'Scandal' and the Politics of Definition”, which I excerpted at Crooks & Liars actually supported Webb's findings, contradicting the elite media attacks against him, yet the elite media attacks were never retracted, and the attacks on Webb essentially ended his career as a journalist. Several year later, he took his own life in despair.

The complex of scandals revolving around Iran/Contra is worth considering for a variety of reasons, one of which is the role played in suppressing them in order to (intentionally or unintentionally) stabilize a conservative worldview account of foreign policy. The more that various overseas misdeeds are hidden from public sight in America, the more that foreign resentment of US actions appears irrational, arbitrary, even “evil”, and the more “necessary” the unquestioned unilateral use of US military force appears to be. On the other hand, the more those actions are exposed, the more that foreign resentment, and resistence become comprehensible, even justifiable, thus strenghtening the case for an egalitarian, values-based, non-military foreign policy approach.

Thus, not only does exposing such misdeeds directly discredit conservative leaders responsible for them, it indirectly serves to undermine the conservative mythos of heroic Americans fighting against blind and/or malevolent forces in a “dangerous world” and strengthen the liberal logic of engaging with self-determing foreign nationals with sometimes differing interests, whom we can nonetheless learn to live with peacefully and prosperously.

This even helps shed light on the so-called “Benghazi scandal”. Ultimately, it's a scandal in conservative eyes, because they believe that it discredits Obama's too-soft approach and his record in fighting al Qaeda — even though that approach is much more a continuation of Bush's second term foreign policy than it is a repudiation. The fact that conservatives believe that four deaths in Benghazi are worse than Watergate, while most of them can't even remember the 241 Marines and other servicemen killed in Beirut on Ronald Reagan's watch in 1983 speaks volumes about how much it matters to them to defend their own mythos, and how utterly unconcerned are about the mere facts of logos.

The added domestic dimension of drug war blowback revealed by Webb's “Dark Alliance” reporting has similar consequences for undermining the conservative mythos. If kids just take drugs for no good reason, then the fault is theirs—the should “just say no!” in Nancy Reagan's famous phrase. And if they will not, then the logic of war seems justified—and the more it fails, the more it will seem necessary: There's no success like failure. But if kids take drugs for complicated reasons (including deliberate covert decisions overseas allying the US with international drug traffickers), then both the simplistic mythos and the contradiction-riddled logos of the war on drugs quickly fall apart, and space opens up for a much more nuanced, more critical and progressive harm-reduction approach, as opposed to an authoritarian moralistic one.

There are multiple reasons for the dynamic of rightwing scandal suppression within the press described above, but one clear outcome is that Republican scandals tend to be increasingly suppressed from public memory over time, just as conservatives expend energy more or less continuously to keep Democratic scandals alive. This process aids and abets the continued primacy of conservative mythos by systematically suppressing the facts of logos that would shoot it full of holes.

The resulting asymmetry is a deeply-embedded part of the American political system, which both feeds off and contributes to the conservative/Republican advantage in terms of mythos in multiple different ways, touching on virtually every policy area there is.