John McCain has been trying to get some of the Ronald Reagan mystique all over him, and he may have managed it with one of his latest endorsements: ex-con and Contragate conspirator Oliver North. Yes, the man who ran a shadow foreign policy out of the White House basement (literally) under the 40th president.
The McCain press machine has been distributing North’s statement that he “cannot sit silently while my fellow conservatives do to John McCain what GOP ‘moderates’ did to me.” In a furious screed, he compares the right-wingers that have been attacking McCain as not conservative enough to the centrists he sees as responsible for his defeat in the 1994 Virginia Senate elections. Moderates that included, erm, Nancy Reagan.
This seems to be two old warriors standing together and trying to make the War on Terror the core issue for the November elections. From his time in the Reagan administration, North may have become some sort of hero to fans of illegal wars, shipping weapons to Iran and Afghanistan, and long-standing accusations of complicity in the international drugs trade; but there’s still that thorny little issue of three convictions in Federal court for his involvement in that whole Iran-Contra mishap. Mysteriously, his biography over at Fox News glosses over all of that.
This article appears in February 15 • 2008.
