Thread by @ncdave4life

1/11》Democrats are soooo gullible! This Ben Barnes fairy tale is obvious Democrat disinformation.

Barnes, now 85yo, is a lifelong Democrat wheeler-dealer, and close associate of John Kerry. He's a protégé of President Lyndon Johnson (one of the dirtiest Texas politicians).

https://twitter.com/Victorshi2020/status/1637223134842736640

2/11》I'm sure Victor Shi & the other leftists touting this wouldn't believe a far-fetched story by a lifelong Republican politician, smearing a Democratic President. So why do they believe a far-fetched story by a lifelong Democrat politician, smearing a Republican President?

3/11》Barnes's story makes no sense. He now claims that in 1980 he met with "Arab" leaders, and asked them to ask the Iranians to not release the hostages before Election Day, because if they waited then Reagan would offer them a better deal. But:

4/11》
𝐀. Iran is not an Arab country.

5/11》
𝐁. It is wildly implausible that that any Republican political dirty-dealer would, for no reason, let a Democrat politician (Barnes) in on a secret dirty deal to sabotage the incumbent Democrat's Presidential election campaign.

6/11》
𝐂. There's no reason to believe that any Arab leaders would have any reason to engage in clandestine dirty diplomacy at the request of a relatively obscure Texas politician.

7/11》
𝐃. In the summer of 1980 nobody knew who would win that election. Carter had the advantage of incumbency, and the idea that foreign "Arab leaders" would just assume Carter was going to lose to Reagan is implausible.

8/11》There was a brief interval between the Republican & Democratic Conventions, when Reagan's "post-convention bounce" had him well ahead of Carter. But that didn't last, and the race was expected to be close. As election day approached, polls had the candidates neck-and-neck.

9/11》
𝐄. Since Iran released the hostages on inauguration day, they obviously didn't wait to see what sort of "better deal" Reagan would offer. So the idea that their behavior was motivated by the promise that they would be offered a "better deal" doesn't make any sense.

10/11》The Iranian political calculus was pretty obvious. The hostages had become a liability to them, but there was no value to Iran in making points with a lame-duck Carter administration. But there was certainly value in making points with the incoming Reagan administration.

11/11》So the Iranians waited, and released the hostages when it would do them the most good.

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@threadreaderapp @rattibha @threaddotblue 12/11》P.S. - Barnes has pulled this sort of stunt before!

Remember the "Rathergate" scandal? It was a 2004 CBS hit piece, to help Kerry win the Presidency: a "fake news" story claiming George W. Bush got preferential treatment in the Texas Air National Guard (TXANG).

@threadreaderapp @rattibha @threaddotblue 13/11》The hit piece had two parts:

Part 1. Claimed that Bush went AWOL and underperformed while in the TXANG, but that he got preferential treatment and avoided the consequences, thanks to his political connections.

That part turned out to be based on forged documents.

@threadreaderapp @rattibha @threaddotblue 14/11》Part 2. An interview with Ben Barnes, in which he claimed he'd personally intervened on Bush's behalf, to get him preferentially admitted to the TXANG, over other, more qualified candidates.

Just as with this latest fairy tale, there was no corroborating evidence at all.

@threadreaderapp @rattibha @threaddotblue 15/11》Barnes has now claimed to have personally been involved in scandalous misbehavior by, not one, but TWO different Republican Presidents, before they were President. In both cases he claimed that he had personally helped them do something very unethical, if not illegal.

@threadreaderapp @rattibha @threaddotblue 16/11》What are the odds?

If you don't smell a rat, you need to get your nose checked.

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