Doomed To Repeat It

by digby

A lot of people are talking about this call by Juan Cole for Bush to fire Elliot Abrams, and for very good reason. It’s a great idea, but since it took six years for him to dump Don Rumsfeld, I’m not holding my breath.

What caught my eye in his post outlining Abrams’ long history of crime and perfidy, though, was this:

In 1991, Abrams pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress under oath. Without the plea deal, he was facing felony charges, since what he did was in fact a felony.

Congress pledged that Abrams would never work at a high level in government again. But by the time the Neoconservative cabal in the Bush administration got Bush to appoint him to the National Security Council, there had been so much turn-over in Congress that, one member told me, “no one remembered who Abrams was.”

Please, someone, tell me this isn’t true. Elliot Abrahams was one of the most evil members of the Reagan administration. He was pardoned by poppy on Christmas eve 1992, just before he left office. He was notorious, infamous.

Unless Democratic staffers and members are all under the age of 40, there is absolutely no reason for them not to have already known who Elliot Abrams was. In any case, their job is to look into the president’s appointees and had anyone done that they would have seen that they were going to be allowing a war criminal back into the government. Then again, he’s just one of many in this administration (that has created a whole new generation of war criminals themselves), so perhaps they just thought that was a prerequisite for the job.

Abrams, unsurprisingly, is back to his old tricks. He’s a very, very bad man and should not ever have been let anywhere near government power again. But he’s one of those awesome Republican “grown-ups” the kewl kids were just thrilled to have back in Washington. I hope they are really enjoying those cocktail weenies.

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