Needless to say, Secret Service records established the precise location of vice presidential candidate Bush throughout the 1980 campaign. And he wasn’t in Paris. Once that was confirmed, the conspiracy theorists simply dropped Bush from their imaginary meeting but were otherwise undaunted. The dates of the alleged meetings kept changing, depending on what could be proved about William Casey’s whereabouts in the fall of 1980. By process of elimination, the wackadoodles finally settled on three days in October for which there appeared to be no evidence of Casey’s whereabouts.
With the conspirators having finally decided that October 17—20 were the absolutely, positively definite dates for the alleged October Surprise meetings, it turned out Casey’s whereabouts could be proved after all. He was at a conference in London, “The Anglo-American History of World War II.” Unfortunately for the conspirators, the conference director kept detailed notes on who attended each session. Not only was Casey present at nearly every talk, including his own, but there were credit card receipts establishing Casey’s presence in London even during brief periods when he left the conference. In all, Casey’s precise location could be proved for nearly every minute of the three-day period. And he wasn’t in Paris, either.
Then it turned out that even fake CIA agent Brenneke was not in Paris during the alleged October Surprise meeting. Having placed himself at the center of the secret meetings in Paris, Brenneke planned to capitalize on it by “writing” a book. So he turned over all his notes and diaries—8,000 pages in all—to his ghostwriter, Peggy Adler Robohm. One can imagine Robohm’s surprise when she came across credit card receipts, signed by Brenneke, proving that he had attended—believe it or not—a Star Trek Convention in that week. Okay, it wasn’t actually a Star Trek Convention. Brenneke was attending a martial-arts tournament in Seattle on the crucial dates from October 17 to 19.
Robohm promptly contacted Representative Lee Hamilton (D-IN), who was chairman of the congressional committee spending millions of taxpayer dollars to investigate the October Surprise. But Hamilton wasn’t interested. So she sent Brenneke’s files to Snepp at the Village Voice.
At least Brenneke had a good explanation for the credit card receipts placing him at the Seattle martial arts tournament during the crucial meeting in Paris. When Snepp asked him about the receipts, Brenneke said, “No comment.” This was the conspiracy that Jimmy Carter demanded a blue-ribbon commission to investigate and on which millions of taxpayer dollars were wasted.18
Interestingly, many of the same screwballs pushing the October Surprise nonsense have popped up in more recent conspiracy theories. Brenneke became a star witness in the Mena, Arkansas, cocaine conspiracy by claiming to have flown drugs for the CIA from Mena when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas.19 Honegger is the originator of the peculiar 9/11 conspiracy theory holding that all the clocks stopped at the Pentagon at 9:32 on 9/11, thus proving that the plane could not have hit at 9:37. Oswald LeWinter—another of Gary Sick’s critical sources for his book October Surprise—attempted to sell forged documents to Mohamed al-Fayed in 1998, allegedly proving that the British intelligence service was involved in the death of Diana, princess of Wales. I’m pretty sure he also started the urban legend about how you can cook an egg with an activated cell phone.
But despite the fact that the October Surprise conspirators made Dan Rather’s source on the Bush National Guard story look like Eliot Ness, major mainstream media such as ABC’s Nightline, PBS’s Frontline, and the New York Times ferociously promoted the October Surprise using these nuts as their sources.
Now here’s the most dazzling part of the conspiracy theory: The investigation of the October Surprise was itself an October Surprise.
The Democrats’ Show Trials into Sick’s cuckoo allegations didn’t take place until 1992—a dozen years after the alleged conspiracy but the very year one of the main alleged conspirators, then-president George H. W. Bush, was running for reelection.
Why didn’t the New York Times start pushing the October Surprise conspiracy theory in 1984, when Reagan was running for reelection? Why not in 1988, the first time alleged conspirator Bush was running for president? The answer is: Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. Those elections weren’t close. Why waste a mammoth, preposterous lie trying to save the likes of Michael Dukakis?
