It was disgusting at the time, and remains so, even now.

Sure, there were still a handful of decent Republicans, mainly in the NorthEast, but the majority of them sucked.

And even then, he let the House Un-American Activities Committee happen.

and a lot of us knew or suspected it and could do nothing about it.

too many of our peeps aid an d abet in their profiting from their deception.
We didn't realize it then of course the thing about "reporters" who we relied on to tell us the truth instead of engaging in covering up.

Dishonesty and treachery are their hallmarks. Note the RW trolls that show up on DU.

did to Carter. It was awful. And it threw such a shadow over his presidency.

Media covered up 1980 Iran hostage deal, the ‘October surprise,’ author tells Club

by Vincent Morris
National Press Club, October 24, 2024

Excerpt…

Unger, whose book “Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason that Stole the White House,” published Oct. 1, says that the issues around the case are larger than questions about our national security apparatus and the role of international politics in a domestic election; it’s about the media.

“One of the great disgraces of our national media in covering this up,” said (author Craig) Unger, who has worked as deputy editor of the New York Observer and editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine. “It was a great scandal and they twisted it and turned it on its ass.”

Although some of the history is still contested, the facts are not. President Jimmy Carter was unable to get American hostages released from Iran. In November 1980, he lost the election to Reagan. In January 1981, just minutes after Reagan was sworn in, the hostages were released.

In his remarks, Unger described how he first came upon the story many years later and turned it into a 10,000 word explosive piece for Esquire magazine. Not long after the piece hit, Unger says he was hired by Newsweek magazine and turned loose to do more investigative work; but “that’s when things went south,” he says.

Unger claims that soon after settling in at Newsweek, his stories about this topic were spiked by editors there. Worse, they printed stories that essentially washed over the explosive charges about the hostage deal, he said.

Unger reserved his most intense criticism for the Washington Post, which owned Newsweek at the time and, he says, had an outsize role in quietly killing the story. He’s also equally critical of Congressional Democrats, who he claims never pursued the dramatic charges as earnestly as they should have.

Continues…

Source: https://www.press.org/newsroom/media-covered-1980-iran-hostage-deal-october-surprise-author-tells-club

Ronald Reagan had sent a Bible to the Iranian leadership. Media was puzzled -- what was that about? Reagan's aides kept their cards tightly vested, so media had few sources of info until it became clear with the release of the hostages. At the time, I figured it was just some ham-handed snafu by Reagan's people.

Bush-41’s October Surprise Denials

By Robert Parry
Consortium News, April 6, 2016

Exclusive: “Deny everything,” British traitor Kim Philby said, explaining how the powerful can bluff past their crimes, a truism known to George H.W. Bush when he denied charges of his own near treason in the October Surprise case, writes Robert Parry.

Excerpt…

This hard-to-believe reality – that the tough-guy Reagan-Bush administration was secretly shipping weapons to Iran after Tehran’s mullahs had humiliated the United States with the hostage crisis – remained a topic for only occasional Washington rumors until November 1986 when a Beirut newspaper published the first article describing another clandestine shipment. That story soon expanded into the Iran-Contra Affair because some of the arm sales profits were diverted to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contra rebels.

For Bush, the emergence of this damaging scandal, which could have denied him his own shot at the White House, was time to test out his ability to “deny everything.” So, he denied knowing that the White House had been secretly running a Contra resupply operation in defiance of Congress, even though his office and top aides were in the middle of everything. Regarding the Iran arms deals, Bush insisted publicly he was “out of the loop.”

Behind closed doors where he ran the risk of perjury charges, Bush was more forthcoming. For instance, in non-public testimony to the FBI and the Iran-Contra prosecutor, “Bush acknowledged that he was regularly informed of events connected with the Iran arms sales.” [See Special Prosecutor’s Final Iran-Contra Report, p. 473]

Snip…

Trusting the Suspect

Beyond the disinclination of Hamilton and his investigators to aggressively pursue important leads, they operated with the naïve notion that President Bush, who was a prime suspect in the October Surprise case, would compile and turn over evidence that would prove his guilt and seal his political fate. Power at that level simply doesn’t work that way.

