Demonic

by Ann Coulter

  Those are two very different claims. It’s perfectly possible to believe Obama is a socialist—based, for example, on his socializing health care, the auto industry, and much of the banking industry and his statement that he thinks the government should “spread the wealth around”3—but not believe he was born in Kenya. Using Obama’s sentence structure, the anti-war Democrats included some folks who weren’t sure if President Bush should be assassinated or whether he was a right-winger.

  It is liberals on TV, not conservatives, who are constantly yammering about Obama’s birth certificate. They’re not doing this to make conservatives look good. This is the only myth that begins to make conservatives look half as crazy as liberals.

  In fact, however, there is not a single Republican in Congress who claims to believe President Obama was not born in this country. Even Salon’s major investigative report, titled “Birthers in Congress,” produced only a few elected Republicans making utterly innocuous remarks, such as Representative John Campbell (R-CA), who responded to a question about whether Obama was born in Hawaii by saying, “As far as I know, yes.” In liberal-land, that’s enough to be labeled a “birther.”4

  Salon’s leading “birther in Congress” was Representative Bill Posey (R-FL) for simply having said he wouldn’t “swear on a stack of Bibles” that Obama was born in Hawaii. I wouldn’t swear on a stack of Bibles that Dennis Kucinich was born on Planet Earth, but apparently now Republicans are deemed to believe anything they don’t heatedly denounce.

  The smoking gun of Posey’s alleged “birther” belief is that he introduced a bill that would require presidential candidates to produce their birth certificates. Inasmuch as it is a constitutional requirement that presidents be natural-born citizens, this is hardly an outrageous proposal.

  But consider what Posey did not do.

  He did not attempt to void a presidential election—as Senator Barbara Boxer and a handful of House Democrats did in voting not to ratify Ohio’s votes in the 2004 election based on the Left’s conspiracy theory about rigged Diebold voting machines.5

  Posey did not say, “I believe it” of the birther theory, as DNC head Terry McAuliffe did of Michael Moore’s more ludicrous conspiracy theories in his movie Fahrenheit 911.6

  He did not hold mock impeachment hearings covered by CSPAN in the House basement—as Democratic congressman John Conyers did for the impeachment of George Bush.7

  But liberals demanded that elected Republicans like Posey do more. They were called on to attack birthers and thereby pointlessly alienate people who might vote for them. Before Republicans tell birthers they’re wrong, how about the Democrats get around to telling their black constituents that O.J. did it? How about the Democrats issue an official proclamation stating that they believe Tawana Brawley was lying and her advisers were malicious frauds? How about asking the Democratic congressman who represents Durham, North Carolina, to comment on whether he believes the Duke lacrosse players were guilty?

  It would be a big step if Democrats would simply stop kissing Al Sharpton’s ring. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews spends 55 minutes of his every show demanding that elected Republicans vilify the birthers. But then he invites on as an honored guest Al Sharpton—perpetrator of the Tawana Brawley hoax. Maybe Matthews could kick off the conspiracy-squelching extravaganza by denouncing Sharpton’s role in that charade.

  For years, Al Sharpton, leading actor in the Tawana Brawley hoax, had veto power over all Democratic presidential candidates. If there ever comes a time when Republican presidential candidates have to get the blessing of the head of the birther movement to run, I’ll say: I’m wrong—Republicans are as crazy as the Democrats.

  It’s not just that your average liberal is more likely than a conservative to believe in laughable conspiracies—although that is clearly true. The difference is, the conservative media denounce their nuts. They don’t hold hearings on deranged theories or attend the loons’ movie premieres. By contrast, the Democratic Party champions its crazies, appearing with them in public and holding congressional hearings to investigate their screwball theories.

  The Democratic Party has a hand-in-glove relationship with Michael Moore, crackpot documentarian, whose Fahrenheit 9/11 is chockablock with demented conspiracy theories, including:

  • the 2000 election was stolen

  • the Bush family clandestinely spirited the bin Laden family out of the United States after the 9/11 attacks

  • Bush went to war in Afghanistan not to avenge the 9/11 terrorist attack but to help the Unocal Corp. obtain a natural gas pipeline in Afghanistan

  Again, Terry McAuliffe, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee, attended the glittering Washington, D.C., premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11 and emerged endorsing Moore’s wacko Unocal conspiracy theory. “I believe it after seeing that,” McAuliffe said. Show me former RNC chairman Michael Steele saying, “I believe the birthers” and I’ll give 90 percent of my book profits to the Hugo Chávez reelection campaign.

  Other Democrats who attended Moore’s movie screening include Senators Tom Daschle, Tom Harkin, Max Baucus, Ernest Hollings, Debbie Stabenow, and Bill Nelson and Representatives Charles Rangel and Jim McDermott. Show me a half dozen Republican senators attending a birther movie premiere and I’ll say “both sides” are the Party of the Mob.