Rumors about Reagan and the Ayatollah had been buzzing about the dental fillings of nutcakes for more than a decade, but suddenly, just before a presidential election twelve years later, Congress and the media were ravenous to investigate whether the Republican president facing reelection was a traitor. Ironically, Democrats carrying on about how Republicans had engaged in dirty tricks to steal the 1980 election was a dirty trick to steal the 1992 election.
The New York Times did not begin hawking the October Surprise theory until the third year of Bush’s presidency—and didn’t stop until Bill Clinton was elected. Right through the 1992 presidential election, newspapers were crackling with accusations that Bush had been involved in Reagan’s fiendish plan to keep American hostages in the hands of Islamic lunatics until Carter lost the election.
ABC’s Ted Koppel set the tone on Nightline, saying that if the allegations were true, “it would be an act of political treachery bordering on treason.”20 The Associated Press reported—in February of an election year—“Democrats contend that they are not out to get Reagan or Bush but simply want to clear the air of a rumor that, if true, would amount to treason.”21
Yes, and if it were true that Obama was a secret agent of al Qaeda—think of what that would mean!
Apart from not being true, how was the October Surprise conspiracy different from the late Senator Ted Kennedy engaging in secret negotiations with the Soviet Union in order to undermine Reagan’s foreign policy? If the October Surprise was so dastardly that we had to spend millions of dollars investigating it, how about investigating a U.S. senator warning the Russkies that the U.S. president was a belligerent lunatic who was terrifying all “rational people.”22 Unlike the October Surprise, that actually happened. Other people who may still be working in Democratic politics were involved. How about an investigation into that bit of treason?
Even after liberal publications such as the Village Voice, the New Republic,23 and Newsweek24 had thoroughly debunked the October Surprise, a Democratic House and Senate were convening lengthy investigations into whether Reagan had struck a secret deal with Iranian monsters holding Americans hostage. Sick, darling of the New York Times, denounced the debunkers, claiming Snepp was still connected to the CIA, that New Republic reporter Steve Emerson was part of a Zionist conspiracy, and that the Senate report was “another cover-up.”25
The House investigation of Bush’s role in the nonexistent October Surprise began in February 1992 and the Senate inquiry began in the spring of that year—coincidentally, a presidential election year. In the House, not one single Republican voted for the investigation and thirty-four honest Democrats voted against it. Neither congressional inquiry managed to wrap up before the election. So George H. W. Bush ran for reelection while two show trials—er, congressional investigations—were in the process of determining whether or not he had committed treason. That sounds fair.
The Senate completed its inquiry into the October Surprise a few weeks after the 1992 presidential election. The House completed its investigation one week before Bill Clinton’s inauguration.
Having served its function, the Senate investigation concluded that “by any standard, the credible evidence now known falls far short of supporting the allegation of an agreement between the Reagan campaign and Iran to delay the release of the hostages.”26
Amazingly, the New York Times refused to accept the Senate committee’s findings and expressed hope for “a fuller, fairer understanding” from the House investigating committee. Jimmy Carter was unable to comment because he was in Pyongyang with Habitat for Humanity building Kim Il Sung a new missile silo.
Five million dollars and yet another congressional in
vestigation later, the House report concluded: “There was no October Surprise agreement ever reached” and further that there was “no credible evidence” that the Reagan campaign had attempted to delay the hostages’ release.27 Five million bucks for that. Liberals were hysterical about the famed “30 million dollars” for Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s investigation during the Clinton years—and Starr got fifteen criminal convictions and a president’s impeachment. The House spent $5 million in an intensive, ten-month investigation to disprove the fantasies of a LaRouchite, a paranormal expert, a fake CIA agent, and the guy who was in charge of Iranian affairs for President Carter.
After foisting this useless investigation on the nation by flacking the crazed conspiracy theories of Gary Sick, instead of apologizing, the Times gave Sick equal time on that day’s op-ed page to respond. His conclusion: Representative Lee Hamilton, the Democrat who had chaired the House’s October Surprise Task Force, was in on the cover-up.
Among other lunacies, Sick wrote:28
1. “As a White House official involved in the hostage negotiations, I refused for many years to accept those allegations [about the October Surprise].”
