After reading a ridiculous opinion story written by “Ollie north” on Foxnews.com, I asked rhetorically “Why is Oliver North still alive?” My grandfather lovingly answered that “Only the Good Die Young”, to which we both shared a laugh. Reading Oliver North’s less than entertaining opinion about Vladmir Putin made me recount a visit from Oliver North to the college I went to, where we paid him something like $25,000 for a speaking engagement.
This was in 2002 before things were getting really bad in Iraq, and just as he loves to do now, Mr. North was giving us his opinion - something nobody asked for. He talked about how great it was that we were talking about going into Iraq, and spitting platitudes left and right about how the U.S. was the best country in the world, and how if we could make democracy work here we could make it work anywhere. What really struck me though was when he went on to explain to an auditorium full of students at a Catholic Liberal Arts college that the United States was the first country to ever use democracy.
When a freshman student who was as confused as everybody else in the room raised his hand and asked “But Col. North, wasn’t Democracy first tried and conceptualized in Ancient Greece?”, Ollie flipped out on the student, advising that he should check his facts before he challenged somebody as highly decorated as he was. The student’s response actually caused Col. North to become visibly pissed off, which was understandable considering that the student asked if the problems in the middle east now could be in any way correlated to his participation in the sale of weapons to Iran during the Iran Contraband scandal in the 80s.
Oh, Ollie. You’re so crazy!
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