I firmly believe that, in some very prominent place in his mind, John McCain is in the second year of his second term as president of the United States. He certainly is president of John McCain. I don't know the source of this delusion; in no way, is the guy a leader, either of his party or his nation. His only obvious followers are Senators Huckleberry Butchmeup from South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte, the Richelieu Of Rye. I suspect it has its origins in his unsuccessful 2000 campaign against George W. Bush. No politician in my memory got better press than McCain did from the national media in those days, including some from, well, me. McCain had so much sunshine blown up his ass that his colon must have looked like Cabo San Lucas. This would have been enough to turn the head of anyone who wasn't essentially a rank opportunist, something that no fair person ever could say about John McCain.

Having already draped himself in a toga, McCain's response to the Obama administration has been both petulant and imperious, a small boy commanding an army of butterflies. This is most recently illustrated in his response to the deal cut by the administration to arrange the release of Bowe Bergdahl from captivity. The conservative chorus of opposition to the deal is a lovely harmonic convergence of complete hypocrisy and profound historical amnesia on the always delightful topic of "negotiating with terrorists." There's nothing we can do about the former; without complete hypocrisy, the entire conservative project would blow away into a pile on Frank Luntz's lawn. It would be like asking swine not to wallow. But there certainly is something we can do about the latter.

Anyway, McCain went on Face The Nation to furrow his brow and express his deep concern.

I think there are legitimate questions about these individuals who have been released. And the conditions understand which they will be released. These are the hardest of the hard core. These are the highest high-risk people. And others that we have released have gone back into the fight. That's been documented. And it's disturbing to me that the Taliban are the ones that named the people to be released. So all I can say is that we need to more information about the conditions of where they're going to be and how. But it is disturbing that these individuals would have the ability to reenter the fight. And they are big, high-level people, possibly responsible for the deaths of thousands.

Speaking of high-level people who definitely were "responsible for the deaths of thousands," let's fire up the old Wayback Machine and journey back to the early 1980's, when John McCain was an ambitious young congresscritter seeking to beef up his neoconservative foreign policy cred. In the attempt, McCaingot involved with something called the U.S. Council On World Freedom, which was run by retired General John Singlaub, and even among the skeevy operators drifting around the Washington foreign-policy elite in those days, Singlaub was notably rancid, playing footsie with ancient Nazi collaborators and the most vicious of death-squad commanders all over the world. By the middle of the decade, just as Ronald Reagan was kicking off his second term, Singlaub took on another project. His organization became one of the cover operations for gthe illegal activities central to what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. According to Theodore Draper's essential study of that era, A Very Thin Line, by 1984, Singlaub was central to Oliver North's scheme to evade U.S. law and arrange third-party funding for the Contras in Nicaragua. He worked with the governments of Taiwan and South Korea. Through his shadowy network of arms dealers, Singlaub arranged for Soviet arms to be shipped into Honduras, thanks to the effort of a Honduran customs official paid to look the other way. "Singlaub," writes Draper, "became a one-man collection agency." Eventually, Singlaub became too much of a wild-card even for Ollie North -- at one point, according to Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus in their book, Landslide, Singlaub, acting on his own, actually underbid Richard Secord, who was the CIA's official arms conduit to the Contras, on a shipment of weapons -- and the scandal moved off in other directions, including selling missiles to Iran for the purposes of raising money for the Contras.

(But North wasn't free from Singlaub. According to Firewall, the memoir by Lawrence Walsh about his days as the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, at the trial of North's old boss, John Poindexter, North testified that he previously had lied to Congress about meeting with Singlaub.)

This was the guy with whom the young, ambitious John McCain allied himself when he first got to Washington. This was the world of spooks and crooks to which he was more than willing to hand the foreign policy of the United States. As with so many things, the unfinished business of the Iran-Contra scandal, and the yet-unplumbed depths of the foreign-policy crimes of the Reagan Administration, are the Rosetta Stone to understanding so much about what has gone wrong with America's relationship with the world over the past 30 years. It remains a monument to the addiction on the part of the country's political elites to secret deals and the dark magic of intelligence work. It remains a monument to a fundamental contempt for democratic institutions, and for the rule of law, and for the clear constitutional mandates through which Congress must have a role in our dealings beyond our borders; as unwilling as modern Congresses have been in exercising these mandates, it acted back in the 1980's. It forbade aid and assistance to the Contras. The Reagan Administration, and the people instructing John McCain on foreign policy, simply ignored the law. It was all about selling missiles to mullahs in order to obtain the release of American hostages in the Middle East and then using the profits to finance a war that Congress already had determined was illegal. The Iran-Contra scandal remains a monument to ends justifying means. If you want to understand the essential emptiness of the Republican opposition to what happened with Bowe Bergdahl, Iran-Contra is the ur-text. John McCain knows all of this. He was there.

And now comes John McCain, and so many people like him, furrowing their brows again and expressing "concerns" over a negotiation in which no money changed hands and no weapons changed hands. And then, I suspect, he goes out onto the sidewalk in front of the CBS studios in Washington, and stands there, puzzled as to why there is no limo waiting to take him back to the White House until some kind soul calls him a cab.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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