Jimmy Carter, Not Quite RIP
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The 98-year-old former President has left the hospital to die at home.
A life well lived.
My view is that Carter was lucky to become President, but then was an unlucky President.
1979, like 1968-1969, but in an opposite direction, was a turning point in history: e.g., rebuilding the military, such as the development of the Stealth Fighter, and appointing Paul Volcker as Fed chairman. But it took until Reagan’s huge victory in 1984 to be clear to the electorate that this shift made sense, so Carter didn’t get credit for it
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Sad indeed. Mr. Carter may very well be the last US President not installed by the Deep State. An accidental President. Strange that they would announce his going into hospice rather than letting him die peacefully and unnoticed at home.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1976/1/12/carters-trilateral-connection-pmondale-vance-brzezinski/
RIP, President Carter.
(Looking forward to Brandon's eulogy for Carter. It will be comedy gold.)Replies: @Carroll price
Next leader of Scotland?
A very good man, but ultimately a bad president.
Carter was a micro manager, who was unable or unwilling to delegate, the authority to manage, even the most trivial of tasks. Like the other engineer president, Hoover, the job simply swallowed him.
Much to his credit, unlike, like any of his successors Mr. Carter, didn’t get super rich as an ex-president.
God Bless, Jimmy Carter
Carter never got over losing to Reagan. He spent the rest of his life hating Americans. And he never got over being gamed by Begin at Camp David, so he spent the rest of his life hating Israel, too. For the last ten years he has kept his mouth shut, pretty much, so he may well avoid the gates of hell. Die in peace, peanut man.
Compare to the likes of Michelle Obama, who used the microphone to let slip her inner feelings.
"Keeping your mouth shut / avoiding the gates of hell" = You can't criticize Jews, goy, or else you'll go to hell. Jews are the apple of God's eye! Salvation is of the Jews! Shut your mouth and stop noticing what Jews are doing, or else you're damned. It's true because this holy book of lies that the Jews wrote says so. QED.
That new military built by Carter is about to destroy the Russia-China fumble machine.
The only three years of my life the United States didn’t invade/start a war was under Carter. The only one out of 13 presidents during my tenure here.
Subpar president, but good man.
Last president to follow the long standing tradition that after leaving the White House, you shouldn’t play a role in politics and you shouldn’t use your time in the Oval Office to make money afterwards.
His failures as President centered on his being a good man , the kind rather easily played upon by the perennially sneaky and devious. The left wing of the Democrat Party, controlled fiscally and intellectually by Jews, wanted him rendered impotent, so they could claim the right to begin purging Middle American whites from Democrat positions off power, so they could redirect the party totally. Allied with them were the emerging Neocons. Those Jews whose foreign policy had 2 prongs (PRO-Israel and anti-Russia {even more than anti-USSR}) began migrating into the Republican Party in droves during the Carter years. And yes, many of them had strong family ties to the Trotsky wing of Bolshevism. So, anti-USSR hawks in the Republican Party got a boost, but one that was anything but conservative and, in fact, was influened significantly by a brand of Marxism that was even more brutal, even more anti-christian and anti-white Gentile, than was Stalinism.
Carter did not grasp those things, but then neither did Reagan, who actually was the bigger dupe in the process. The result was that each party got a hard kick toward the Left in key ways, with Jews emerging with near total control of national foreign policy and national 'racial' policy. It has been all downhill since.Replies: @Patrick McNally, @James Forrestal
Looks like Carter was the start of a wave where we elected state governors for president.
He put a lot of effort into reforming the fed bureaucracy, which was a regular thing that national leaders at least mentioned (example: Al Gore’s Reinventing Government).
Now, the worst habits of bureaucracy are lauded as the proper way to do things.
I assumed, from the other side of the Atlantic, that Carter got a worse press than he deserved. I’ve since seen it explained as The Establishment’s reaction to an outsider, much as with Nixon or Trump. They prefer slithery creatures like Slick Willie or Lesgo Brandon.
How this view ties in with the assassination of JFK I’m not sure – it would be easier to understand if I knew who was behind the plot. (I assume there was a plot because of Ruby assassinating Oswald.)
I suppose the assassination of RFK was to ensure he couldn’t become President and open a new inquiry into his brother’s death.
I’d like to understand more about the assassination attempt on Reagan.
I don’t suppose the CIA trained the aggressive rabbit that attacked Carter?
Carter irritated insiders right from the start by planning to withdraw all U.S. forces from Korea.
He was “overruled.”https://thediplomat.com/2018/06/how-the-deep-state-stopped-a-us-president-from-withdrawing-us-troops-from-korea/He relied on economic and political pressure (but not military) to try to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan.https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/30/archives/carter-tells-soviet-to-pull-its-troops-out-of-afghanistan-he-warns.htmlHis “Carter Doctrine” was an attempt to avoid endless war, not foment it.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_DoctrineIn short, Carter was a dove in the eyes of the Deep State.Replies: @Corn
I assumed, from the other side of the Atlantic, that Carter got a worse press than he deserved.The media at that time favored the Democratic Party, but they were not yet an extension of it. Carter was generally disliked by the Democratic establishment in Washington, so was regarded by reporters and editors with more critical distance than Democratic pols usually are. He didn't get a worse press than he deserved, he just didn't get the mulligans Democratic presidents usually get (Johnson didn't get them after the summer of 1967, either).Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Pixo, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @Reg Cæsar
The unsuccessful assassin of President Reagan was named John Hinckley Jr. Hinckley's father, John Hinckley Sr. had been a friend and oil business partner of George H.W. Bush since H.W. and family settled in Midland, Texas in the late 1940s. The dusty central Texas town had been a magnet for parasitic Eastern Seaboard gentry looking to exploit the oil boom.
Whilst the Hinckley and Bush families bonded Hinckley Sr. became deeply involved with World Vision, an NGO involved in humanitarian work. World Vision became the prototype for the archipelago of NGOs stringed across the globe serving as cover and base of operations for the CIA.
Espionage is a preoccupation of the Bush family. Prescott Bush, H.W.'s father, was a Wall Street banker and senator representing Connecticut. Prescott was one of the conspirators of the 1934 plot devised by Wall Street oligarchs to coup FDR.
After the war, Prescott encouraged H.W. to become one of Allen Dulles's minions in the oil and financal sectors. After his stint in the U.S. Liaison Office in China, H.W. became DCI at CIA. During his short term at Langley, CIA became deeply involved with the Operation Condor assassination squads and the establishment of narco-military dictatorships throughout Latin America. He would continue to do business with these regimes in the 1980s as vice president and into the 1990s whilst president.
During the presidential election year of 1980, Neil Bush, son of H.W., was a friend and business partner of Scott Hinckley, brother to John Hinckley Jr. Both were based in Denver and attached to Vanderbilt Oil, a company owned by John Hinckley Sr. And during this period of time John Hinckley Jr. was in psychiatric care and under the influence of various psychoactives prescribed by his shrink. This mind management did not prohibit Hinckley Jr.'s arrest during the Fall of 1980 at the Nashville airport carrying three handguns on the very same day President Jimmy Carter was in town.
