occurred after an official criminal investigation had begun, which does not appear to be the case here...
...Consider the October 1987 issue featuring an article by one L. Gordon Crovitz, who, if not exactly a household name, comes credentialed as "assistant to the editor of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal," a writer with two law degrees, one from Yale, another from Oxford...
...Well, not quite...
...Regular Commentary watchers, pursuing their grim occupation, may notice a turn still further toward fanaticism, an extra touch of hysteria...
...How's that for homework...
...What could be more damning than "As Walsh apparently sees it, his job as special prosecutor is to prosecute...
...How stupid of them!—perhaps a result of caving in to liberal pressure...
...Not to the neoconservatives, who keep dragging themselves further and further rightward, even to the right of their darling in the White House...
...Were Walsh less benighted, he could learn from twodegree Crowitz that those who failed to pay taxes on their contra profiteering were engaged in . . . acts of charity, a word whose meaning is set forth in an Elizabethan statute, the Charitable Uses Act of 1601...
...They pleaded guilty, Crovitz informs us, to a criminal law that was not broken...
...And Walsh, who possesses only one law degree, makes Commentary's Crovitz positively apoplectic...
Vol. 35 • January 1988 • No. 1
