A friend informs me that John Boehner has appointed Elliott Abrams to something called “the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.” This tells us nothing — that is, that nothing has changed. That the Republican Establishment is still in the pocket of the Big Pentagon Money, and the serial liars, and the plunderers, and the self-dealers — and that the GOP Hot Tub Crowd is absolutely shameless.
Why? Listen to Boehner himself: “Elliott Abrams is an honorable public servant…”
Stop right there.
Sorry, Mr. Speaker, Abrams was convicted of lying to the Senate, in the scandal that profoundly disgraced President Reagan (Abrams was joined by Iran-Contra malefactor Ollie North). That made him permanently unconfirmable by the Senate, as well as permanently disreputable. Unlike John Profumo, who had the dignity and self-respect to leave public life after a relatively insignificant dalliance, Abrams and North have not devoted their lives to serving the poor and elderly by cleaning toilets in old-folks homes out of the public eye; they have both insisted on seeking rehabilitation by embracing the yardstick of Washington’s pigsty: If you’re not in jail, you’re ethical.
To continue with Boehner: “[Abrams] has served the American people with integrity and distinction [sorry, Dear Reader; vide supra.]. I am pleased to announce his appointment to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, where I am confident he will be a strong advocate for people throughout the world who are facing oppression and coercion for their faith.”
Oh really? How confident are you, Mr. Boehner, well-known to be an orthodox Catholic? Under Abrams’s guidance from the National Security Council (the highest position that the NeoCons could secure for him that did not require Senate confirmation), Bush’s unconstitutional, unjust war installed in Iraq a “democracy” that has killed tens of thousands of Christians, driven every living Jew from Iraq, along with a majority of Christians and Catholics who had been at home there for two thousand years (the rest are soon to follow). The Good Christian Bush has never apologized. Poor soul, he has never even publicly acknowledged this human rights disaster (which is also a heinous capital crime against “Religious Freedom,” by the way) that he wrought on Iraq.
Has Abrams ever apologized? Will Abrams surprise and edify us all, and pull a Profumo — admit his moral failings, and advocate the rights of all the Jews and Christians who have suffered under his policies, and then spend the rest of his life trying to make right all the wrong he has done them? Or will he pursue the typical Neocon Auto-Rehab Program, getting cheap political appointments to useless government appendages that (he hopes) will overshadow the dark night of his soul and embellish his credentials in his class notes at the Harvard Alumni Magazine?
How long must this prevaricating pestilence strut across the stage?
“Out, out damned spot. Out!”
Gen. It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her to continue in this a quarter of an hour.
Lady M. Yet here’s a spot.
Doct. Hark! she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.
Lady M. Out, damned spot! out, I say! One; two: why, then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? [Macbeth, Act V, Scene 1)
8:45 pm on May 15, 2012
