Everybody Run! Saint Ronnie’s got a gun
Axios’ morning email thingie (the whole excerpt because Imma bad blogger) confirms the October Surprise:
At age 84, Ben Barnes — a former Texas House speaker and lieutenant governor — spills to The New York Times’ Peter Baker a tale of skulduggery in the Carter-Reagan election that’s been mostly secret for 43 years:
- In 1980, Barnes’ longtime political mentor, former Texas governor John Connally, invited him on a mission to the Middle East.
- “What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States,” Baker writes in his 2,600-word account.
Why it matters: With former President Jimmy Carter “now 98 and in hospice care, Mr. Barnes said he felt compelled to come forward to correct the record.”
🗳️ What happened: Carter was “bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency … Carter’s best chance for [re-election] was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.”
- Barnes says Connally took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another, “meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal,” Baker reports.
- Shortly after returning home, “Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.”
🤔 Between the lines: “‘Carter’s camp has long suspected that Mr. Casey or someone else in Mr. Reagan’s orbit sought to secretly torpedo efforts to liberate the hostages before the election, and books have been written on what came to be called the October surprise. But congressional investigations debunked previous theories of what happened.”
- “News of Mr. Barnes’s account came as validation to some of Mr. Carter’s remaining advisers.”
- Jerry Rafshoon, a top White House and campaign communications adviser for Carter, said any interference may have changed history: “If we had gotten the hostages home, we’d have won, I really believe that.”
The bottom line: As the years passed, Barnes “often thought an injustice had been done to Mr. Carter,” Baker writes. “Discussing the trip now, he indicated, was his way of making amends.”
I think most of us on the Left knew this happened, but we could never prove it. The Reagan Revolution was a scam and a crime from the start, or before it actually: they used the AMERICAN hostages (held them hostage themselves, when you think about it) for political gain. Traitors from the beginning.
Mock Paper Scissors 
It’s funny how often liberal conspiracy theories turn out to be true.
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We all knew that this report from the New York Times was too convenient to be a coincidence:
The right has conspiracy delusions¹; people on the other side, however, have real conspiracies.
¹ I refuse to call them “conspiracy theories” because they are not worthy of being designated theories, which has a precise scientific meaning.
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I’m shocked. Shocked I tell you, to find out Ragun was a leftie. He would have saved us all, so much grief, with a shot to the window of that airplane.
w3ski
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“As the years passed, Barnes “often thought an injustice had been done to Mr. Carter,” Baker writes.” Yeah, like it was just between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Of course he forgets about the American people. He is a Republican, after all.
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Their ideology has always been greedy and wreathed in corruption, but the GOP has been a criminal organization since Nixon betrayed Johnson and the US back in 1968. Party over country — always.
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And Nixon made sure that the Vietnam peace talks were stalled so he could win the election. Their party symbol should be a dog with a very crooked hind leg.
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Gov. Connaly was the bagman, but the plot was Casey’s. Bank on it (like a Contra).
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I doubt Casey. If so, he got instructed by Geo Herbert Walker B., CIA godfather and later mastermind of nine-eleven op…”because voters denied him a second term that was due him, after all he did for them.”
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I like the quotation marks. Nice touch.
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We already knew.
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Carter sent helicopters to rescue the hostages. Ollie North commanded the mission and admitted he threw sand in the helicopter engine to cause the mission to be aborted. To make Carter unsuccessful.
Ollie and Bush shoulda been shot for sedition. Bush ran everything those years. Reagan was non campus mentis in lulu land held in pose by Nancy the way Dr Jill props up Joe B.
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