>I'm still baffled by how little punishment there was for Iran-Contra
I'll tell you why you're baffled. Those kinds of issues tend to be very complicated because the world is complicated and messy. However people don't do well with grey and nuance, so instead they try to map it to something they can get a handle on that match their world-view and ideology and reinforce by reading highly partisan summaries (where the opinion just so happens to match their own) and staying in a bubble with other like-minded partisans.
Ah yes, lots of subtlety and nuance involved in the creation of an illicit program which was end-run around an explicit Congressional prohibition against helping the Nicaraguan contras. There was so much subtlety and messiness they even had to destroy tons of documents about their activities so no one else would be exposed to all that messy complexity!
I'll tell you why you're baffled. Those kinds of issues tend to be very complicated because the world is complicated and messy. However people don't do well with grey and nuance, so instead they try to map it to something they can get a handle on that match their world-view and ideology and reinforce by reading highly partisan summaries (where the opinion just so happens to match their own) and staying in a bubble with other like-minded partisans.