Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton used the release of Israeli prisoners by Hamas as an excuse to give the audience at Fox a revisionist history of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1980, where the Reagan campaign ratf**ked Jimmy Carter.
While pushing the use of American troops as a "viable solution" to extract hostages from Gaza during an interview on Fox News Sunday, Cotton continued his screed by claiming that "Hamas is still so contemptuous of President Biden that it hasn't yet released American hostages" before making this ridiculous assertion.
COTTON: This would have never happened under Donald Trump, or Ronald Reagan.
In fact, if you recall, Jimmy Carter had a hostage crisis with Iran, Hamas' patron for over 400 days. Iran released those hostages the day Ronald Reagan took office because they were so scared of what Ronald Reagan might do to them.
You don't see that kind of fear of President Biden from Hamas or Iran or frankly, anyone around the world.
Once again, it's opposite-land over on Fox "news." Ironically, recent reporting has just confirmed the case that the Reagan campaign conspired to prevent the release of the hostages, and for anyone that wants to look at the details, go read this article by Charlie Pierce at Esquire: The Thing We All Knew Finally Proved True: Reagan-Iran Edition, or this one from The New Republic: It’s All but Settled: The Reagan Campaign Delayed the Release of the Iranian Hostages.
Our own Jon Perr also did a nice take down of this sort of revisionist history about Reagan when Republicans used the same sort of tactics to attack President Obama back in 2013.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