In the 1980 Republican contest, the Reagan's loathing of George H.W. Bush was not a secret. However, the political operators behind Reagan knew H.W. was the candidate supported by Langley. Saying no to the CIA is not a wise idea whilst competing for the White House. It is thought that in the end it didn't matter: CIA was going to control the executive through assassination, and if that didn't work, and it didn't, VP Bush was going to operate his office like a shadow CIA, in partnership with DCI William Casey.
And that's how things turned out. Now, will you join me in my War Against Pants?
https://www.grunge.com/307725/a-look-at-the-assassination-attempt-plotted-against-jimmy-carter/
Last president to follow the long standing tradition that after leaving the White House, you shouldn’t play a role in politics and you shouldn’t use your time in the Oval Office to make money afterwards.Replies: @Shamu, @Almost Missouri, @Jim Don Bob
A very good man. Easily a better man than almost any President for no telling how long.
His failures as President centered on his being a good man , the kind rather easily played upon by the perennially sneaky and devious. The left wing of the Democrat Party, controlled fiscally and intellectually by Jews, wanted him rendered impotent, so they could claim the right to begin purging Middle American whites from Democrat positions off power, so they could redirect the party totally. Allied with them were the emerging Neocons. Those Jews whose foreign policy had 2 prongs (PRO-Israel and anti-Russia {even more than anti-USSR}) began migrating into the Republican Party in droves during the Carter years. And yes, many of them had strong family ties to the Trotsky wing of Bolshevism. So, anti-USSR hawks in the Republican Party got a boost, but one that was anything but conservative and, in fact, was influened significantly by a brand of Marxism that was even more brutal, even more anti-christian and anti-white Gentile, than was Stalinism.
Carter did not grasp those things, but then neither did Reagan, who actually was the bigger dupe in the process. The result was that each party got a hard kick toward the Left in key ways, with Jews emerging with near total control of national foreign policy and national ‘racial’ policy. It has been all downhill since.
Nonsense. There were about 4 original neocons who had had some previous limited association with Trotskyist organizations, without ever joining the party. Bill King gave a rational rundown on all of the relevant way back in here:
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0304/0304neocontrot.txt
"As part of the two-decade old civil war within intellectual conservatism, paleoconservatives have forcefully asserted that neoconservatism is a descendant of American Trotskyism, and that neoconservatives continue to be influenced by the ideas of the exiled Soviet revolutionary in their view of foreign policy...
"In fact quite the opposite. While it is based on elements of truth, the assertion for the most part consists of exaggerations, misrepresentations, and even outright falsifications whose end result is a thoroughly distorted view of the history of neoconservatism."
From the "admission against interest" standpoint, here's the Baalfather of neoconservatism himself, Irving Kristol, in his notorious 1995 screed Neo-Conservatism: “I regard myself lucky to have been a young Trotskyite and I have not one single bitter memory.”
And here's Stephen Schwarz ranting in the pages of the Neocon Review itself, where he attempts to "refute" the neo-Trotskyite "canard"... by inveighing against those evil Stalinist revisionist wreckers, and declaring that "To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who alone, and pursued from country to country, and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot little house in Mexico City" and so forth.
Clearly the neocons have absolutely no connection (or loyalty) to their fellow tribesman Bronshtein...Replies: @Patrick McNally
Why hasn’t Justin Trudeau invited Carter to Canada to take advantage of his brilliant and humane “death care” system? Why die home in an opioid daze when you can die the assisted, scientific, WHO-approved way, in a “death pod”, thanks to socialist utopia Canada?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/canada-cases-right-to-die-laws
Jimmy Carter was a better President than he gets credit for, who got quite a bit done in both foreign policy and domestic policy. His personal manner worked against him in the Iran crisis, and the 1979 oil crisis and stagflation didn’t help, though his appointment of Paul Volcker (and Volcker’s shift from managing interest rates to managing the monetary aggregate) help kill off inflation as a serious issue for the next 40 years.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/conservative-con-man/Rothbard debunks and demythologizes this conservative con man's aura.Carter's worst crime may well have been helping to establish the Trilateral Commission.Replies: @Not Raul, @Reg Cæsar, @Post-Postmodernist
Last president to follow the long standing tradition that after leaving the White House, you shouldn’t play a role in politics and you shouldn’t use your time in the Oval Office to make money afterwards.Replies: @Shamu, @Almost Missouri, @Jim Don Bob
Reagan didn’t. Neither did the Bushes, whatever else one thinks of them.
The encroaching senility of the former, and the latter already being rich might have had something to do with that, though. Still, Carter does make a stark contrast with the Clintons, Obamas, and Bidens. So if you mean Carter was the last Democrat president to follow the longstanding tradition… yeah, I agree. He was and is an honest and decent man. We shan’t see his like again anytime soon about the Oval Office.
A: “FU money”
Reagan made a speech in Japan that earned him $2 M after he left the White House. That’s modest by the Clinton standards, but went against the tradition of retired presidents not exploiting their previous job and opened the door for what presidents after him did.
Of course, Reagan had made a lot of money from speaking engagements before he ran in 1980 too.
The speaking-fee gig is just one of the forms of ex-post-facto bribery that our system has perfected. Why pay a bunch of politicians to do your bidding? Let them vie with each other to do your bidding and then only pay off the ones who were successful. Ah, the genius of American capitalism! As any procurer knows, you only pay the whore after she puts out.
When you think about it, our government is actually one of the most corrupt governments on Earth. And it stands to reason it would be. It has the most power. It has the most to offer. And therefore it would command the highest asking price for its services.Replies: @Art Deco
Carter made some crippling mistakes, but on the whole his instincts were better than the median among the Democratic congressional caucus. His people skills were deficient, and that made it difficult to build relationships with members of Congress. Also, his staff was unfamiliar with the social dynamics of Congress and had no idea at the outset how resistant they would be to what he was interested in accomplishing. One thing he attempted to do in 1977 was cancel a mess of pork barrel water projects. Walter Mondale tried to dissuade him from doing this (“you may be able to cancel five projects; you’re not going to cancel 30 projects”). That caused a lot of bad feeling in Congress and he never recovered with his own caucus. Another thing he gave priority to was a technocratic energy program without giving any thought to what he’d have to do to persuade Congress. Tip O’Neill’s comment to an aide after discussing the sales plan with Carter was “This guy is hopeless”. (Carter did manage to accomplish partial decontrol of natural gas prices, because it could be done administratively).
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He inherited Arthur Burns as Fed chairman; Burns may have been the least capable man to have held that that job during the period running from 1933 to 2018. Instead of replacing him immediately, Carter let him finish out his term and then appointed an industrialist to the position who had been on the board of one of the Federal Reserve Banks but otherwise had no background in economics and finance. Note, the intellectual kultursmog at the time in the Democratic Party was influenced by James Tobin, who fancied it would take 15 years to restabilize prices so the task wasn’t worth doing. Arthur Burns approach to inflation had been one of learned helplessness. (Burns predecessor Wm. Martin had rapidly restabilized prices in 1951-52 and his successor managed the same in 1981-82). The escalating inflation may have been the most salient factor in sinking Carter. Then there was the secular increase in labor market sclerosis, which reached its peak around 1979. The implication of that was that you’d experience higher unemployment in an effort to re-stabilize prices.
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Carter was given to dithering as well, as seen in his responses to various problems in foreign affairs. For all that he was an experienced executive, he couldn’t seem to set priorities and got bogged down in minutiae. He also made an attempt to run the White House without a chief of staff (an attempt Jerry Ford had made as well), then put Hamilton Jordan in the job.
