You know you’ve attained middle age when your young-adult memories themselves reach the age of young adults. Someone born around the time I was marching against the Reagan administration’s proxy war against Nicaragua might well administer my next routine colonoscopy. How can I know this and not be perturbed?

The Reagan/Bush I scandal known misleadingly as “Iran-Contra” dwarfed Watergate in audacity, criminality, and objective impeachability. It served as a dress rehearsal for the world-historical criminality of the Cheney/Bush administration. More importantly, it served as dress rehearsal for the impunity conferred upon the criminals by an opposition party too scared to oppose and a press too scared to press. We have this fecklessness to thank for the fact that people like Oliver North, John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, George Schultz, Richard Perle, and indeed the entire Bush clan, far from crawling under a rock of enduring castigation (much less incarceration), remain burdens to our lives to this day.

As ever, the noble exceptions prove the depressing rule, and during the Reagan years, AP reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger broke numerous stories that exposed, clarified, and contextualized the ongoing horrors of the administration’s privatized covert war-making apparatus. Like many others who told too much truth to power (think Ray Bonner, Chris Hedges, Sydney Schanberg), their exertions were rewarded by marginalization.

Since 1995, Bob Parry has waged a largely thankless battle against the memory hole through his investigative web site Consortiumnews.com. In the last decade, he and his coauthors have drawn together the thematic threads from the Reagan era to the Bush II abominations. The work, and the need for it, continues under what increasingly looks like the Bush III administration.

Yet in an era when so many of us crow about the need to supplant our worthless corporate media with quality alternatives, Consortiumnews.com struggles on a shoestring, hindering its ability to pursue the stories, analyses, and projects it wants to tackle.

I regularly receive their cries for help, and respond as I can, but thought it was high time to pass the appeal on to MyFDL. They’re currently so strapped that they need to give up the warehouse space for Bob Parry’s books, Lost History, Secrecy and Privilege, and Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush. Do what you can, if you can.