The Republican Party will again hold America hostage over raising the debt ceiling limit unless President Obama caves in to their demands.
This isn’t the first time right wingers have held us hostage.
In 1968, Richard Nixon’s campaign undermined Lyndon Johnson’s Paris peace talks, effectively extending the Vietnam war for political gain. Johnson called it treason when he talked to Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen in a recorded phone conversation. Later, when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, then-President Nixon panicked and ordered Watergate break-ins to find his secret files.
Iranian ex-President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, in a March 5 Christian Science Monitor article, confirmed the theory that Ronald Reagan made a secret deal with Ayatollah Khomeini to hold the hostages until after the 1980 election to make Jimmy Carter look weak on foreign affairs.
Before the Gulf War in 1991, Dick Cheney and George H.W. Bush scared the Saudis with satellite photos that allegedly showed 250,000 Iraqi soldiers on the border. The Saudis agreed to allow American troops into Saudi Arabia, motivating Osama bin Laden’s attack on 9/11.
