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Quick follow-up to our earlier item about Giuliani's new ad, in which he discusses the Iranian hostage crisis. He omits his usual line about the mullahs looking into Ronald Reagan's eyes in 1981 and releasing the American hostages they had held for 444 days. But he still implies that the Iranians released them out of fear or respect for Reagan.
Giuliani is right when he says that "[t]he one hour in which they released them was the one hour in which
Ronald Reagan was taking the Oath of Office as President of the United
States.” The events were happening simultaneously. But he has been wrong to suggest that this had anything to do with Reagan. If anything, the Iranians were just waiting for Carter to leave.
Politico's Jonathan Martin pointed this out earlier this year, quoting Mark Bowden's 2006 book "Guests of the Ayatollah": All of the hostage takers I
interviewed said that the decision to wait until Carter officially left
office was deliberate, a final insult to the man they had propped up as
the representative of the devil on earth.
The implication that the Gipper somehow struck fear into their hearts and thus provoked the hostages' release is borderline preposterous. Amazon.com yields another interesting tidbit from the same book: The Iranians guarding the hostages weren't scared of Reagan -- they wanted him to win: They were convinced that anyone other than Carter would understand their reasons for seizing the embassy and would admit the great wrongs America had committed in Iran. (p. 554)
Not to mention that hostage negotiations had begun under Carter, that Iraq's invasion of Iran forced their hand, and that Iran-affiliated Islamists continued to kidnap Americans left and right throughout the 1980s. Surely they had looked into Reagan's eyes too, right?
To his credit, Giuliani was careful to back up his facts this time around. In previous ads, such as this one about health care, he played more than a little fast and loose with statistics. Maybe he omitted the "eyes" line because he knew he would get this sort of response. But the causal implication is still there. He takes the fact of the simultaneous inauguration/hostage release and uses it to bolster a myth. Unfortunately, it's not one that any of his opponents are about to call him out on.
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Slate editorial assistant Chris Wilson sends the latest on the mysterious Ron Paul spamming saga:
Ron Paul’s online fan club has made an art out of flooding sites with praise for the Texas libertarian, so much that they’ve been accused of spamming. So when e-mails with subject lines like “IRS Fears Ron Paul?” or “Ron Paul Wins GOP Debate!” started cropping up in inboxes in late October, some people wondered whether it was part of some vast libertarian conspiracy. Well, was it?
Probably not, says computer sleuth (and Ron Paul fan) Joe Stewart. Stewart tracked the messages back to one spammer named "nenastnyj," whom Stewart calls "Nina." In other words, this wasn't the work of tech-savvy Paul supporters coordinating a spamming campaign on behalf of their man. Instead, it appears to ratify the "lone spammer" theory that one individual paid Nina to send out millions of messages.
Stewart, a senior analyst at the Atlanta-based SecureWorks firm, discovered that, like most spam these days, the Ron Paul messages were coming from computers infected with a malicious program. He traced the infected machines back to a command-and-control server in the United States, where he got a copy of the program being used to send spam. Nina turned out just to be a middleman who ran spam projects through a much larger operation.
Whoever paid Nina to send out the e-mails probably knew him already, Stewart says. While it’s easy to hire a spammer on various hacker forums, Nina doesn’t advertise his services anywhere public and would be hard for a first-timer to locate. Is it possible Nina is just another Ron Paul fan? Unlikely, Joe says, given comments Nina has made on hacker forums.
Paul campaign spokesman Jesse Benton describes the findings as “vindicating” for anyone who suspected foul play from the campaign.
For more details, check out Stewart’s report here.
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Mitt Romney's campaign sent out a batch of photos today showing Romney penning his HISTORIC, MONUMENTAL, NARRATIVE- CHANGING speech on Mormonism, which he delivers tomorrow morning. We thought this might just be a subtle way of leaking the speech itself, but Photoshop wasn't up to the task ...
Anyone have one of those nifty CSI-style photo enhancing machines?
See the rest of the collector's item photos here, here, here, and here.
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Earlier this week, we examined signs that Hillary Clinton’s karmic tank appears to be running low. Now we know where all that good fortune went: right into Dennis Kucinich's life.