This was preposterous: Sick had been hawking the October Surprise theory to the media as early as 1988, each time claiming to have resisted believing, but finally being overwhelmed by, the apocryphal evidence.29
2. The family of Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, “failed to provide his passport, which had vanished mysteriously.”
Wow—that is mysterious! How could a passport simply vanish? This is how: Casey had died in 1987 and the congressional investigation didn’t begin until five years later, in 1992. Not being able to readily produce the passport of a man who passed away five years earlier is not especially mysterious.
3. “All this leaves open the possibility that members of the Reagan-Bush campaign may have interfered with the Carter Administration’s most delicate foreign negotiation.”
This is why you should never argue with homeless people claiming the government is controlling our minds with microwaves, kids! It’s easier to just let them write a column for the New York Times op-ed page.
It is inconceivable that there would ever be comparable congressional investigations by Republicans. It would be as if Republicans spent millions of dollars investigating Obama’s birth certificate—except there is such a thing as a birth certificate. There was no such thing as a secret meeting between the ayatollah’s representatives and Reagan’s people.
The allegedly serious Democrats aren’t just humoring their base. This is what they believe. Years after elected Democrats wasted taxpayer money running down the demented October Surprise conspiracy theory, the Clinton administration’s first contact with Tehran was to demand information from the baffled Iranians about the mythical October Surprise.30
Hitler falsely blamed the Reichstag fire on a communist to justify the mass arrests of communists and insurrectionists. But at least the Reichstag building really did burn down. Liberals just go about inventing news stories and then demanding the rest of us deal with it. This is the politics of hallucination.
Only a mob could impose their psychoses on the nation like this. Only a mob is illogical and paranoid enough to believe such fantastical stories. And only the liberal mob has professors, Times columnists, former presidents, and members of Congress willing to promote liberal delusions. You couldn’t get enough conservatives to believe such nonsense to support an Internet chatroom, much less a multimillion-dollar investigation. From beginning to end, the October Surprise lunacy was another project of the liberal mob.
As Le Bon says, the “improbable does not exist for a crowd.” Unable to reason, “deprived of all critical faculty,” a mob will believe anything.31
PART II:
THE
HISTORICAL
CONTEXT
OF THE
LIBERAL
SIX
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION:
WHEN LIBERALS ATTACK
To understand liberals, one must understand the French Revolution.
It’s difficult to track the precise chronology of the French Revolution because there is no logic to it, as there never is with a mob. Basically, the mob would hear a rumor, get ginned up, and then run out and start beheading people. Imagine CodePink with pikes. From beginning to end, the French Revolution was a textbook case of the behavior of mobs. As Le Bon described mobs about a century after the French Revolution: “[A] throng knows neither doubt nor uncertainty. Like women, it goes at once to extremes. A suspicion transforms itself as soon as announced into incontrovertible evidence. A commencement of antipathy or disapprobation which in the case of an isolated individual would not gain strength, become at once furious hatred in the case of an individual in a crowd.”1
Liberals don’t like to talk about the French Revolution because it is the history of them. They lyingly portray the American Revolution as if it too were a revolution of the mob, but merely to list the signposts of each reveals their different character. The American Revolution had the Minutemen, the ride of Paul Revere, the Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, and the Liberty Bell.
The markers of the French Revolution were the Great Fear, the storming of the Bastille, the food riots, the march on Versailles, the Day of the Daggers, the de-Christianization campaign, the storming of the Tuileries, the September Massacres, the beheading of Louis XVI, the beheading of Marie Antoinette, the Reign of Terror, and then the guillotining of one revolutionary after another, until finally the mob’s leader, Robespierre, got the “national razor.” That’s not including random insurrections, lynchings, and assassinations that occurred throughout the four-year period known as the “French Revolution.”
Here are the highlights of the French Revolution to give you the flavor of the lunacy.
As with most rampages during France’s revolution, the storming of the Bastille was initiated by a rumor. The mob began to whisper that the impotent, indecisive Louis XVI was going to attack the National Assembly, which had replaced the Estates General. For some reason, the people were particularly enraged over the king’s firing of his inept finance minister, who had nearly bankrupted the country with Fannie Mae–style accounting. The rabble needed weapons to defend themselves from this imaginary attack on their new populist assembly.