After discovering the Beach memo, I emailed a copy to Hamilton and discussed it with him by phone. The retired Indiana Democratic congressman responded that his task force was never informed that the White House had confirmation of Casey’s trip to Madrid.

“We found no evidence to confirm Casey’s trip to Madrid,” Hamilton told me. “The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he did make the trip. Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”

Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation.

“If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said. Hamilton added that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests.

Therein, of course, lay the failure of the October Surprise investigation. Hamilton and his team were counting on President Bush and his team to bring all the evidence together in one place and then share it with Congress, when they were more likely to burn it.

Continues…

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/06/bush-41s-october-surprise-denials/

George H. W. Bush corrupted the press, personally.

So the bastard Connally was a Democrat before he became a Republican. I hope he died painfully.

First for LBJ, then for Carter. Being a Conservidem, he also thought the Democrats were turning too Socialist. Though he was nominally for Equal Opportunity in the Civil Rights movement, it was more of a "just not too much Equal Rights" position, and he didn't like what he considered the coddling of Radicals on the Left. Especially Economic and Environmental radicals

Just from what I remember.

time gov. connally was a democrat.

Nope. Not going there.

I am going to assume he might have learned things that the rest of us were never told, and he just assumed that extreme measures at that level of politics was normal.

Weird.

Right wingers in the media played it on a loop so that it hung like an albatross around Carters neck.

If you read the speech there is nothing shocking or damning in it. Everything Carter observed and warned against was true.

Pat Buchanan called it the “malaise speech” and the press solidified it as the story.

by Gary Sick but I see there is another book of that title by Barabara Honneger
knew this already. It's amazing how information comes out and then is ignored.

What Reagan did was criminal and still he got elected and was lionized by his party.

... basically wiped his butt with the Logan Act.
Conducting covert negotiations with foreign powers as a private citizen is a felonious no-no, especially with intent to subvert efforts of the sitting president. But then, we are talking about Republicans, and, silly old bear, everyone knows that laws don't apply to Republicans!

It's for everyone else but them. Look how many times it was disregarded by the T administration... and by how many different people in that admin. It was so many, so often that it became a joke.

... have been given a get-out-of-jail-free card too many times. It's long past time for their day of reckoning.

Because he got away with it and didn't smell so bad when it was over.

was 1980 a free and fair election?

I guess it's all how you define free and fair.

... as for lionized, there are MAGAts out there who believe he is no less than God's choice for America's leader.

Nixon--Watergate, sabotaging Johnson's attempt to end Viet Nam war, Cambodia
Ford--pardoned Nixon (otherwise not a criminal, but then he didn't ever get elected president)
Reagan--Iran hostages, Iran Contra
HW Bush--Iran Contra, pardoned Iran Contra felons
W Bush--Torture.
His governor brother cooked the election in Florida (purging voter rolls, butterfly ballot, polls closing before everyone voted in Black districts, etc., but still not enough without help from SCOTUS)
Then against Kerry the results of exit polls in 16 states were reversed in the night (which statisticians said was impossible by chance), and public viewing in the final county in Ohio was shut down during which time that result was also reversed. Ohio decided the election.

Voters prefer Democrats. The RW takover has been illegal at every turn. A coup spanning half a century. Not one of our Republican Supreme Court Justices is legitimate.

Trump is just the logical result.

When we first started dating (13 years ago), he told me all Republicans are evil. I told him I thought that was bit harsh. I've learned a lot since then.

wrote of this exact same thing. (not at my mainframe now so can't link the article from my bookmarks).

https://hartmannreport.com/p/four-presidents

There is even more to it than I realized. Why did it take me until 2020 to understand that Republicans were against democracy?
We've had 50 years to figure this out and teach it to our kids, who if they'd learned history wouldn't be voting for this stuff.

And you're welcome. Thom Hartmann as always has the unparalleled ability to see the WHOLE picture and explain it quite succinctly.

by which Johnson's efforts to settle the Vietnam War were scuttled just before the election.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/12/30/anna-chennault-obituary-vietnam-back-channel-nixon-1968-223299/

As I remember, the Iranians released the hostages right after Reagan took his oath of office.
Typical of Republicans; anything to get elected. Nothing is to sleazy, dishonest, immoral, unethical, or un-American for them.