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Still, you remember what counted as a scandal in 1979 and you see what’s ignored today, you realize there has been a catastrophic decline in standards.
Amen about the decline in standards.
The storied showdown between Fed Chairman Bill Martin and President Lyndon Johnson wasn't just about personalities. It was a fundamental dispute over the Fed's policymaking role.
Martin's term was set to end in January 1970, but with the election of Nixon, Martin feared his leverage would be diminished in his remaining months. Nixon had long resented Martin — believing that the Fed's tightening policy of the late 1950s caused the brief recession of 1960 and cost Nixon the election — and settled on the economist Arthur Burns to replace Martin. An awkward arrangement was reached in which Burns would succeed Martin as Fed chair once Martin served out his formal term — but until then, Burns would work for Nixon as a White House adviser. This close political relationship is one reason why many scholars, in retrospect, consider Burns' tenure to have been compromised from the start.
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2016/q3-4/federal_reserve
Back to Jimmy Carter, Carter started the deregulation of civilian, not government, entities. In particular airline deregulation. Unlike government workers airline pilots to a hit to their pensions.
Carter got the ball rolling:
American Airlines workers face pension plight
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-americanairlines-pensions-idUSTRE7AT2ZM20111130
Carter's mistake was not deregulating the energy industry, which Reagan did. Deregulating energy was a much more complicated task and required a genius like James Baker. Carter's mistake was not keeping then Commerce secretary Baker in place.
If I remember right, Carter also attempted to buy votes my expanding Social Security, although he left the tax increases to Reagan. Nixon also attempted to keep Vietnam going by indexing SS to inflation.
Carter should be given some points for not bailing out NYC, which Ford refused to do. So people thought Carter would be more amenable to heavily unionized and Democrat NYC.
Although he opined about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety, he vociferously defended Vance . IIRC, the “scandal” didn't amount to much, but the optics were bad. His cabinet reorg looked like a fire drill. He seemed to be in a constant state of cognitive dissonance, even in retirement. He never would have made it as an executive.
All in all, a good man who could be sanctimonious and was out of his dept running a government. But that underlying decency always remained.
I had a summer job with the part of DoE that made the '79 gas crisis worse with emergency allocation red tape and retail price caps for gas to prevent gouging, thus fucking up supply. The Administrator rode the bus to work in his sandals, but had a government car (with phone and driver) for meetings. If Carter didn't like what his people were doing, I never heard about it.
Hell, I'm only 49 but I'm just barely old enough to remember Joe Biden being run out of the '88 primaries for being plagiarism. At the time it was an enormous scandal and the network newscasts led with the latest uncovered evidence every night for a a couple of weeks until he was gone. (ie "Tonight, troubling new evidence has emerged about democrat candidate Joe Biden)
When Obama picked him for VP 20 years later, I figured it was a joke and surely the plagiarism stuff would flare back up and everyone would remember why he dropped out previously. Nope.
And now he's president and nobody talks about any of that stuff. Any accusation about his honesty or integrity is just dismissed as partisan resentment.
Another example would be the Gary Hart / Donna Rice imbroglio four years earlier. Back then it was unquestionably unacceptable, nowadays someone would make the excuse that it was just between him and his wife (the strategy Clinton used in 1998) and the rest of us needed to butt out.
I bring up democrats because the MSM does most of the current day covering up and looking the other way on their behalf. Republicans are not treated as gingerly.Replies: @Art Deco
Modern medicine has completely failed to fight the major health problems afflicting Americans and Russians: obesity, mental illness, substance abuse, diabetes, and bad teeth.
Cancer diagnoses continue to rise. Birthrates continue to decline globally; no human solution will ever reverse it; the authority of men over women has been permanently lost.
Our medical system is completely incompetent and run by bobbleheads. For the next 2000 years nothing but death, poverty and extincton await us.
We deserve it. We are scum.
Obesity, Type II diabetes and substance abuse are largely within the power of individuals either to avoid or failing that, control. To a lesser extent, the same is true of some kinds of mental illness and dental problems.
Modern medicine should never have been prioritized over personal responsibility, as it is today, (certainly wrt obesity, Type Ii diabetes and substance abuse). I won't argue that genetics are not a factor. But healthy lifestyle choices play a big part, too.Replies: @Anon
Welcome to all.
However, best not to air your depressive thoughts here at the moment. Not a real empathetic bunch usually.
The usual gloom-and-doomers don't get much love, but they keep coming back.
Odd that poor ole Jimmy Carter, one of the oldest former presidents (who did relatively little harm) has set you off on your spiral to extinction.
And don't use the pronoun "we" when you really mean "I".
LOL.
He sucked.
Sucked dog weiners.
“oH bUt AfTeR hE lEfT oFfIcE hE hElPeD bUiLd HoUsEs FoR a FeW nEgRoEs!”
Can you say photo ops? Anyway, all the more reason to hate him.
All the revisionist cucks who love him can take heart. His awful daughter Amy is around–run her as a Republican next year-call her “Nikki Pale-y”. Or maybe keep her a Dem and she can replace Kum on Muh Harris as Joe’s running mate. Party like it’s 1979! Glory Days!
I think Gerald Ford was their first in a succession of former Presidents to buck rake big time. Nixon was taken to task for accepting $600,000 to do the Frost interviews. (A contextually similar sum today would be $4,000,000). For his cash, Frost got 29 hours of unscripted time to inerrogate Nixon. (Clinton was charging $189,000 for 50 minutes of boilerplate a few years ago). The people cutting up Nixon wouldn’t have contributed a dime to retiring his overdue legal bills, of course. George W. Bush hoovers up barrels of cash for speeches. You don’t hear about it because he favors confidential settings (and evidently says nothing worth leaking). His father was supposedly struck dumb at the amount of money trade associations were willing to pay for him to show up and talk. For the most part, the buck raking Presidents are able to do is an other-people’s-money problem.
Comedians supposedly do million dollar private parties (to Saudi trash, etc.) "Influencers" apparently turn tricks for similar amounts to rich scumbags. This sort of thing seems quaint:
https://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/My-big-fat-10-million-bat-mitzva
A million dollars for an evening with Don Henley? Just an evening?
Even "D" list celebrities charge 5000 dollars for giving talks. So, it's hardly a surprise that former presidents, even horrible ones like the ones we've got, can make huge money. The 150k-300k that Clinton charged was probably calibrated to not seem like too much.
The question is--are the bribes worth it? Trump's greatest gift may well have simply been preventing Hillary from winning--because she never could make good those debts.Replies: @Ron Mexico
I've wondered about the people/groups willing to pay the money. Is there really a calculation that it pays off? I would think the pol would do it for less. Where's the inclination to get a deal?
1)State Dept Iran Desk, CIA failed to see that Shah overthrow was imminent. But Carter was blamed.
2)Blunder in hiring Brezhinski with his ethnic grievance against Russia, and ramping up Afghan war in 1979, 1980…… Afghanistan was a millstone around USSR. Backing Islamic extremism has hurt us more than it hurt the Russians. But as USA was losing the Cold War Carter felt he had to back mujediin (sp) freedom fighters.
