Since its founding, it has been an article of faith at Tiger Beat On The Potomac that history consists of whatever popped up on the handheld electronic device 10 minutes ago. It also has been an article of faith in those quarters that its customers are as into "winning the morning" as its original founding geniuses were, and that those same customers are therefore as dumb as posts. Hence, we get Michael Crowley's opening paragraph of his "deep dive" into Bernie Sanders' radical past.

In his most recent debate with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders befuddled some viewers with an arcane reference to a 1953 U.S.-backed coup in Iran, which Sanders called an example of America's history of "overthrowing governments."

Those befuddled viewers are the reason that TBOTP exists and that the Republican presidential nominating process is being dominated by a vulgar talking yam. The overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran—and the subsequent installation of the Shah—is the source of all the destructive ill-will that has plagued the relationship between these two countries to this day. It is the American ur-meddling in a century of it and it's as relevant to a discussion of current Middle East affairs as a critique of the Syrian civil war is. We continue.

One big difference between then and now: Forty years ago, Sanders didn't just complain about CIA interventions abroad; he called for abolishing the spy agency altogether. The CIA is "a dangerous institution that has got to go," Sanders told an audience in Vermont in October 1974. He described the agency as a tool of American corporate interests that repeatedly toppled democratically elected leaders—including, he said, Mosaddegh. The agency was accountable to no one, he fumed, "except right-wing lunatics who use it to prop up fascist dictatorships."

Don't worry, though, Crowley's going to take us on a sightseeing tour through history similar to those chartered buses who used to take tourists from Ohio through Haight Ashbury to look at the funny hippies.

At the time, the 33-year-old socialist was running for U.S. Senate on the ticket of the Liberty Union Party, an anti-war group that likened the draft to "a modern form of slavery" and called for reducing the U.S. military in favor of local militias and the Coast Guard. While Sanders' extreme leftist past is well known, many of his specific views from the 1970s and '80s remain unfamiliar even to Democratic insiders. And while those views have mellowed considerably over time, Sanders' unexpectedly strong performance in the presidential race has party leaders increasingly alarmed that Republicans would make devastating use of his early career should he win the Democratic nomination.

Don't worry, though. Crowley has found a "Democratic insider" to back him up.

"Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength," said Jeremy Bash, who served as chief of staff to CIA director Leon Panetta and now advises Clinton's campaign. "If this is a window into Sanders' thinking, it reinforces the conclusion that he's not qualified to be commander in chief."

Speaking of the height of the Cold War, maybe if we'd replaced the CIA with some smarter people, our intelligence agencies wouldn't have so badly missed the fact that our principal adversary was falling apart from within.

(The piece is loaded in a lot of different ways. Crowley makes sure to get a reference to the Weather Underground's activities in there. He seems to be making a case that the entire antiwar movement consisted of Bernie Sanders and bombs in Greenwich Village brownstones.)

Crowley at least gives a hand-wave toward how angry people were at the revelations of the Church Committee—which only occurred "shortly after" Sanders' remarks if you consider five years as "shortly after"—and he does acknowledge that "some Americans" believed the CIA was running amok. I suspect some Chileans and East Timorese were of that opinion as well. One of the Americans who held that belief was noted Weather Underground leader Senator Patrick Moynihan of New York, who twice as late as the 1990's authored bills to eliminate the agency. Indeed, at its very founding, Dean Acheson, as cold a Cold Warrior as ever lived, expressed his trepidation at establishing an intelligence agency outside of the State Department. And then there was John F. Kennedy, who famously threatened to break the CIA "into a thousand pieces" after the agency lied him into launching the Bay of Pigs invasion. (A certain school of historical commentary has this outburst as one of the sources for The Plot that culminated in Dallas.)

Despite Crowley's best attempts to turn what Bernie Sanders said four decades ago into a Strawberry Alarm Clock lyric, more than a few Very Serious People down through history have thought the CIA was a bad concept that became, in practice, a truly terrible idea. That this position today can be caricatured as something "extreme" is a measure of how sheeplike the nation has become with regard to its national security.

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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