Massing in the streets for days after the presentation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to the Assembly, the people became more and more agitated. By the morning of July 14, 1789, about 60,000 French citizens armed with pikes and axes were running back and forth between the Hotel de Ville (Town Hall), and Les Invalides, a barracks for aging soldiers, demanding weapons and ammunition. Finally, the mob broke through the gate of the Invalides and ransacked the building, seizing 10 cannon and 28,000 muskets, but they could find no ammunition.
Then they rushed off to the Bastille for ammunition—and also because they considered the Bastille an eyesore. Once a fortress, then a jail, the Bastille was in the process of being shut down. It held only six prisoners that day. But the Parisian mob irrationally feared the Bastille based on its menacing appearance and false rumors of torture within its walls.
With legions of Parisians banging on the gates of the Bastille and demanding ammunition, the prison’s commander, Marquis de Launay, invited representatives of the mob inside to negotiate over breakfast. They requested that the cannon be removed from the towers because mounted guns frightened the people. De Launay agreed and the cannon were withdrawn.
Meanwhile, the mob outside became more frenzied, believing that their representatives inside, lingering over breakfast, had been taken hostage. The mob interpreted the withdrawal of the cannon to mean that the cannon were being loaded, in preparation for firing into the crowd.
As the mob grew larger and angrier, the Bastille’s guards warned them to disperse, shooing them away by waving their caps and threatening to fire. The people interpreted the waving of hats as encouragement to c
ontinue the attack.
And so it went, with periodic gunplay interrupted only by De Launay’s repeated attempts to surrender. The mob secured its own cannon and began firing at the prison, hacking at the drawbridge, and scaling walls into the courtyard of the Bastille. Facing tens of thousands of angry citizens, De Launay made a final offer to surrender total control of the Bastille to the mob, provided it be accomplished peacefully. He threatened to blow up the entire city block unless his demand for a bloodless transition was agreed to.
His offer was refused amid angry cries of “No capitulation!” and “Down with the bridge!” De Launay surrendered anyway.
The mob poured in and ransacked the entire fortress, throwing papers and records from the windows, killing some guards, and taking others as prisoners. One captured guard who was marched through the street said there were “masses of people shouting at me and cursing me,” as “women gnashed their teeth and brandished their fists at me.”
De Launay was triumphantly paraded through the streets of Paris with the people cutting him with swords and bayonets until he was finally hacked to death, whereupon the charming Parisians continued to mutilate his dead body. A cook was given the honor of cutting off De Launay’s head, which he accomplished with a pocketknife, kneeling on his hands and knees in the gutter to do it. De Launay’s head, along with the head of a city official, Jacques de Flesselles, who had failed to assist the mob’s search for weapons that day, were stuck on pikes and waltzed through the streets of Paris for more celebratory jeering.2
This is the revolutionary event celebrated by the French—the murderous barbarism of a mob.
Or as Parisians called it, “Tuesday.” The incident at the Bastille was merely a particularly aggressive version of the rampaging and pillaging they had been doing for weeks, all based on this or that rumor.
Apart from the feral viciousness of the attack on the Bastille, the madness of it was that the Third Estate—peasants and the middle class—had already won themselves a Republic. Under the old system, the French people had had a legitimate grievance: The Third Estate, composed of the great mass of citizens, paid all the taxes but got none of the government jobs. Those were reserved for the nontaxpaying nobility and clergy. (It was much like rich Democrats today—Tim Geithner, who failed to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes but was still confirmed as Obama’s treasury secretary; U.S. senator Claire McCaskill [D-Missouri], who failed to pay $287,000 in taxes on a private plane; Tom Daschle, proposed Obama nominee to be Health and Human Services Department secretary, who failed to pay all his taxes; Nancy Killefer, proposed Obama nominee to be White House chief performance officer, who failed to pay all her taxes; Zoë Baird, proposed Clinton nominee as attorney general, who failed to pay all her taxes; and Charlie Rangel, Democratic congressman censured by the House Ethics Committee for failure to pay all his taxes.)