WILL HUMBLE TRUTHS CATCH UP WITH OLLIE NORTH?
(The Consequences of Embracing Pardoned Felons as New American Heroes) 

   Ollie’s coming to Humble, Texas.  The sprawling First Baptist Church, half a mile from my house, sent out red-white-and-blue glossy postcards to everybody in town.  Cool as a cucumber, Ollie North in full uniform, colonel’s oak leaves aglow, boldly looks you in the eye from the glossy, and then you realize the anomaly.  Ollie North is a convicted felon!  Oh, he was pardoned by Poppy Bush?  Big deal.  Amazing how presidents with magic wands can pardon the sleazy, purify all their felonious sins, and in some cases, glamorize them as heroes.  Sean Hannity will tell you Ollie is a “great American.”  Poppy Bush pardoned him (like what else do you want?) right before the end of Poppy’s one-term, read-my-lips-no-new-taxes stint as 41^st president of the United States.  So Ollie is now as pure as the driven snow.   A pardon takes away the sins of the sinner, and I suppose the Humble, Texas First Baptists really get down on forgiveness of sins.  And Republicans in uniform who say they are born again Christians and love this pro-choice nation of ours.  But my God!  I thought (which did not seem at all inappropriate), is Ollie North the best Baptists can do for famous speakers?  An old friend said the church’s collection plates would swell because of Ollie, but so what?  Does the catchy phrase, ‘The end justifies the means.”  sound all that Christian?  Does a convicted felon, billed as a pillar of goodness and hero example for our youth and speaking before the Baptist congregation, seem a bit seamy to anyone?  Do issues of separation of church and state come to mind?  Do the First Baptist elders and pastor, Bruce Frank, realize that Ollie North has endorsed John McCain for president?  Remember him?  He’s the candidate who says the Iraq War could go on for another 100 years, and it’s okay by him if it does?  Do Ollie’s right wing, neoconservative views expressed chronically on Fox News bring into question the tax-exempt status of churches who ask him to speak before their congregations?  And lastly, are the Baptists doing the work of the Lord, really, or do they seek to further the political views of Ollie’s Neocon Republican base which has proven that it is about following the profits of war and no-bid contracts rather than following the teachings of Jesus?  Did the congregation protest?  Do they think Jesus preached War and continued Occupation of your neighbors in foreign countries?  Could the Humble First Baptists see Ollie’s as an example of truth, justice, and the American way?  Or would Neocon purveyors of continued war like Ollie North replace Jesus as the new savior who advocates war and aggression against other nations like Iraq who never harmed us? 

   When Reagan was president, Ollie North broke the law by using unidentified funds to buy arms from Iran to give to the Contras fighting in Central America.  It is doubtful that many Americans remember much about the whole thing because poor old gentlemanly President Reagan said, at the time, that did not  happened on his watch.  Indignantly, Reagan refuted the charges only later to retract his statement and admit that yes, it had happened under his presidency, and though he was unaware of it, it happened on his watch, and he was deeply sorry.  America forgave him, poor old guy, maybe because we thought of him as old, but still the Gipper.  How could we not forgive him?  He was a great actor, and he moved us.  Would we care to examine the Iran-Contra Affair and to see just who was guilty of anything?  Nah. 

   Ollie is not the only convicted felon pardoned by the Bushes.  Recently, Scooter Libby was convicted of his part in lying under oath at the Valerie Plame trial and had his two-year sentence commuted by Poppy’s eldest son and 43th president, George W. Bush.  See, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA Operative had her secret identity leaked by someone in the White House.  That’s treason, but not to worry.  Sure, it gave Cheney and Bush when Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson exposed the two of them as liars just before they attacked Iraq, but heck, who would notice if they offed Wilson’s wife for pure revenge?  They knew Carl Rove, Gonzales and other perpetrators would never be questioned by a congressional committee about who leaked her identity.  It’s true, Joe Wilson, had gone to Niger and proved a key Bush intelligence report bogus that Saddam Hussein had been seeking to buy Uranium from Africa.  Revenge is sweet, and if the heat gets turned up, Scooter will fall on his sword, but not to worry.  Bush pardoned him, slick as owl shit on a Sycamore limb.  The new US justice system cannot compete with the Neocnon totalitarian regime.  Apparently former White House press secretary Scott McCleland felt like blowing the whistle, but he was a bit late.  His new book on exposing the crimes of the White House has him being demonized by the Neocons as we speak, and it looks like Scott is toast. 