  In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark proudly accepted Moore’s endorsement. Moore was an honored guest at the Democratic National Convention that year, sitting with former president Jimmy Carter. What is the likelihood that a birther will be sitting with former President Bush at the 2012 Republican National Convention?

  Democratic fundraisers have been headlined by Rosie O’Donnell—a prominent 9/11 “truther,” who believes the World Trade Center was blown up with explosives, not taken down by terrorists in airplanes. In 2003, Democratic presidential candidate and future Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean approvingly cited the left-wing fantasy that Saudi Arabia had warned Bush in advance about the 9/11 attacks. He promised a caller to National Public Radio that, if elected, he would investigate. Why are Democrats never asked if they really want the support of people who think the Bush family was in on the 9/11 attack?

  There’s something else Representative Bill Posey didn’t do, despite his alleged status as a “birther.” He didn’t hold congressional hearings costing taxpayers millions of dollars to investigate a kooky conspiracy theory cooked up by Lyndon LaRouche—as Senate and House Democrats did with LaRouche’s October Surprise conspiracy theory. LaRouche was a plausible source: You’ll recall that he hatched the idea that the Queen of England ran an international drug-smuggling ring. Indeed, LaRouche was the second-most-ridiculous person named “Lyndon” to ever run for president of the United States.

  Before it is completely washed down the memory hole, let’s review this spectacular Democratic conspiracy theory: The October Surprise.

  To set the stage: It was 1980 and Ronald Reagan was running for president against the incumbent Jimmy Carter. Reagan was the sunny, popular right-wing governor of California. Carter was the bumbling, egotistical coward bent on surrendering to the Soviets, who claimed to have been attacked by a giant swimming rabbit.8 Carter’s economic policies had produced a 21 percent interest rate, a 17 percent mortgage rate, and a 15 percent inflation rate in the coveted “hat trick” of presidential incompetence. Not only that, but he had produced skyrocketing unemployment.

  Carter’s brilliant strategic ploy of abandoning the shah of Iran, an important American ally, soon led to soaring oil prices and, of course, Islamic lunatics holding fifty-two Americans hostage in Tehran, where they remained for 444 days, until Carter was safely removed from office by the American people. (Carter’s abandonment of the shah also gave rise to the global Islamofacist movement we’re still dealing with today.) Under Carter, Americans were permitted to put gas in their cars only on alternate days, based on whether the last number on their license plates was an even or odd number. The price
of oil had risen 154 percent since the beginning of Carter’s presidency. And these, mind you, were Carter’s accomplishments. He also gave us Ruth Carter, Billy Carter, and a sweater-based energy policy.

  With all that going for them—plus that old Mondale magic—Democrats were dumbstruck that they lost the 1980 election. (Nor could they understand, incidentally, why gas prices, inflation, and interest rates shot down 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. The hostages, 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 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 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 acted as 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 representatives of presidential candidate Reagan and the Ayatollah. The two key American “witnesses” to the October Surprise were paranormal expert Barbara Honegger and fake CIA agent Richard Brenneke.

  Honegger was a former low-level Reagan
staffer, who told reporters she heard voices from the future.15 She believed in supernatural events and claimed that an intelligence officer told her that satellites were directed to part the clouds during Reagan’s inauguration so that the sun would shine only on him.16 She was briefly famous in 1983 for accusing the Reagan administration of not caring about women, announcing to one of her many fawning media admirers, “I am honored to have been used by the Force, if you will, with a capital F, like in ‘Star Wars.’ That’s how I feel. You know, the Zeitgeist of history.”17 Honegger was Christopher Hitchens’s main source for his stories promoting the October Surprise conspiracy in The Nation magazine.

  In search of an ally, Honegger approached fake CIA agent Brenneke and told him about the October Surprise story. She handed him a list of Reagan associates asking him to put a check by those who were at the Paris meetings. Brenneke’s own notes of the meeting show that this was the first he had heard of the October Surprise “thesis,” as he called it. He wrote, “Honegger meeting notes: Thesis: Reagan-Bush campaign conspired to delay the hostage release until after the November 1979 election [sic] … Howard Hughes was somehow involved.…”

  Brenneke was about to be fired from his lucrative job with a left-wing think tank for failing to produce evidence of a different conspiracy theory, so he needed a new gig. Suddenly, it rang a bell. And so, a few weeks later, not only had Brenneke heard of the October Surprise meeting—he had been there! A LaRouchite confirmed that he had seen Brenneke at the meeting, something Brenneke himself had not remembered until that very moment.

  According to these three reliable sources—Brenneke, Honegger, and the LaRouchite—in October 1980, George H. W. Bush (later Reagan’s vice president), William Casey (later Reagan’s CIA director), and presumably Howard Hughes met with the Ayatollah’s representatives in Paris to make their nefarious deal. We’re still trying to determine if the Freemasons were involved.