According to today’s marvelous Washington Post profile of Kucinich and his wife, Elizabeth, the couple's relationship has been blessed from the start. A few choice pieces of evidence:
- [A lovelorn Dennis Kucinich asks Indian guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar how to find love.] "And his response was, 'Stop looking and then she will appear,' " Dennis says. "And I said, OK, I'm going to stop looking.' I said that. And that afternoon—"
"I walked through the office door," Elizabeth finishes.
- "It was about 7:30 at night and I was just sending a message out to the universe saying, 'Where is this woman? If there's anything to be done here, I need a sign.' "
"And at that moment—"
"At that exact moment, I get an e-mail."
- Elizabeth looked down at her ring and realized that the silver design inscribed on her blue opal, which had previously looked like just an abstract pattern of triangles, was in fact—if one looked hard enough—two K's, back to back.
"Kucinich and Kucinich," she says. "I thought, 'OK! So I bought myself my own engagement ring!' "
- Their days are filled with these sorts of moments, as when they go out for Chinese food and the fortune in Dennis' cookie tells him he has "integrity and consistency." ("Isn't that amazing?" Elizabeth says.) And then they turn the fortune over, and Dennis' Chinese word is hat, and amazingly, Elizabeth just bought a hat before lunch.
It's like all the luck that could have gone into his presidential run has instead been transferred to his romantic life. The opposite of Rudy Giuliani!
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Giuliani has a new ad running in New Hampshire in which he tells one of his favorite anecdotes. When Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, Iranian mullahs had been holding American hostages for 444 days. “The one hour in which they released them was the one hour in which Ronald Reagan was taking the oath of office as president of the United States,” Giuliani says in the spot. The story makes regular appearances in Rudy’s stump speeches. But there’s one line that didn’t make it into the ad.
"They looked in Ronald Reagan's eyes and in two minutes they released the hostages," Rudy said at a GOP debate in May. "They obviously saw something different in the eyes of Ronald Reagan than in the eyes of Jimmy Carter," he told a New Hampshire audience in October.
It always struck me as one of Rudy’s cheesier lines, but it’s also a big part of his pitch: The difference between a leader and a slacker is ineffable. Either you are one or you aren’t. It wasn’t the death of the Shah in July 1980 that led to the hostages’ release. It wasn’t the invasion of Iran by Iraq that fall, which made the prospect of ticking off the United States less appealing. Nor was it the Algerian-brokered hostage negotiations, arranged before Reagan took office, that solved the crisis. It was the look in Reagan’s eyes.
Because it's not about diplomatic skills or military prowess. It's about who can beat Bin-Laden in a stare-down.
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Mike Huckabee is in for an icy day in Iowa, but not because of the weather.
First comes word that Huckabee had no idea that the new National Intelligence Estimate was released on Monday. For Huckabee, this reaffirms one of his chief weaknesses: That he doesn't know what he's doing in foreign affairs. I've heard of the fog of the campaign trail, but did a staffer not think to give Huck a heads up? Because this fundamentally alters the way candidates approach their Iran policy, this is a more grievous gaffe than John Edwards not knowing about the "General Betray Us" ad.
Even worse for Huck, the Huffington Post fronts an exclusive report on his role in securing the release of a convicted rapist, Wayne Dumond, while governor of Arkansas. Huckabee has always claimed he had no reason to believe Dumond would rape again. But Huffington's report includes letters sent by Dumond's rape victims warning Huckabee that they thought Dumond would rape again. Once released, Dumond allegedly went on to rape and murder two more women. This has been a simmering issue on the campaign trail, and his opponents would be wise to lead any attacks with this news.
Let's not forget that these allegations swirl as Mitt Romney asks the Iowa attorney general to look into pro-Huckabee push polls in Iowa. This amounts to one hell of a buzzkill for Huckabee as his poll numbers continue to take off. Look for the media, who may have become self-conscious for falling in love with Huckabee, to turn on him as quickly as they propped him up.
Mike, that guy who sings "Bad Day" is standing by. Let us know if you need him to fly to Iowa.
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