Free Demonic by Ann Coulter Page B

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 Clarence Thomas. In those scandals, people who unquestionably knew one another disputed the facts of their relationship.
    Absolutely no one who could credibly claim to have been involved in a secret deal between the Reagan campaign and the Iranians came forward to attest to the alleged “October Surprise.”
    According to Village Voice reporter Frank Snepp, who was the first to thoroughly discredit the October Surprise hokum, 13 reporters actedas conduits for information, allowing alleged witnesses to conform their stories with one another. “Only by swapping rumors and tacking with the latest ones,” Snepp said, “were they able to create an impression that they knew of this event firsthand.” Curiously, the Deep Throat conspirators kept changing their stories to fit the available evidence and would wait to hear what other loony tunes were prepared to “confirm” before “confirming” anything themselves.
    There were two types of October Surprise conspiracy theorists: international con men and domestic dingbats. The international crooks would suddenly remember being part of the October Surprise conspiracy upon being arrested for some other crime, such as smuggling or fraud.
    A classic example was Gunther Russbacher, an Austrian who had pulled off a string of con jobs, including impersonating: an Air Force officer, an Army captain, an Air France pilot, a federal prosecutor, a secret agent, and a stockbroker. During his sentencing for theft while posing as a stockbroker, the Chicago Tribune reported that his wife Raye said Russbacher was “actually a deep-cover CIA operative whom the government is trying to suppress because he piloted a flight that carried George Bush to meet with Iranians in 1980 to delay release of the U.S. hostages in Tehran—the so-called October Surprise.” 14
    You cannot tell me anyone in the media, even on the New York Times editorial page, seriously believed these people. (Frank Rich was still the theater guy for the Times back then.)
    Then there were the standard nut-bar conspiracy theorists who claimed to have personal knowledge of meetings between