… People and contacts with the Iranians as per the hostages. But somehow 40 + years later it
turns out that yes there was and HW Bush was right in the middle of it too. 10 days to 2 weeks
after Reagan’s inauguration plane loads of US Military supplies started landing @ the airport in
Tehran, Iran and then the money made from those operations was deposited in Swiss Bank accounts
to fund a war in Nicaragua and to run cocaine into America. And Iran Contra was born and who helped to keep this shit all covered up? Bill Barr.

was that it was entirely VP Bush’s project—they had no knowledge of what was done. And then when GHWB ran for president, they blamed everything on Reagan.

They were seven hostages being held in Lebanon by Hezbollah.

Please

connection?

But the powers that be came after him including the Washington Post, The NY Times,
and the L.A. Times and his own paper the San Jose Mercury News demoted him and
all but retracted the story. And later he suicided himself.

**********

“ Webb briefly returned to journalism in 2004 as a reporter for the weekly Sacramento News & Review, where he wrote a handful of stories. On December 10, 2004, after a long bout of depression, he died in an apparent suicide.”

********

And the myth of the great Ronald Reagan and his people was protected.

… there and how it was used to wash dirty money and funnel it to the bush Brothers who got
up one morning and drove over the state line into Georgia and then committed suicide in some
hotel room or the computer guy in Ohio who rigged the 2004 election and then his private plane
just fell out of the sky just as he started talking about Ohio’s out of the sky and officials were
@ the crash sight in under 1/2 an hour cleaning it all up.

and that one small section of road was conveniently repaved immediately.

The Reagan Admin sold Iran war equipment to the Iranian Revolutionaries through Israel and then took the money and used that as seed money to run cocaine and crack cocaine into America and used those profits to fund the Contra Terrorists in Latin America. That is why that largely ignored scandal was called Iran-Crontra, rather than GOP Crack Running to fund Terrorists.

Oh, Because Ollie, The End Justifies The Means, North was part of the rescue attempt?

Certain quarters objected when President Jimmy Carter instituted "Human Rights" over economic and business interests as the main objective of U.S. foreign policy. The President understood reliance on Saudi Arabia and oil was a danger to national security. So, he began to move the nation toward "Energy Independence" and renewable, clean sources over dependence on Big Oil for energy. The people who own the oil companies and the governments of oil-rich nations objected.



Three unidentified US hostages speak to the press while their Iranian captors (L and R) watch closely, at the besieged US embassy in Tehran, November 1979. [IRNA-FILES/AFP via Getty Images] Source: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231104-on-this-day-the-iran-hostage-crisis/

In addition to turning down the thermostat and wearing a sweater to stay warm, President Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House and ordered the federal highway speed limit of 55, which saved about 150,000 barrels of oil per day and about 4,000 lives per year. President Reagan took the solar panels down and Big Oil really hasn't worried much about getting replaced ever since.

Bottom Line: Big Oil, the Saudi Roils and the global Petrogarchs HATE democracy. They can't live as large as they want if they have to share the loot with other people, including the people who live on top of the "black gold." And they want to get every last penny from every last drop this extracted mineral can yield, even if it kills us all in the process. So, they hire or buy politicians like Prescott Bush, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush. The Gehlen NAZI spy operation was absorbed by OSS into the new CIA in the late 40s and early 50s. And they want to make the rest history, especially Democracy.

Thank you.

Uniting both the worlds of business and government are the professional criminal class known as the GOP. How they got that way, paperwork and making sure it never does anything but mark them as anything but the owners:

So, not only is ignorance strength, it makes crime (and treason -- Hi, Donald!) pay connected Republicans handsomely.

This is why I have a problem with Fox leading the national news media in a lynch mob pouncing on Charles Pierce and Esquire magazine.

