Politifact, the leftist propaganda mill disguised as a "fact-checking" web site, always has its "Pants on Fire" matches at the ready for conservatives and Republicans. This is remarkable, given that it has never given any Hillary Clinton statement or campaign assertion a "Pants on Fire" evaluation. The one example it cites falsely claims to "involve" her, but has nothing to do with anything she or anyone in her campaign said.
One of the latest outrages concerns the web site's obvious problem with accepting the realities behind the January 1981 resolution of the Iran hostage crisis. GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio made an obviously true claim about the timing of the hostages' release after 444 days, namely that it occurred as Reagan took the oath of office on January 20 of that year. He further stated that the Iranians knew that America would "no longer (be) under the command of someone weak."
Fortunately for Rubio and unfortunately for Politifact, Rubio's timing-related statement is beyond dispute, and his implication concerning the Iranians' and American negotiators' respective mindsets is true beyond a reasonable doubt.
Politifact began its misleading attempt to discredit Rubio with a false headline and dishonest framing of his statement.
The headline: "Rubio wrongly credits Reagan for 1981 release of hostages from Iran."
Politifact wants readers to believe that Rubio was giving Reagan full credit. He was only saying that his presence loomed large and was a factor in the hostage situation's resolution. As we will see, it was.
The framing:
Let's compare that framing to exactly what Rubio told Chuck Todd on Sunday's Meet the Press:
CHUCK TODD: So under President Rubio, you would not have negotiated any sort of prisoner exchange for those four American hostages.
MARCO RUBIO: When I become President of the United States, our adversaries around the world will know that America is no longer under the command of someone weak like Barack Obama. And it will be like Ronald Reagan where as soon as he took office, the hostages were released from Iran.
So all Rubio was stating is that "as soon as he (Reagan) took office, the hostages were released from Iran." That is an obviously true historical fact. Politifact itself acknowledged that:
(On Inauguration Day in 1981, President Jimmy) Carter informed Reagan at 8:31 a.m. that the release of the hostages was imminent, according to a contemporary report in the New York Times. "The hostages, whose 14 months of captivity had been a central focus of the presidential contest last year, took off from Tehran in two Boeing 727 airplanes at 12:25 p.m., Eastern standard time, the very moment that Mr. Reagan was concluding his solemn Inaugural Address at the United States Capitol," its report says. Reagan announced the news at 2:15 p.m. at a luncheon with congressional leaders in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall. So Reagan, not Carter, got to bask in the glow of the hostages’ safe return.
Despite the showy announcement, scholars of the period say that Reagan did not play any significant role in freeing the hostages.
No one, including Rubio, has ever said that Reagan played any direct role, or that the hostages came home because of anything specific Reagan did in connection with their release. Therefore he did not "wrongly credit Reagan" for that result.
But yes, Rubio did credit Reagan for not being weak like President Obama, and by implication Jimmy Carter. There's no point in anyone on the left pretending that Carter wasn't weak; he was. There's also no point in anyone on the left pretending that Barack Obama, the current object of Rubio's disdain, hasn't been weak. He has, with an added bonus: Obama touts obvious examples of his weakness as evidence of his strength. No one who understands history is the least bit fooled.
Politifact should have ended things here and said, "Yeah, Rubio's right, the hostages were released as soon as Reagan took office." But Rubio is a Republican, so they decided that Rubio was somehow implying that Reagan's strength is what freed the hostages.
Reagan's strong will didn't directly free the hostages. But was it will a factor looming over the negotiations which led to the hostages' release? Damned right it was.
As Steven Hayward at Powerline noted earlier today, even the Washington Post acknowledged as much in a January 21 editorial:
Who doubts that among Iran’s reasons for coming to terms now was a desire to beat [Reagan] to town?
The answer is: No one with active critical thinking skills. But there's more evidence for those who have put them on ice and need to thaw them out.
Politifact's hacks are among the clueless. Their explanation for the timing of the hostage situation's resolution is roll-on-the-floor funny:
... the Iranians had tired of holding the hostages, and that the administration of Jimmy Carter did the legwork to get the hostages released.
So if Carter had somehow won reelection, the hostages would still have been released on January 20, 1981. After 444 days, the Iranians were just too fatigued to go on even one more day with their hostage-holding exercise. Isn't that obvious? (That's sarcasm, folks.) You can't make this stuff up.
Here are two other pieces of evidence from contemporaneous press reports indicating that the Iranians fiercely desired to wrap things up by Reagan's swearing-in, and that the American negotiators knew of this desire.
American negotiators were clearly using the perception of Reagan's toughness as a club in their last-minute negotiations, as seen in the Janury 20 edition of the Hartford Courant covering news "From Wire Services" from the previous day:
White House spokesman Jody Powell warned Iran that if the agreement is not implemented by the time Carter leaves office, Reagan was under no obligation to abide by its terms.
In a previous paragraph, the front-page Courant item noted that "negotiators workers feverishly throughout the night to resolve the last heart-stopping snag as teh clock ticked away the final hours of Carter's presidency," and that chief Iranian hostage negotiator Behzad Nabavi had, "in an apparent effort to pressure negotiators to reach a solution before Carter's term ended ... issued a new threat" just 12 hours before power would transition to Reagan." Why all the urgency, if Reagan's outlook on the hostage situation, which was known to be clearly less open to negotiation and more open to other potential measures, wasn't relevant?
It's icing on the cake that Politifact's go-to "expert" was the thoroughly discredited fever-swamp conspiracy theorist Gary Sick. Apparently, no one with any semblance of credibility was available to substantively support the web site's irresponsible smear of Marco Rubio and of Ronald Reagan's legacy.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