Last president to follow the long standing tradition that after leaving the White House, you shouldn’t play a role in politics and you shouldn’t use your time in the Oval Office to make money afterwards.Replies: @Shamu, @Almost Missouri, @Jim Don Bob
Disagree completely. Jimmy never forgave America for not re-electing him, and went on to interfere in North Korea and Venezuela. Just another Wilsonian technocrat who dismissed anyone who disagreed with him as stupid.
Since any discussion of Carter will perennially lead to his negatives, as well as some undeserved accusations, then go on to idealize Reagan as the antidote, here’s some hair of the dog for that never-ending hangover:
Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy, by Murray N. Rothbard
https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/conservative-con-man/
Rothbard debunks and demythologizes this conservative con man’s aura.
Carter’s worst crime may well have been helping to establish the Trilateral Commission.
I encourage everyone to read it.
A summary wouldn’t do it justice. Too much good stuff.Replies: @Bard of Bumperstickers, @QCIC
How Right Was Reagan?, Richard Gamble, The American Conservative, 2009Selected excerpts:Replies: @Art Deco
Scott Adams (in his sane period–many years ago) described how he kept getting invitations to do speeches but didn’t want to. So, in order to refuse, he named some completely bonkers fee–and got accepted! So he started doing speeches for bonkers-level fees
Comedians supposedly do million dollar private parties (to Saudi trash, etc.) “Influencers” apparently turn tricks for similar amounts to rich scumbags. This sort of thing seems quaint:
https://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/My-big-fat-10-million-bat-mitzva
A million dollars for an evening with Don Henley? Just an evening?
Even “D” list celebrities charge 5000 dollars for giving talks. So, it’s hardly a surprise that former presidents, even horrible ones like the ones we’ve got, can make huge money. The 150k-300k that Clinton charged was probably calibrated to not seem like too much.
The question is–are the bribes worth it? Trump’s greatest gift may well have simply been preventing Hillary from winning–because she never could make good those debts.
Does he promise to make it "the last worthless evening you have to spend"?
I think one of the most disgusting things a President’s family has ever done to make money is when Susan Ford did an ad for Subaru (” This Ford likes Subaru!’)
It’s probably on YouTube – I haven’t bothered to check. But it happened. I saw it personally several times.
To do this at a time when the American Automobile Industry was reeling from blows that the OPEC Arab Oil Embargo had imposed on us was frankly disgusting and unpatriotic.
I am aware that Eleanor Roosevelt did ads for margarine, encouraging people to use margarine instead of butter. I have always heard that that was due to the need for reducing dairy usage – maybe Korean war related, I’m not sure. But as FDR was and is such an icon of the Left, it’s probably worth looking into to see if that’s not just more leftist propaganda.
It's vaguely amusing.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Carter had an ability to actually think and reverse course when needed.
He tended toward the sanctimonious “let’s all suffer” to fulfill some moral mandate thing going. For example, he wanted everyone to turn the thermostat down and be miserable in winter to save energy instead of just finding more oil. Maybe that God-awful Missionary mentality. Ahhh the glory of collective suffering.
But like I said, he could think and he reversed himself on important issues and set the groundwork for needed changes.
Jimmy Carter and Berry Gordy (founder of Motown Records) are second cousins.
He was also the feckless victim of some serious ratfucking by his own people, Brzezinski in particular.
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He inherited Arthur Burns as Fed chairman; Burns may have been the least capable man to have held that that job during the period running from 1933 to 2018. Instead of replacing him immediately, Carter let him finish out his term and then appointed an industrialist to the position who had been on the board of one of the Federal Reserve Banks but otherwise had no background in economics and finance. Note, the intellectual kultursmog at the time in the Democratic Party was influenced by James Tobin, who fancied it would take 15 years to restabilize prices so the task wasn't worth doing. Arthur Burns approach to inflation had been one of learned helplessness. (Burns predecessor Wm. Martin had rapidly restabilized prices in 1951-52 and his successor managed the same in 1981-82). The escalating inflation may have been the most salient factor in sinking Carter. Then there was the secular increase in labor market sclerosis, which reached its peak around 1979. The implication of that was that you'd experience higher unemployment in an effort to re-stabilize prices.
=
Carter was given to dithering as well, as seen in his responses to various problems in foreign affairs. For all that he was an experienced executive, he couldn't seem to set priorities and got bogged down in minutiae. He also made an attempt to run the White House without a chief of staff (an attempt Jerry Ford had made as well), then put Hamilton Jordan in the job.
==
Still, you remember what counted as a scandal in 1979 and you see what's ignored today, you realize there has been a catastrophic decline in standards.Replies: @bomag, @Pixo, @George, @Dr. Doomngloom, @Ralph L, @JR Ewing
Thanks.
Amen about the decline in standards.
Thanks.
I’ve wondered about the people/groups willing to pay the money. Is there really a calculation that it pays off? I would think the pol would do it for less. Where’s the inclination to get a deal?
His efforts almost completely eradicated the Guinea worm, which is just about the most loathsome of all human parasites.
Negroes really liked Carter, and not without reason. Now there’s only one white boy left that they admire :
Don’t miss his 540°
He's the new wigger
Carter at least knew how to act after losing. IIRC he conceded, attended the inauguration and then went away for a few years.
Trump should have emulated him.
Trump should have emulated him."
Apples and oranges.
Carter lost his bid for reelection, fair and square. Trump is far from the only person who believes he would have won a second term had the election not been stolen from him.
Despite all the economic woes I believe that Carter would have won a second term if the Iran hostage rescue mission had succeeded. I also believe that he should have resigned when it failed.
Carter is a man of honour.
Also his plane was called Peanut 1.
Carter is no longer the worst President of the last 60 years and IMO, LBJ was much worse than Carter. Of those who came after Carter, IMO, only Reagan and Clinton were better. Not saying the actor or Bubba were all that either, yes, America fell under the watch of all these guys. Look at the period of 1963-2023. What President stopped the downward spiral? Answer: None.
Worst Presidents of Last 60 Years
Worst to Least Worst
1. Joe Biden
2.LBJ
3.George Bush Jr.
4.Barack Obama
5.Donald Trump
6.George Bush Sr
7. Jimmy Carter
8.Gerald Ford
9. Richard Nixon
10. Bill Clinton
11.Ronald Reagan
Cue: Georgia by Ray Charles
You people all realize LBJ was the mastermind of the JFK assassination, don't you? In addition to a veritable litany of other crimes and sins.
With the high inflation and high crime of the seventies and the ultimate failure of our Vietnam adventure, sixties liberalism was largely seen to have failed during that period. The election of a moderate southern Democrat and then conservative Republican were attempts to move away from that. Carter and Reagan supported Volcker while he killed off inflation, even though it meant going through a bad recession. We avoided any long-term occupations of other countries and nation building exercises. We changed policing methods and started putting more criminals in prison. Things started getting better.
The reforms didn’t stick, though. We adopted lax crime policies again with the same result of increasing crime. We engaged in increasingly large amounts of government spending and money printing and high inflation reappeared. Afghanistan was a repeat of Vietnam. When we finally got out, it was just to replace radical Islam with Putin as the new Hitler. We can look at history and see what we need to do but we don’t seem to have the will to do it. We either go back to what worked in the past or things will continue to get worse.
