Atrios has been at war with centrism lately and he has been struggling mightily to define exactly what centrism is. Here’s his latest effort.
Mostly centrism is used be elite opinionmakers to denote sensible, set off against real or (more often) imagined “extreme” positions which are of course wrong because anything “extreme” has to be wrong. Except, perhaps, invading countries for no good reason.
I admit, it isn’t an easy thing to define. I think that centrism is one of those things, like pornography, that defies easy definition but that you know when you see it. The following excerpt, from a November 2000 article by Robert Parry, shows centrism in action.
The second Iran-contra shoe dropped in early November 1986 with a story in a Beirut newspaper about the Iran arms sales. When the secret about North’s diverting Iranian arms profits to the contras was disclosed a few weeks later, the Iran-contra scandal was born.
But the Reagan-Bush administration was not ready to tell all. Immediately, the administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill moved to counter and to contain the scandal. For his part, Bush insisted that he was “not in the loop” on the Iran-contra business.
Cheney to the Rescue
One of the key congressional Republicans fighting this rear-guard action was Rep. Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who became the ranking House Republican on the Iran-contra investigation. Cheney already enjoyed a favorable reputation in Washington as a steady conservative hand.
Cheney smartly exploited his relationship with Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who was chairman of the Iran-contra panel. Hamilton cared deeply about his reputation for bipartisanship and the Republicans quickly exploited this fact.
A senior committee source said one of Cheney’s top priorities was to block Democrats from deposing Vice President Bush about his Iran-contra knowledge. Cheney “kept trying to intimidate Hamilton,” the source said. “He kept saying if we go down that road, we won’t have bipartisanship.”
So, Hamilton gave Bush a pass. The limited investigation also gave little attention to other sensitive areas, such as contra-drug trafficking and the public diplomacy operation. They were pared down or tossed out altogether.
Despite surrendering to Cheney’s demands time and again, Hamilton failed, in the end, to get a single House Republican to sign the final report.
Only three moderate Republicans on the Senate side – Warren Rudman, William Cohen and Paul Trible – agreed to sign the report, after extracting more concessions. Cheney and the other Republicans submitted a minority report that denied that any significant wrongdoing had occurred.
The watered-down Iran-contra majority report essentially let Vice President Bush off the hook. Bush’s political career was saved.
With the Iran-contra scandal contained, Bush mounted a 1988 presidential campaign that set the modern standard for negativity, race-baiting and a win-at-all-cost ethic. In 1989, Cheney became Bush’s defense secretary.
Bush was elected instead of imprisoned, and when his bid for re-election went down in flames, he pardoned all the Iran-Contra criminals on Christmas Eve 1992. The result?
Elliott Abrams is now Deputy National Security Advisor and is widely rumored to have been behind the failed coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002. Bush’s son is the President. Dick Cheney is a heartbeat away from the presidency. And Lee Hamilton is called in every time the Bush administration needs bipartisan cover. He served as co-chair of the 9/11 commission, which he freely admits never had a chance to succeed. And now is co-chair of the Iraq Survey Group, which all of Washington is waiting to hear from.
That, my friends, is what centrism is all about. You need look no further.
In a late 1980s interview aired on PBS ‘Frontline,’ Hamilton said that he did not think it would have been ‘good for the country’ to put the public through another impeachment trial. In Lee Hamilton’s view, it was better to keep the public in the dark than to bring to light another Watergate, with all the implied ramifications. When Hamilton was chairman of the House committee investigating Iran-contra, he took the word of senior Reagan administration officials when they claimed Bush and Reagan were ‘out of the loop.’ Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh and White House records later proved that Reagan and Bush had been very much in the loop. If Hamilton had looked into the matter instead of accepting the Reagan administration’s word, the congressional investigation would have shown the public the truth. Hamilton later said he should not have believed the Reagan officials.
Thus ends another Atriotic episode of simple answers to simple questions.
