Free Demonic by Ann Coulter Page A

and the nation enjoyed peace and prosperity soon after Reagan became president.) Naturally, liberals asked themselves: What other than a dirty trick could explain Carter’s loss?
    The Left’s theory was that in October, one month before the 1980 presidential election, members of Reagan’s campaign clandestinely met with representatives of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and offered to sell him weapons in exchange for his promise not to release the hostages before the election. By delaying the release of the hostages, the theory went, Reagan would deprive Carter of a triumphant victory on the eve of the vote. In other words, liberals believed the Islamofascist cutthroats who had been toying with Carter like a cat with a ball of yarn for the past year wanted Carter replaced by someone stronger, like Reagan . Even by the standards of conspiracy theorists, this one was crazy.
    But it seemed like a perfectly plausible theory to the editorial board of the New York Times . After all, the hostages were released immediately after Reagan’s inauguration. Surely there was no reason for the Iranians to find Reagan more intimidating than a president who claimed to have been attacked by a giant swimming rabbit. Hadn’t the hostage-takers been scared out of their wits by the photos of Carter wilting like a schoolgirl after jogging?
    It was as plain as the nose on your face: Reagan had struck a secret deal! As leading conspiracy theorist Craig Unger put it, “One can almost make a prima facie case that surreptitious deals did take place. Thehostages, it should be recalled, were released only minutes after Reagan’s inauguration.” (Even the Columbia Journalism Review gently chided Unger for ignoring the investigative journalist’s practice of looking for evidence on both sides of a theory.) 9
    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 1987 10 ), 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 atColumbia in 2007. That’s a liberal for you: They have undying respect for Holocaust-denying, messianic America-hating