Which George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush and the 17,000 Republicans running for president never could be.
Which Richard Milhaus Nixon and Ronald Wilson Reagan never were.
Furthermore, Carter should have been president in 1980 but Reagan and Bush Sr. stole the election by cutting a secret deal with Iran to hold onto the hostages until Jimmy Carter was defeated in the 1980 presidential election.
Documentation for my claim about the 1980 election below:
According to Robert Parry:
Reagan-Bush Ties to Iran-Hostage Crisis
April 9, 2014
Exclusive: The Senate wants to block Iran’s new UN ambassador because he was linked to the Iran hostage crisis 35 years ago, but that standard would strip honors from Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, implicated in extending the hostage crisis to win the 1980 election, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
U.S. government officials are in high dudgeon again – this time over Iran’s audacity in naming an ambassador to the United Nations who allegedly played a minor role in the 1979-81 crisis in which 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days in Iran. But the same U.S. officials ignore the now overwhelming evidence that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush helped extend the hostages’ suffering to gain an edge in the 1980 election.
The double standard – getting worked up over the allegations about Iranian Ambassador Hamid Aboutalebi and going silent over the evidence implicating Reagan and Bush – is just the latest in a long series of examples of the U.S. government’s hypocrisy.
From Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran after the 1979 revolution:
I was deposed in June 1981 as a result of a coup against me. After arriving in France, I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.
Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the “October Surprise,” which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.