Pierce’s article stated that President George Herbert Walker Bush, Poppy to his childhood friends, pardoned his son, Neil Bush, over the billion-dollar fraud Neil oversaw while "serving" on the board of Silverado Savings & Loan in Colorado in the late 1980s. Here the Denver Post details the history.

While technically true, Poppy did not grant an official pardon. However, instead of reporting the truth, let alone the whole story, about Neil Bush and his billion-dollar fraud and resorted crimes, the news media focus their fierce attention on Esquire’s mistaken use of the word “pardon.” The magazine has since dropped the story and issued a retraction on their error.



Great. The reality is Neil Bush got something better than a pardon. George HW Bush ordered the DoJ to back off his billion-dollar fraud of a child. His tool to oversee the matter was Poppy’s Attorney General, William Barr, the young version seen in the photo above with quasi-vegetable yet-still President Ronald Reagan. Coincidentally, we must remember Barr is the same AG who would help cover up the Russia ties for one pee-resident Donald J Trump by pre-misinterpreting what the Mueller Report said. Here's an excellent article on how Poppy communicated when he needed to get things done:



So, Pierce wrote the truth about Neil Bush, son of then-President George HW “Poppy” Bush, who seems to have ordered his Attorney General, one Bill Barr, to overlook any criminal charges. It’s really a matter of semantics: George HW Bush and his Justice Department let Neil Bush and his S&L co-conspirators skate.

Small world. And the nation’s mass media act like it never happened when covering President Joe Biden and the pardon granted his son, Hunter Biden. Instead, the news media emphasized their gussied-up outrage over a pardon over the reality of how Neil Bush was forgiven over a billion-dollar fleecing of the US taxpayers. That little difference over the word "pardon" is telling and depressing.

The more I learn, the more my head explodes.

I like to think knowledge is power.

sabotaged by the ayatollah's deal with the reagan team

just as anna chenault is on record for sabotaging peace talks in 1968.

these people have been traitors since, a good guess would be 22 nov 1963.

the Dulles brothers were at it inthe late fifties and early sixties

birch society = koch

mccarthy = cohn = trump

the koch money was made stealing oil from the osage then working for stalin.

the trump money was made "trafficking" prostitutes in the yukon then slumlording in n y c. trump is an outright fraud and inside trader.

the musk and thiel money was made by slaughtering bantu and boer. (the boers are white for anyone who thinks that will save them)

"behind every great fortune is a great crime" anatole france

i'm interested now in the caste system, and where we untouchables rate with ramaswammy and patel , but i am an old school conspiracy theorist.

and back to the thread subject. jimmy carter was a great president who was blamed for the inflation and oil wars of his predecessors, and given little credit for cleaning up after the nixon mismanagement of the economy. (actually , wage and price controls along with dropping the gold standard fiction might have cost nixon his job more than anything in watergate)

The United Fruit Company which called the shots in Central and South America (which is where the Brothers Dulles were useful).

And long ago the corruption that caused Marine General Smedley Butler to write "War Is a Racket".

Controversy surrounds Anna Chennault for the crucial role she may have played on behalf of Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign in seeking to delay the Vietnam War peace negotiations, in order to boost Nixon's chances for victory. (Wiki)

Kind of like HW, Connally and Ben Barnes sabotaging Jimmy Carter’s efforts to release the American
hostages in Tehran, Iran or Trump telling Bibi Netanyahu not to have a cease fire in Gaza to help
him in the election.

1968 almost cost mine.

…with N.Vietnam and had his legs blown off in an ambush. He was a few weeks short of
19. They never told us that one of our best allies in WW II in Southeast Asia was Ho Chi Minh
and we had promised him that the Vietnamese could control the country after the war but
because of shit bags such as Joe McCarthy and Dick Nixon kept whipping up anti communist
crap.

And now we all wear Nike gear made in Vietnam.

amazing how godless commies are a lot like us.

I can still recall looking @ my friend's house
and seeing a Marine Staff Car, seeing an
officer in dress blues, and then an Episcopal
Priest walk out.

I can still recall looking @ my friend's house
and seeing a Marine Staff Car, seeing an
officer in dress blues, and then an Episcopal
Priest walk out. The neighborhood was never the same.

his deathbed confession is an interesting snippet.