The democrat party was caught flat-footed by Carter ,he was not supposed to get anywhere near the nomination but was the choice of the people( they “fixed” that later) after the fiascoes of the 70’s. That’s why he was undermined by Ted Kennedy et. al. and was a one term president , he did do an excellent job of reputation rehabilitation after leaving Washington.
Changes, behind the scenes, were made in Dem circles. In 2020 Joe Biden's victory was assured over Bernie et. al.
Greene would have been an excellent addition to the Senate had he beaten DeMint in the general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Greene
Jimmy Carter got the Chinese colonization of America started…..One day the Mao suits showed up on American University Campuses….Drive past SUNY Stony Brook on 25A right down from Renaissance Technologies……the students walking around:PURE HAN RACE POWER ON FULL DISPLAY…Immigration Lawyers are very fond of the Georgia Peanut Farmer……What did Carter say to the leader of China?
Jimmy Carter aided and abetted the Han Race Power Colonization of Native Born White Working Class Living and Breeding in America….
Amy Carter was a proto-Antifa when she was going through puberty……
What did Jimmy Carter say to the leader of China?……You must know the answer to this question Steve…So why don’t you tell us…..
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He inherited Arthur Burns as Fed chairman; Burns may have been the least capable man to have held that that job during the period running from 1933 to 2018. Instead of replacing him immediately, Carter let him finish out his term and then appointed an industrialist to the position who had been on the board of one of the Federal Reserve Banks but otherwise had no background in economics and finance. Note, the intellectual kultursmog at the time in the Democratic Party was influenced by James Tobin, who fancied it would take 15 years to restabilize prices so the task wasn't worth doing. Arthur Burns approach to inflation had been one of learned helplessness. (Burns predecessor Wm. Martin had rapidly restabilized prices in 1951-52 and his successor managed the same in 1981-82). The escalating inflation may have been the most salient factor in sinking Carter. Then there was the secular increase in labor market sclerosis, which reached its peak around 1979. The implication of that was that you'd experience higher unemployment in an effort to re-stabilize prices.
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Carter was given to dithering as well, as seen in his responses to various problems in foreign affairs. For all that he was an experienced executive, he couldn't seem to set priorities and got bogged down in minutiae. He also made an attempt to run the White House without a chief of staff (an attempt Jerry Ford had made as well), then put Hamilton Jordan in the job.
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Still, you remember what counted as a scandal in 1979 and you see what's ignored today, you realize there has been a catastrophic decline in standards.Replies: @bomag, @Pixo, @George, @Dr. Doomngloom, @Ralph L, @JR Ewing
This libertarian-claptrap discussion of 1970s inflation blames personalities and fails to mention the oil embargo and employment contracts with automatic CPI raises.
Yes Nixon/Ford/Carter/Burns could have reduced inflation by causing a depression that reduced oil demand so much the price returned to the pre-embargo levels.
They were right not to.
Inflation is a monetary phenomenon.
You've seen explosions in commodity prices without significant changes in the general price level just in the last 15 years. (See the oil market ca. 2008). You've evidently forgotten them. The excess inflation of the time (1966-82) antedated the OPEC shenanigans by seven years and persisted in the intervals between them. While we're at it, fuels accounted for all of 3.8% of personal connsumption expenditures in 1972, 4.8% in 1975, 4.3% in 1978, and 5.8% in 1981. The dynamics in this market was not why the prices of consumption goods increased 2.6-fold over a period of 16 years.
Inflation indexing of labor contracts (and, keep in mind, union contracts did not cover 3/4 of the working population in 1972) is a manifestation of general expectations. This makes it more challenging to re-stabilize prices, but it doesn't require a depression. Union penetration in 1951 was higher than it was in 1972, and the restabilization of prices was quite rapid. The decline in production levels between the 1st quarter of 1981 and the 3d quarter of 1982 was all of 2.1%. (For scale, the decline in real production levels between calendar year 1929 and calendar year 1933 was 27%).
I blame 'personalities' because policy is not made by machines and policy decisions matter. One thing that doesn't matter in this case is what your social ideology is. Whether you're a libertarian or your're a Marxist, inflation remains a monetary phenomenon.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Pixo
Carter was, weirdly enough, sort of like Donald Trump: a guy with the best intentions, cheerfully jumping head-first into a snake pit without ever having seen a snake.
After Carter’s death, the current President will be older than all living ex-Presidents, and by a comfortable four-year margin.
It’s hard to imagine, but Jimmah really was “on the left” for his time. He paid back the teacher’s unions votes with the Dept. of Education, was entirely too pro-black for where I lived, and was pro-big-government. However, none of this was like the American-hating Commie ideas of the left of today. President Carter was still WITH Americans and FOR Americans.
Additionally, who knows who the last honest Christian gentleman like him came before – had to be a century ago now, and, no, we’ll never see another one in the Potomac Regime.
I also like how he disdained the pomp and ceremony, and went with Jimmy vs. James Earl.
Here’s a contrast between ex-President Reagan (who I like better) and ex-President Carter: Ronnie’s got the busy Regime-adjacent DCA airport named after him, “Ronald Reagan Airport”. Jimmy’s got the airport in Americus, Georgia (near Plains, which also has a strip) named “Jimmy Carter Regional”. It’s uncontrolled, i.e. no tower, and you can get off a plane and go piss into the grass by the taxiway if you need to, like his brother did.
The press was remarkably critical of Carter. With Clinton, they started to shift to abject political boosterism.
Probably the last President who put the country's interest above his.
Additionally, who knows who the last honest Christian gentleman like him came before – had to be a century ago now, and, no, we’ll never see another one in the Potomac Regime.
Absolutely.
My first vote was for Carter in ’76 and I don’t regret it. If you could combine Bill Clinton’s political skills with Jimmy Carter’s personal rectitude you might have yourself a president.
Compare the Carter Family — yes, even Beer Can Billy — with the Biden Gang
I’ll never forget that the prick wouldn’t die while I was working for the government. It cost me a free day off for mourning
The watershed that separates a “conservative” from a “liberal” in America.
Also, good point about the oil embargo, which was what lies behind the oil-denominated-in-dollars-relationship we developed with the willing-to-undersell-other-OPEC-members Royal House of Saud.
When he sent his daughter to the DC public schools, I didn’t know whether to admire his conviction or marvel at his stupidity
Steve, I saw a pic of Jimmah and I don’t think he’s dying anytime soon (hallelujah).
One misconception about hospice care is that the care is only for the last days of life. The truth is that hospice patients can receive care for six months or longer, depending on the course of their particular illness. If I were betting on how much time he has I’d give him at least 6 months–he’s a tough guy.
I respect his work post presidency.
Isn’t he the last US President to not be Israel’s lackey? Maybe also Obama and the very end of his second term.
A long, interesting life and he did some good. May he rest in peace when he passes.
The observation that Trump’s has been the only administration since Jimmy Carter’s that did not launch an unprovoked military attack on some foreign country is usually sufficient to stop in its tracks a rant by someone suffering from Trump derangement syndrome. By that standard alone, Jimmy Carter was an exceptional President and a good man.
This Pakistani is now running for First Minister, ie King of Scots.
He took his oath of office in Urdu and spent his formative years agitating for mass “asylum-seeker” settlement in Scotland.
We can look forward to the India-Pakistan conflict being replayed across the Anglo-Scottish border.
