About That Kissinger Quote Neil Gorsuch Likes

[deminks]

https://www.thenation.com/article/about-that-kissinger-quote-neil-gorsuch-likes/

Shortly after Donald Trump announced the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, it was revealed that Gorsuch had picked a Henry Kissinger quotation to caption his 1988 Columbia yearbook photograph: “The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

(snip)

Kissinger’s remark wasn’t a one-off but part of his routine, the urbane wit that gossip columnists and foreign-affairs journalists continue to swoon over. This particular joke was used to disarm reporters’ attention to Kissinger’s role in Watergate, which was substantial and should have brought him down along with Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and the rest. But compared with these charmless “Prussians,” Kissinger was practically Noël Coward. One of the first times “the illegal we do immediately” quip was printed in public, as far as I can tell, was when it was entered into the Congressional Record in 1973, in opposition to Kissinger’s nomination as Secretary of State (prior to that, as Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Kissinger hadn’t needed Congress’s consent): “joking about Watergate and the constitution…exemplifies his notorious lack of any capacity for moral leadership; per his reported statement: ‘The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.’ Elitist, professional ‘humor’ such as this disqualifies for high office.”

A month later, on October 28, 1973, The New York Times was running it as part of a compendium of Kissinger humor, in a column titled “The Sayings of Henry Kissinger.” Recently, a declassified document reveals that Kissinger repeated the joke to Turkey’s foreign minister in 1975, as the two men discussed ways to bypass a Congressional ban on arms sales to Ankara. “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.’ [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.” By 1977, when Kissinger was leaving office, his well-wishers were quoting it back to him in tribute. Oh, that Henry!

(snip)

As a Supreme Court justice, Gorsuch will be ruling on matters of national security, and since much of Trump’s foreign policy is little more than an updating of the Nixon/Kissinger Doctrine—that is, relying on repressive allies to do the US’s dirty work, with the promise not to criticize human-rights violations which that work entails—Gorsuch’s affection for this particular Kissinger quotation is troubling. When Kissinger used it in 1975 with Turkey’s foreign minister, he was trying to find a way to work around the congressional cutoff of military aid to Turkey, due to its invasion of Cyprus. That same year, Kissinger also worked to make sure arms continued to flow to Indonesia’s Suharto, to whom Kissinger gave the green light to invade East Timor. “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,” Kissinger said, so as to prevent a law that automatically bans arms sales to aggressor nations from kicking in. The mass murder of East Timorese followed. Fascism yesterday, fascism today.

(end snip)

emphasis mine.

[Cracklin Charlie]

1. I just saw an ad on teevee for Trump's nominee.

I have never seen such a thing before.