   Ollie and Scooter and their superiors had no fear in executing their illegal acts or in being caught and incarcerated for their crimes.  Sure, they were both convicted, but when you got the power of the White House on your side, who cares?  Just wave your finger and a crime is not really a crime.   This new high crimes mentality extends far and wide.  As we speak, Congress is in the process of granting immunity to the phone companies who aided and abetted Bush in illegally wiretapping Americans and shredding the 4^th Amendment to the Constitution.  The phone companies knew it was illegal, but succumbed to the president who said breaking the law was okay.  Now Congress is rewriting the law to where though wiretapping without FISA Court approval was a crime, it no longer is a crime.  But that’s not all.  Congress is passing legislation that says Bush and the phone companies really did not break the law which was in force at the time.  Understand?  It may be doublespeak but we better get used to it.  It’s all a bald-faced lie.  It’s saying that it really was not against the law, even though the law was in force, and the phone companies helped Bush break the law.  But it really didn’t happen, understand?  Leaves you mumbling to yourself. 

   This criminal, me-istic, mentality, characterizes our new morality here in the good old US of A.  Churches don’t censor convicted felons like Ollie North; they applaud them as true Americans who fight Muslims, evil, and terrorists, not necessarily in that order.  I still cannot grasp this new warlike Christian mentality where killing thy neighbor is a part of the Word of Jesus, but oh, well.  Maybe John or Luke forgot to write about how belligerent Jesus could be.  Ollie sat defiantly in congressional committee, spewing his patriotism for America and the flag all over the chamber, and he never showed remorse for his part in the Iran-Contra crimes he committed.  America and the cameras seemed to love him just like when they convinced us that Reagan, nee the Gipper, the Great Communicator could be president.  Both of them broke the law in the Iran-Contra affair.  Reaganomics began to spread like cancer while jobs and the dollar tanked from borrowing and spending.  Never mind.  America still was in love with the Gipper who smiled and winked at us on camera.  And the American fell in love with Ollie, too, in a pressed uniform, all Indiana Jones-like and looking brave.  We somehow sized him up to be one of the great Americans of today.  The camera said so, and we took the bait.  We did not seem to care about what he had done.   And I suppose that’s why the First Baptist Church of Humble engaged Ollie as a speaker.   Looks good from the podium, or before the Fox News Camera with Sean Hannity lobbing Ollie softball questions.   

   The jury is in; Ollie North and his felonious kind have become our new heroes.   Well, Scooter is maybe more nerd than hero, but he did fall on his sword for his boss, Dick Cheney and Bush who proved that a dictatorship really could exist here in the land of the free.  Nobody really cared about what Scooter did, either, and his being convicted of high crimes and sentenced to do hard time would never materialize.  Get used to it.  This scenario is the new American way of truth and justice.  Buying into such scum and glamorizing them because they are criminals is the moving force, I believe, behind the new American Way.  Bush would never have been able to attack and occupy Iraq if he had not lied to the American people about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction pointed at us.  But we forgave him and blamed it all on bad Intelligence reports.  Bush would never have been able to continue the Iraq occupation by borrowing America into poor nation status by continuing to finance the illegal Iraq War and occupation by monies we now must borrow from the Chinese.  We are broke.  Sorry ‘bout that.  Our national debt would not have been 10 Trillion dollars and counting if Bush had not been allowed to continue in Ollie North fashion where he looks like a hero, talks and swaggers like a real hair-trigger cowboy, says the word terrist a few times, and picks America’s pockets while putting our brave soldiers in harm’s way, needlessly.  Needlessly. 

   I am more than disappointed in this new nation where our president acts like Mussolini, the Congress mimics the Politburo, and the people, bleat like sheep that get led to the slaughter each and every time a dictator or dictator by committee comes to power.   Sadly, I have to agree that many of the Democrats we elected to be our champions are sorry excuses and enablers of the Bushes and the direction they know Bush is taking this battered, bludgeoned, and changed new nation we still call America.  Congress is covering their own asses because their hands aren't clean and they know it.  So get out the magic soap and water of Congress and wash past crimes all clean so you will not be prosecuted as accomplices for those crimes ALREADY COMMITTED against the people and the Constitution.   

   What our leaders have done feels a bit like you're waiting in the ER for news on an old friend who has been shoved off the top of a tall building.  The doctor comes in and says,  

"Sorry but he did not make it.  At the end of the terrible fall, the victim fell on a spire and was disemboweled." 

"Whose responsible for this?  Who pushed him?"  you ask.   

"We did."  he says, mournfully.  "All of us.” 

   But then Ollie is going to speak to all the First Baptists in Humble, Texas.  Maybe I will go to see if he says anything real or reassuring.  Somehow I don’t think he will be able to manage both.