Jimmy Carter’s decency and sincere faith in Christ are a stark contrast to the scummy Clinton’s and Bidens. There were no Epstein-like figures around Carter, no drugs, no shady investment schemes like Burisma, Whitewater, Cattle Futures contracts, Chinese paybacks, etc. Carter was lied to by the expert class quite a bit and believed them. He will be in heaven.
Great–the Schoolmarm is holding my comment in limbo, yet again. WTF?
I can’t believe some of the comments (or the original post).
Ah, well, most of the bloviators online, “cons” or libwipes, are either soft, clueless older folks, the “lucky Boomers” who grew up as affluent suburbanites that, unlike working class/poor Boomers, weren’t touched or affected by the political disasters of the past 60 years–like Dubya: born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.
Or else the children of the cornholes–Gen X/Y/Z Millenials Etc (almost as goofy a moniker as LBGTQE-IE-I-O)-growing old without ever growing up, navel gazing, educationally malnourished, and half of them thinking that the world began in 2010, leaving them laughably unequipped for opining about things like this that were before their time.
Carter’s four years brought America down more than just about any other administration has–although this current jackwagon, who helped Jimmuh fk up back then, will no doubt eclipse Peanut Boi.
Additionally, who knows who the last honest Christian gentleman like him came before - had to be a century ago now, and, no, we'll never see another one in the Potomac Regime.
I also like how he disdained the pomp and ceremony, and went with Jimmy vs. James Earl.
Here's a contrast between ex-President Reagan (who I like better) and ex-President Carter: Ronnie's got the busy Regime-adjacent DCA airport named after him, "Ronald Reagan Airport". Jimmy's got the airport in Americus, Georgia (near Plains, which also has a strip) named "Jimmy Carter Regional". It's uncontrolled, i.e. no tower, and you can get off a plane and go piss into the grass by the taxiway if you need to, like his brother did.Replies: @Rooster16, @bomag, @Trinity, @epebble
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Carter was just a useful idiot, who created institutions that would be used as a means to wield power and sow division. I don’t think any reverence should be given to his child-like view of the world and the repercussions that came from it.
Am recalling reading about a visitor to Carter’s Oval Office, when things were quite dire for the U.S. with the Panama Canal being ‘given back’, Iranian hostage crisis, inflation at 13% and rising, Unemployment rising, stagflation, and bullied by Russia with Cold War realities, etc.
The visitor saw two items on the Oval Office desk (made from oak from the HMS Resolute). Those items were 1) the White House tennis court schedule; and 2) notes on an upcoming meeting about UFO sightings. The point of the story was not to point out Carter’s apparently misplaced priorities, but that when things get overwhelming people tend to focus on what is within their control.
This libertarian-claptrap discussion of 1970s inflation blames personalities and fails to mention the oil embargo and employment contracts with automatic CPI raises.
Inflation is a monetary phenomenon.
You’ve seen explosions in commodity prices without significant changes in the general price level just in the last 15 years. (See the oil market ca. 2008). You’ve evidently forgotten them. The excess inflation of the time (1966-82) antedated the OPEC shenanigans by seven years and persisted in the intervals between them. While we’re at it, fuels accounted for all of 3.8% of personal connsumption expenditures in 1972, 4.8% in 1975, 4.3% in 1978, and 5.8% in 1981. The dynamics in this market was not why the prices of consumption goods increased 2.6-fold over a period of 16 years.
Inflation indexing of labor contracts (and, keep in mind, union contracts did not cover 3/4 of the working population in 1972) is a manifestation of general expectations. This makes it more challenging to re-stabilize prices, but it doesn’t require a depression. Union penetration in 1951 was higher than it was in 1972, and the restabilization of prices was quite rapid. The decline in production levels between the 1st quarter of 1981 and the 3d quarter of 1982 was all of 2.1%. (For scale, the decline in real production levels between calendar year 1929 and calendar year 1933 was 27%).
I blame ‘personalities’ because policy is not made by machines and policy decisions matter. One thing that doesn’t matter in this case is what your social ideology is. Whether you’re a libertarian or your’re a Marxist, inflation remains a monetary phenomenon.
- Milton FriedmanReplies: @YetAnotherAnon
The identical inflation patterns in England, France, etc probably were all the result of their own bad “personalities,” right?
There’s no comparison of commodity price increases post-2000 as the commodity intensity of GDP is down more than half compared to the 1970s and they were largely the result of rapid demand growth straining supplies in a worldwide boom, not a sudden and drastic supply shock.Replies: @Art Deco
Never trusted that guy with that big phony smile. That whole thing with him carrying his own bags was b.s. according to the secret service. As soon as he was out of sight of the cameras he handed his bags off to the agents. Just another weak Democrat liberal who would bend over backwards to appease the blacks. He’s so happy Biden became president because now people cant say he was the worst president in modern times. Only good thing about him being president was it gave us Ronald Reagan in a landslide.
He also agreed to give away the Panama Canal (not give back or return, it was never theirs). He should have told the Panamanians to pound sand. The only reason there is a Panama is because of that canal - show some gratitude and be quiet.
Carter post-presidency spent a lot of time criticizing current Presidents while overseas - very unseemly. That said he was the last Dem prez that seemed to actually like America and Americans.
It has been 50 years and a month since the last Democrat who served as President died. Obviously, the longest such time span ever, by fa
yeah i’m not buying that. this guy did a lot of damage.
ending civil service exams. creating Education Department. 55 mile per hour speed limit which had zero effect on oil consumption and lasted decades. permanently blocking the recycling of nuclear fuel. blocking oil products exports for decades. plenty more that i don’t want to make a lengthy post about. the amount of long term knock-on damage any Democrat President can do in a single term is tremendous.
inflation was insane when this guy was in office. cars sucked A LOT. only the music was good.
lead gasoline phaseout and catalytic converters started in 1975, before Carter was in office.
Yes, that sucked very badly. For one thing, it was a precedent for the Feral Gov't to blackmail States using the people's income tax money to do it. That's the most egregious, but this thing cost me personally for years afterwards.
Even after it was removed from Interstates, other roads had the 55 mph limit for a few more years. Yes, I got pulled a lot, and yes, Sammy Hagar was absolutely right. I can't drive fifty-five!, and if you've ever done it, you'll see it's almost mathematically impossible to go 55 mph across the US of A.
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He inherited Arthur Burns as Fed chairman; Burns may have been the least capable man to have held that that job during the period running from 1933 to 2018. Instead of replacing him immediately, Carter let him finish out his term and then appointed an industrialist to the position who had been on the board of one of the Federal Reserve Banks but otherwise had no background in economics and finance. Note, the intellectual kultursmog at the time in the Democratic Party was influenced by James Tobin, who fancied it would take 15 years to restabilize prices so the task wasn't worth doing. Arthur Burns approach to inflation had been one of learned helplessness. (Burns predecessor Wm. Martin had rapidly restabilized prices in 1951-52 and his successor managed the same in 1981-82). The escalating inflation may have been the most salient factor in sinking Carter. Then there was the secular increase in labor market sclerosis, which reached its peak around 1979. The implication of that was that you'd experience higher unemployment in an effort to re-stabilize prices.
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Carter was given to dithering as well, as seen in his responses to various problems in foreign affairs. For all that he was an experienced executive, he couldn't seem to set priorities and got bogged down in minutiae. He also made an attempt to run the White House without a chief of staff (an attempt Jerry Ford had made as well), then put Hamilton Jordan in the job.
