Either the New York Times is historically illiterate or it just doesn’t give a damn.
The Left never lets go of anything or forgets its history. No conspiracy theory is too dead to be dragged up again. And with Carter on the way out, the New York Times decided to drag out its old claim that the Carter administration’s Iran hostage crisis was somehow the fault of Reagan who bribed Iran not to free the hostages.
This conspiracy theory never made any sense since the hostages were released on the last day of the Carter administration. If there had been some secret deal by Reagan’s people, then the release would have happened after Reagan took office and initiated some sort of proposal plan to obtain their freedom.
When your conspiracy theory’s payoff never adds up, then there’s no ‘there’ there.
The New York Times claims to have dug up a witness in the form of Ben Barnes. The New York Times never mentions that Barnes is a top Democrat activist and was one of Kerry’s biggest fundraisers or that he’d previously gone around claiming that he’d gotten George W. Bush into the Texas Air National Guard.
The media shopped that ‘scoop’ around in 2005 as if Barnes were credible. Now it’s doing it all over again while failing to mention the last time this happened when the story could never be confirmed.
“I got a young man named George W. Bush into the National Guard when I was lieutenant governor of Texas, and I’m not necessarily proud of that, but I did it,” Barnes said in the 45-second video, which was recorded May 27 at a meeting of John Kerry supporters in Austin.
This latest story follows the same pattern, a supposedly heartfelt retelling of a story he now regrets and feels guilty about.
One problem. It can’t be confirmed. Also it makes no sense.
Mr. Barnes said he had no idea of the purpose of the Middle East trip when Mr. Connally invited him. They traveled to the region on a Gulfstream jet owned by Superior Oil. Only when they sat down with the first Arab leader did Mr. Barnes learn what Mr. Connally was up to, he said.
Mr. Connally said, “‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter,’” Mr. Barnes recalled. “He said, ‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over.’ And boy, I tell you, I’m sitting there and I heard it and so now it dawns on me, I realize why we’re there.”
Mr. Barnes said that, except for Israel, Mr. Connally repeated the same message at every stop in the region to leaders such as President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt.
Sadat was fundamentally hostile to the new Iranian regime. So hostile that the Iranians likely played a role in prepping the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate him after he offered the Shah asylum.
Trying to negotiate with Iran through Sadat would be like trying to negotiate with Israel by sending messages through Hamas. It makes zero sense especially since the Islamic regime had actual supporters in America and Europe that any envoy could have met with if it wanted to pass on a message to Tehran.
Either the New York Times is illiterate when it comes to politics and history, or it just doesn’t give a damn.
