Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [43]
A somewhat more obvious motivation for Khomeini’s timing in releasing the American hostages was given in a Jeff MacNelly cartoon that showed Khomeini sitting in a circle of Ayatollahs reading a telegram aloud: “It’s from Ronald Reagan. It must be about one of the Americans in the Den of Spies, but I don’t recognize the name. It says ‘Remember Hiroshima.’ ”
A normal person gets an ice cream headache trying to follow the details of the October Surprise conspiracy theory. It was invented out of whole cloth by LaRouche after the 1980 election and remained in the kook fringe for years, finding brief outlets only in disreputable publications like The Nation (Christopher Hitchens, July 1987), the New York Times (Flora Lewis, August 198710), and Playboy magazine (September 1988).
The lunatics might have spent their days in obscurity, talking to supercomputers of the future—as one October Surprise theorist claimed she did—except that, in April 1991, the New York Times began relentlessly flogging the story. Even if the October Surprise theory were plausible—which it wasn’t—why the Times would suddenly start aggressively promoting a theory about an decade-old event is anybody’s guess. Wait—I just remembered why the New York Times would so aggressively promote a theory about a decade-old event! They’re the New York Times, and the theory was an attack on Reagan.
Anyway, in late 1991, the Times printed a lengthy op-ed by Gary Sick promoting the October Surprise lunacy.11 Sick had been President Carter’s principal aide for Iran during the Iranian hostage crisis—as impressive a position as being FDR’s chief adviser on “sneak attacks” in December 1941. Sick was a professor at Columbia, apparently because the university was unable to hire the aide in charge of gas prices during the Carter administration.
In addition to single-handedly injecting the October Surprise conspiracy theory into the mainstream media, Sick would be responsible for bringing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia in 2007. That’s a liberal for you: They have undying respect for Holocaust-denying, messianic America-hating dictators, but they denounce Reagan for allegedly being involved in dark conspiracies with Holocaust-denying, messianic America-hating dictators. If “America-bashing” were a category at the Oscars, this guy would be up for a Lifetime Achievement Award. And please: no letters—I know that America-bashing is the principal purpose of the Oscars, but in a technical sense, it’s not an actual award category.
More than a decade after LaRouche had dreamed up the idea of a secret deal between the Reagan campaign and the Ayatollah Khomeini, the mainstream media embraced “The Election Story of the Decade,” as Sick called it. As we shall see, conspiracy theories are best left in the pages of crackpot rags like The Nation magazine. Once they appear in crackpot rags like the New York Times, serious people start wasting their time investigating.
After the Times turned over two-thirds of its editorial page to Sick’s October Surprise theory in 1991, other news outlets, such as PBS’s Frontline and ABC’s Nightline, began treating crazies howling at the moon as if they were serious news sources. Soon editorials across the nation were demanding answers. Even Jimmy Carter called for a “blue-ribbon” commission to investigate, saying, “It’s almost nauseating to think that this could be true”—which is ironic, because that was my reaction, word for word, upon learning that Jimmy Carter had been elected president. The “evidence is so large,” Carter said, “I think there ought to be a more thorough investigation of the allegations.”12
What is fascinating about the October Surprise theory is that it was pursued notwithstanding the absence of a single person who could credibly claim to have been involved. This was not a Hiss-Chambers case. It was not one of Clinton’s “bimbo eruptions.” It wasn’t even Anita Hill accusing