Link to tweet

the stealth bomber program was top secret, so carter kept quiet

the b1 bomber [rogram was redubdangt, expensove, and tecgnologically insufficient so carter dropped it from the budget.

reagan made a big deal about the b1 , castigating cafrter for "weak defense" and the other usual repub b s, while carter kept the stealth bomber secret.

guess who told the secret as soon as he was sworn in.

It was not a secret, of course, but this is a good reminder.

Is essentially doing the same thing now with the hostages in Gaza. He is using them for his own political purposes instead of really trying to get them out.

They are determined to prevent President Biden from securing a cease-fire in Gaza no matter what.

Connally and LBJ working together. Gee I wonder, what other big story, came out of Texas? Was it JFK, seems I remember something else, coming out of that snake pit. Now I remember, Oswald was the lone assasssin

at the moment Reagan was being sworn in?
Nothing suspicious about that.

More than 20,000 additional troops killed there after 1968, when The Crook sank LBJ's peace negotiations.
For 60 years repukes have been sacrificing American lives on the altar of politics, and for 60 years we've been working to preserve decorum.

there was also an assassination (or three) involved in the 1968 election.

The year 1968 was a very bad year (except that it was the year I became a civilian again).

I have a pet theory that the GQP learned a big lesson from the Watergate fiasco and the Nixon pardon: do whatever you gotta do to grab power and once you have it you can just pardon all your guilty co-conspirators. They had time to develop this MO during the Carter years and were ready to go with it in 1980. Look at all the dirty tricks they've pulled since then and it's not a big surprise that they have devolved into little more than a self-serving crime syndicate headed by a convicted felon who loves to hand out pardons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandals_of_the_Ronald_Reagan_administration

BARNES, at one time one of the future lights of the Democratic party.

for a long, long time

It gets so tiring to continue to be reminded of how we have been lied to, over and over again.
Not correcting the first lie leads to never correcting the course of our country.
For me it began with JFK. This is such a sad state of affairs (I feel disillusioned but won't stay there long).
All of it so intertwined by the very same people going through generations of families.

Sigh.

And true to form he was a POS POTUS too.

A big apology for their treason, and for the needless suffering they caused.

it won’t happen! They won’t take responsibility and will blame others.

Jesus.

Jimmy Carter was robbed.

Every day until the whole world knows how this great humanitarian was robbed by gutter rats.

That POS stole Carter’s debate prep handbook and handed it over to the Reaganites.

...about democracy, justice, and freedom...

WERE ALL LIES!

When a nation relies on the goodwill of a corrupt opponent, you will certainly be crushed.

It has taken me 72 years to wake up to this sad reality.

THE FIX IS IN! IT ALLWAYS HAS BEEN.

Buckle up.

The worst is yet to come.

perfect example of why I love this place.

Too bad older voters did not. Even though we were freshman art school students in NYC in 1980 we were all very aware of the fraud Raygun's election was and we HATED HIM!!!!!!!!!!

When he was shot we were so happy, just the opposite of the reaction after John Lennon was killed the same year.

Why didn't older Americans realize that "greed is good" is GOP BS-speak. Sometimes older people are pretty fucking stupid and lack any respect for the country. They only respect the Almighty dollar. God Raygun's proclamation was the beginning of the end of democracy in the US. Older Americans, especially white men, have successfully killed the USA. There will be no Resurrection this time. Old, white men never change. They hate giving up what they have and that will NEVER change. They know, they know. This is the end.....

?si=jeZBKUx1SKVOjLEC

Do they think the world was stupid enough to not realize what they did in 1980?
I think Republicans must be another species.

Even though there's no hard evidence otherwise. Republicans have been pulling this shit since 1968. It's in their DNA. And we're supposed to believe that this year we had a "free and fair" election? Bullshit!

That they can afford to pay off whoever needs to be paid off and fund the skullduggery necessary to throw and election by a few million votes. Gerrymandering. Vote suppression. Coding and software manipulation. It always comes down to a few million votes, there's seldom a true 'mandate' margin of victory. It's all fucking rigged.