Quick question and please don't take this the wrong way

[Bush was AWOL]

but did Kerry ever meet Ortega? I totally disagree with what Reagan did in SA, but I'm in an argument with someone who is once again insisting that Kerry sided with the communists, blah, blah, blah.

[dave123williams]

1. It wouldn't suprise me if there was some contact...

Kerry was very busy digging in to BCCI, and the whole Iran-Contra mess. That's why the GOP hates him so much, beyond his threatening their power in a run for the Whitehouse.

[Vickers]

2. You mean the part where Reagan authorized Oliver North to illegally

sell arms to Iran in a hostage deal (dealing with terrorists? The shame!), and then illegally (again with the illegal stuff!) funneled the money to Contras fighting the Ortega-led Sandinistas?

No idea.

:P

Never let them frame the argument. Know your history, and throw it in their stupid fucking face.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. I have no idea

Daniel Ortega did visit the U.S. (and appeared on the Phil Donahue Show), and he may have met with members of Congress to try to get them to stop Reagan from picking on his country, but if Kerry did meet Ortega, so what?

By trying to deny this, you're buying into the freeper's assumption that the Sandinistas were Soviet or Chinese style Communists, which they were not, and that meeting with them was a bad thing, which it was not. When world leaders come to the U.S., members of Congress often meet with them, whether they particularly like them or not.

The only proper answer to such a question is "So what?"

And if the little dittohead isn't satisfied with that answer, ask him if he knows why the Sandinista revolution took place, what the Sandinistas' policies were, who the Contras were, what kinds of targets the Contras struck at, how the Reagan administration interfered in Nicaraguan elections, and how the Nicaraguan population reacted when the Sandinistas were voted out after years of pressure from the U.S. For bonus points, you can ask him if he knows which members of Reagan's Central American intervention team were convicted of felonies, were quietly pardoned by Poppy Bush on Christmas Eve when no one was looking, and were appointed to powerful posts in Bush Jr.'s administration.

If he doesn't know the answers to these questions, he's talking out of his ass, or most likely, repeating one of Rush's Sacred Pronouncements, which is actually the same thing.