Yesterday, you wrote:
 

>1. Yes, the religiously insane Ayataollah Khomenie didn't like Jimmy Carter because
>Carter allowed the dying Shah of Iran to come to New York for medical treatment.
>Khomenie very logically assumed the Shah was here to plot his return to power,
>so the hostages were taken - for no particular reason.
 

Not quite. Iranian nationalists such as the followers of the Ayatollah were upset that:

A) The United States had singlehandedly installed a fascist dictator (the fucking Shah
["king" in Farsi] in case you missed it) to rule over them and export their natural resources
dirt cheap to the US and its allies after WWII. Regardless of your opinion of Iran itself,
nobody likes to have the leaders of their countries installed against the express wishes
of the people, do they?*

B) Iran's only chance to call the Shah to account for his oppressive and
murderous practices was thwarted by their best friends in the whole world,
the United States. At least the Italians got the satifaction of spitting on
Mussolini's corpse in Rome; the Shah died in Paris. Regrettably, the wacko
nationalists snapped and took American hostages. Once that happened, they
got so high on the attention that they started spouting the nuttiest
bullshit on earth. So crazy did they become, in fact, that they agreed to
keep the hostages until Grandpa Caligula's inauguration.

I don't condone or support what they did any more than I do McVeigh
murdering all those people, but it's not as if the Ayatollah somehow
munched down some bad falafel and decided to snap up some Yankees for
kicks--it was an extreme reaction to a terrible concatenation of
ill-conceived US foreign policy.
 

--Aaron Snyder
ajsny@earthlink.net
 

Aaron,
I understand what you're saying, and I don't disagree, but A and B don't explain
why the Ayatollah would hate Carter's guts and love Red-Ink Reagan.

Either way, taking the hostages hurt Iran and helped nobody but Reagan.

...and America fell for Reagan's lies.

Remember, Reagan promised,

"When I'm president, we won't have this hostage problem any more,"
   which was horseshit, but the media didn't harp on it because it had
   nothing to do with Clinton's zipper.

Turns out, Reagan made secret deals with the Ayataollah to keep the hostages,
but that's nothing compared with trying to hide a blowjob.