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Still, you remember what counted as a scandal in 1979 and you see what's ignored today, you realize there has been a catastrophic decline in standards.Replies: @bomag, @Pixo, @George, @Dr. Doomngloom, @Ralph L, @JR Ewing
1965: The Year the Fed and LBJ Clashed
The storied showdown between Fed Chairman Bill Martin and President Lyndon Johnson wasn’t just about personalities. It was a fundamental dispute over the Fed’s policymaking role.
Martin’s term was set to end in January 1970, but with the election of Nixon, Martin feared his leverage would be diminished in his remaining months. Nixon had long resented Martin — believing that the Fed’s tightening policy of the late 1950s caused the brief recession of 1960 and cost Nixon the election — and settled on the economist Arthur Burns to replace Martin. An awkward arrangement was reached in which Burns would succeed Martin as Fed chair once Martin served out his formal term — but until then, Burns would work for Nixon as a White House adviser. This close political relationship is one reason why many scholars, in retrospect, consider Burns’ tenure to have been compromised from the start.
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2016/q3-4/federal_reserve
Back to Jimmy Carter, Carter started the deregulation of civilian, not government, entities. In particular airline deregulation. Unlike government workers airline pilots to a hit to their pensions.
Carter got the ball rolling:
American Airlines workers face pension plight
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-americanairlines-pensions-idUSTRE7AT2ZM20111130
Carter’s mistake was not deregulating the energy industry, which Reagan did. Deregulating energy was a much more complicated task and required a genius like James Baker. Carter’s mistake was not keeping then Commerce secretary Baker in place.
If I remember right, Carter also attempted to buy votes my expanding Social Security, although he left the tax increases to Reagan. Nixon also attempted to keep Vietnam going by indexing SS to inflation.
Carter should be given some points for not bailing out NYC, which Ford refused to do. So people thought Carter would be more amenable to heavily unionized and Democrat NYC.
random slavs were able to shoot down the Nighthawk using surplus Soviet radar, so it’s probably a good thing it didn’t fly much against active duty Soviet equipment.
Carter WAS more directly involved in the B-1, a not very useful bomber which was expensive and expensive to maintain, and should have been retired long ago. if you’re gonna do the B-1, why not just do the Valkyrie. oh right. Soviet anti-air tech was better than US tech since the S75 in 1957.
Steve asks where is the Russian Airforce? Where is the US Airforce in Syria? staying away from Russia surface to air systems, that’s where.
as always, control-F for “missile” on these articles about why wars are different now. somehow Pinker and company never talk about this.
Donald Regan’s famous quip to Reagan in 1985: “you have it, I have it, Meese doesn’t. What is it?”
A: “FU money”
Inflation is a monetary phenomenon.
You've seen explosions in commodity prices without significant changes in the general price level just in the last 15 years. (See the oil market ca. 2008). You've evidently forgotten them. The excess inflation of the time (1966-82) antedated the OPEC shenanigans by seven years and persisted in the intervals between them. While we're at it, fuels accounted for all of 3.8% of personal connsumption expenditures in 1972, 4.8% in 1975, 4.3% in 1978, and 5.8% in 1981. The dynamics in this market was not why the prices of consumption goods increased 2.6-fold over a period of 16 years.
Inflation indexing of labor contracts (and, keep in mind, union contracts did not cover 3/4 of the working population in 1972) is a manifestation of general expectations. This makes it more challenging to re-stabilize prices, but it doesn't require a depression. Union penetration in 1951 was higher than it was in 1972, and the restabilization of prices was quite rapid. The decline in production levels between the 1st quarter of 1981 and the 3d quarter of 1982 was all of 2.1%. (For scale, the decline in real production levels between calendar year 1929 and calendar year 1933 was 27%).
I blame 'personalities' because policy is not made by machines and policy decisions matter. One thing that doesn't matter in this case is what your social ideology is. Whether you're a libertarian or your're a Marxist, inflation remains a monetary phenomenon.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Pixo
“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”
– Milton Friedman
My impression is that Carter was sacrificed by Brzezinski as part of a wider strategy. Most people are familiar with the interview that he gave to Le Figaro back January 1998:
https://archives.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention… We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would… That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire… What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
But very little talk about that interview ever touches on Iran. The Iranian policy of the Carter administration fit in with the Afghan policy, in ways which Carter himself may not have understood. Carter pressured the Shah into making concessions to the Ayatollah Khomeini in ways which helped to trigger an Islamic revolution in Iran. At the time this seemed like a titanic defeat for US imperialism in the Middle East. But eventually Khomeini played an important role in rallying Muslim fighters to support the war in Afghanistan against the USSR. Not only that, but the sense that Islamic fundamentalism had beaten US imperialism in Iran helped to strengthen the credibility of appeals among Muslims to support the war in Afghanistan. If the Shah had remained in power, while Carter or Reagan tried to stir Muslims into fighting the USSR in Afghanistan, there would probably have been much less enthusiasm.
Brzezinski and other State Department strategists seemed to have worked out a plan which involved sacrificing the Shah and Carter as rooks in order to lure the Soviet queen into Afghanistan. Carter comes off like a dumb humanitarian, criticizing the Shah and pressuring him to make concessions to Khomeini, only to end up helping Khomeini take power and denounce the US as “the Great Satan.” Then Reagan comes in and actually sells more arms to Khomeini, but it’s no longer the act of the dumb humanitarian. It’s now the strong cowboy giving aid for an Islamic jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan, which Khomeini supports. A lot of it seems politically contrived, with Brzezinski probably one of the masterminds behind it.
But it didn't end. Americans never got a peace dividend. More money then ever is spent by the M.I.C. The Washington imperial Zionist machine just invented new enemies, China, Russia, etc.Replies: @Patrick McNally
That too should be entered into the ledger.
What Brzezinski did not know in 1998 was that the USA would itself become trapped in an Afghan war against his "stirred-up Moslems" and "unimportant" Taliban, and would remain there for twice as long as the USSR; Europe would be flooded with unassimilable Afghan refugees; and neither the stirred-up Moslems nor the Russian threat would go away.
Despite these grave adverse consequences, Washington hawks regarded Brzezinski's Afghan strategy as so successful that they repeated it in Ukraine thirty years later, with potentially apocalyptic results.
Another data point to confirm Sailer’s law of mass shootings.
https://www.newser.com/article/61aa866442baa39f5ed5307bb766d642/memphis-police-say-1-dead-10-injured-in-overnight-shootings.html
Carter was the last U.S. president with a science/engineering degree since Herbert Hoover and was the last U.S. president to attempt to be fair to the Palestinian people and recognize the crime against humanity known as Israel since Kennedy.
. The French are human. Muslims?Replies: @Colin Wright, @Colin Wright, @reactionry, @reactionry
-- (https://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Peace-Apartheid-Jimmy-Carter/dp/0743285034)
Additionally, who knows who the last honest Christian gentleman like him came before - had to be a century ago now, and, no, we'll never see another one in the Potomac Regime.
I also like how he disdained the pomp and ceremony, and went with Jimmy vs. James Earl.
