Hang 'em high

An odd, even terrible title for a piece written on Holy Saturday, right after Good Friday that memorial of a famous miscarriage of justice. But in browsing comments to Glenn Greenwald's column today on the weird and wholly (if predictably) disproportionate Rightist reaction to Speaker Pelosi's Syria trip, I found this mini-essay by a regular commenter, in which he describes two GOP partisan acts of interference in international actions by a Democratic President.

One was the fairly well-known interference of the Reagan campaign in Pres. Carter's work to get the Iranian diplomatic hostages freed. The other was new to me: the Nixon campaign interfered in Vietnamese peace talks, in 1968, persuading the South Vietnamese government to stonewall talks initiated by the Johnson Administration. Citing Robert Parry (citing, in turn Seymour Hirsh):

[and so] the Vietnam War dragged on for another four years, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died, as did hundreds of thousands of Indochinese.

I don't know the truth of this story: it's contested, to be sure; but if it's true, I think Nixon's body should be exhumed and, well, maybe napalm would be appropriate.

But as the commenter writes, "Now that's what a genuine Logan Act violation looks like--and, as Parry intimates--quite possibly an act of treason as well." Yes, there are people in positions of political power in this country who have betrayed and continue to betray the nation's interests and who treacherously toy with the lives of our citizens and soldiers. And they ain't Nancy.