SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Grab the Salt It's been said for months now that when we got to the bottom of the Iran-contra mess, we'd find out the President was either a fool or a liar. According to...
...You can go back and look Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every month...
...I did see'people who do have abnormal tendencies...
...Moving along to the Nicaraguan end of this insanity, I spare all you progressives yet another explanation of why Oliver North's moving profession of concern for democracy in Nicaragua and for the lives of eleven-year-old girls would gag a maggot...
...They were fighting communism so it doesn't spread," said this citizen...
...Grab the salt and look at the record...
...The Philippines dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos came about with the knowledge and blessing of the CIA—see Ray Bonner's excellent new book, Waltzing with a Dictator—and was, of course, supported by our government for twenty years...
...Perhaps his most enduring contribution to the political lore of the Great State was a line that seemed to him so deep, he repeated it at every stop and on television as well...
...According to Oliver North, this secret agency, funded by arms sales, was to be accountable to no one in elected office...
...You should have seen the other candidates...
...Whether attempting to rescue hostages in Iran or bombing Libya, you are not wise to advertise your intentions in advance...
...Why did no one think to ask him about the CIA gimme cap sported by the contras that says, Admit Nothing-Deny Everything—Make Counter-Accusations...
...He could just wear a button that says, The buck stopped before it got here...
...We elect people to do what's right for the country...
...The current government of Chile is a CIA product, as are the governments of Indonesia and Zaire...
...You want to fight a man who played football with two broken wrists over a profundity like that...
...military forces...
...Loeffler later denied that he had spent all his time in his room: "I did walk around the hotel...
...But we need to define "covert operations," if only because Lieutenant Colonel North is so confused about what they are...
...Why should we know what they do...
...The CIA successfully installed a military government in Guatemala that produced twenty years of torture...
...Ronald Reagan knew all along it was an arms-for-hostages deal, and he lied about it...
...Loeffler's television advertisements claimed he was "tough as bob war" (bob war is what you make fences with) and to prove it he bragged that in his youth he had played football with two broken wrists...
...I say that Texas will always be Texas...
...When our covert operations work, they produce terrible things...
...During one of his remarkable defenses of the need to engage in lying and secrecy so that we can bring open government and democracy to more benighted nations than our own, North managed to put into one bag he labeled "covert operations" the roundup of the AchilleLauro hijackers, the bombing of Libya, the invasion of Grenada, and the sale of arms to Iran with subsequent diversion of the profits to the contras...
...Their collective record of murder, torture, theft, and abuse is a disgrace to this country and to everything we want it to stand for...
...It came from a student found sunning himself on a Chicago beach by some inquiring reporter out to take the pulse of the people...
...As I have traveled around this* great state," he would intone, "many people have said to me, 'Texas will never be Texas again.' But I say they are wrong...
...it up...
...The failures are bad enough, but the successes are real disasters...
...If you don't know what's under discussion by the middle of the argument, I suspect you're not going to make much of a contribution anyway...
...Few people are more annoying than those pedants who stop a perfectly good argument dead in its tracks by saying prissily, "Now let's define our terms here...
...The happy salesman is none other than that distinguished former member of Congress from Hunt, Tom Loeffler, who needed a job because he came to electoral grief in his gubernatorial bid last year...
...Easily the most terrifying idea I have ever heard seriously proposed by a high Government official was William Casey's plan to set up a private CIA to conduct covert operations...
...They were paid for out of the military budget, not the CIA's, and they required the commitment of U.S...
...But that does not make them covert operations...
...But the most alarming statement I have heard in all this was nothing said before the Congressional investigating committees...
...I'd just as soon not be associated with abnormal people...
...The U.S...
...Before all this is over, you will hear at least several dozen times the assertion, "We all realize that some covert operations are necessary...
...The good news is that the Reagan Administration has now put a Texas politician in charge of selling its contra-aid package on Capitol Hill...
...Government does not try to hide its role in them...
...In fact, the only covert operation in the bunch is the last...
...In that case, what was he doing running for governor...
...It is not the same thing as mining Nicaraguan harbors in violation of international law and then lying about it...
...Connoisseurs of Texas politics will recall that Loeffler is the man who went to San Francisco to give a speech during his late campaign and, according to a published report, spent the entire visit holed up in his hotel room, wearing shower caps on his feet for fear of getting AIDS from the tiles in the tub...
...According to Admiral John Poindexter, he's both...
...Some military operations do require secrecy, of course...
...This caused certain uncharitable persons to question his good sense, so he explained he didn't know his wrists were broken at the time...
...After they are over, or even as soon as they have begun, such operations are made public...
...All the others were military operations...
...Yes, we can successfully overthrow the governments of Third World countries by means of covert operations, but we always replace those governments with repressive regimes...
...In 1953, the CIA successfully placed the Shah of Iran back on his throne after his people had chucked him out the first time...
...He was too dumb to notice his own staff was supplying and running an army in Central America...
Vol. 51 • September 1987 • No. 9