Here's a contrast between ex-President Reagan (who I like better) and ex-President Carter: Ronnie's got the busy Regime-adjacent DCA airport named after him, "Ronald Reagan Airport". Jimmy's got the airport in Americus, Georgia (near Plains, which also has a strip) named "Jimmy Carter Regional". It's uncontrolled, i.e. no tower, and you can get off a plane and go piss into the grass by the taxiway if you need to, like his brother did.Replies: @Rooster16, @bomag, @Trinity, @epebble
LOL, thanks.
The press was remarkably critical of Carter. With Clinton, they started to shift to abject political boosterism.
He took his oath of office in Urdu and spent his formative years agitating for mass “asylum-seeker” settlement in Scotland.
https://twitter.com/ThomasEvansAdur/status/1627282330179051520Replies: @Anonymous, @anonymouseperson
With England governed by a Hindu that would make a peculiar kind of sense.
We can look forward to the India-Pakistan conflict being replayed across the Anglo-Scottish border.
Inflation is a monetary phenomenon.
You've seen explosions in commodity prices without significant changes in the general price level just in the last 15 years. (See the oil market ca. 2008). You've evidently forgotten them. The excess inflation of the time (1966-82) antedated the OPEC shenanigans by seven years and persisted in the intervals between them. While we're at it, fuels accounted for all of 3.8% of personal connsumption expenditures in 1972, 4.8% in 1975, 4.3% in 1978, and 5.8% in 1981. The dynamics in this market was not why the prices of consumption goods increased 2.6-fold over a period of 16 years.
Inflation indexing of labor contracts (and, keep in mind, union contracts did not cover 3/4 of the working population in 1972) is a manifestation of general expectations. This makes it more challenging to re-stabilize prices, but it doesn't require a depression. Union penetration in 1951 was higher than it was in 1972, and the restabilization of prices was quite rapid. The decline in production levels between the 1st quarter of 1981 and the 3d quarter of 1982 was all of 2.1%. (For scale, the decline in real production levels between calendar year 1929 and calendar year 1933 was 27%).
I blame 'personalities' because policy is not made by machines and policy decisions matter. One thing that doesn't matter in this case is what your social ideology is. Whether you're a libertarian or your're a Marxist, inflation remains a monetary phenomenon.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Pixo
Global inflation went from 5.5% in 1970 to 14% in 1980. Maybe it was all Nixon and Ford’s fault for making Burns #1 and Volker #2 at the Fed rather than vice versa, since PV had that One Weird Trick. And somehow every developed nation was unaware of this trick that prevented both inflation and depression when oil prices quadrupled in 2 years.
The identical inflation patterns in England, France, etc probably were all the result of their own bad “personalities,” right?
There’s no comparison of commodity price increases post-2000 as the commodity intensity of GDP is down more than half compared to the 1970s and they were largely the result of rapid demand growth straining supplies in a worldwide boom, not a sudden and drastic supply shock.
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There is no such thing as 'global inflation'. The term inflation makes sense only in relation to particular currency units.
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The identical inflation patterns in England, France, etc probably were all the result of their own bad “personalities,” right?
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Strange as it may seem to you, bad policies can be adopted by multiple actors, very often under the influence of the fashions of the time.
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Fed rather than vice versa, since PV had that One Weird Trick.
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He had no weird trick. He and his confederates put controls on the growth of monetary aggregates and let interest rates fluctuate. Jimmy Carter in March of 1980 insisted he abandon this policy, and he complied. He implemented it again in January of 1981 with Reagan's blessing. Prices were re-stabilized in 21 months.
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There’s no comparison of commodity price increases post-2000 as the commodity intensity of GDP is down more than half compared to the 1970s and they were largely the result of rapid demand growth straining supplies in a worldwide boom, not a sudden and drastic supply shock.
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I have no clue where you're mining this nonsense, but you should consult other sources.
Additionally, who knows who the last honest Christian gentleman like him came before - had to be a century ago now, and, no, we'll never see another one in the Potomac Regime.
I also like how he disdained the pomp and ceremony, and went with Jimmy vs. James Earl.
Here's a contrast between ex-President Reagan (who I like better) and ex-President Carter: Ronnie's got the busy Regime-adjacent DCA airport named after him, "Ronald Reagan Airport". Jimmy's got the airport in Americus, Georgia (near Plains, which also has a strip) named "Jimmy Carter Regional". It's uncontrolled, i.e. no tower, and you can get off a plane and go piss into the grass by the taxiway if you need to, like his brother did.Replies: @Rooster16, @bomag, @Trinity, @epebble
Believe me, Jimmy isn’t as “honest” as you think. Reagan? Freaking PHONY actor.
And, no, that wasn't singlehandedly, as he had the help of millions of American and other Western soldiers, sailors, airmen, engineers, and technicians, along with Pole Lec Walesa and other Pole Pope John Paul II, Maggie Thatcher, etc ...
.
* "Known problem", I should state, as nobody seemed to realize that there was an internal Communist infiltration - Long March through the Institutions - going on in parallel. Alas, we lost that one.
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He inherited Arthur Burns as Fed chairman; Burns may have been the least capable man to have held that that job during the period running from 1933 to 2018. Instead of replacing him immediately, Carter let him finish out his term and then appointed an industrialist to the position who had been on the board of one of the Federal Reserve Banks but otherwise had no background in economics and finance. Note, the intellectual kultursmog at the time in the Democratic Party was influenced by James Tobin, who fancied it would take 15 years to restabilize prices so the task wasn't worth doing. Arthur Burns approach to inflation had been one of learned helplessness. (Burns predecessor Wm. Martin had rapidly restabilized prices in 1951-52 and his successor managed the same in 1981-82). The escalating inflation may have been the most salient factor in sinking Carter. Then there was the secular increase in labor market sclerosis, which reached its peak around 1979. The implication of that was that you'd experience higher unemployment in an effort to re-stabilize prices.
=
Carter was given to dithering as well, as seen in his responses to various problems in foreign affairs. For all that he was an experienced executive, he couldn't seem to set priorities and got bogged down in minutiae. He also made an attempt to run the White House without a chief of staff (an attempt Jerry Ford had made as well), then put Hamilton Jordan in the job.
==
Still, you remember what counted as a scandal in 1979 and you see what's ignored today, you realize there has been a catastrophic decline in standards.Replies: @bomag, @Pixo, @George, @Dr. Doomngloom, @Ralph L, @JR Ewing
My recollection was that he wouldn’t delegate, everything needed up on his desk for approval. He was a failure at executive (C-Suite ) level management. while I suspect Obama outsourced everything, carter earnestly tried too hard. He failed to communicate a big picture vision and got bogged down in all the small decisions.
Although he opined about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety, he vociferously defended Vance . IIRC, the “scandal” didn’t amount to much, but the optics were bad. His cabinet reorg looked like a fire drill. He seemed to be in a constant state of cognitive dissonance, even in retirement. He never would have made it as an executive.
All in all, a good man who could be sanctimonious and was out of his dept running a government. But that underlying decency always remained.
As I recall, he accepted an offer of $ 2 million from some Japanese tycoon for a speaking tour in Japan, but there was such an uproar raised about the impropriety of it that he backed out. The charges of impropriety were lodged by a lot of the same democrats and journalists (but I repeat myself) who be remain silent at the millions in speaking fees raked in by the Clintons.
Of course, Reagan had made a lot of money from speaking engagements before he ran in 1980 too.
The speaking-fee gig is just one of the forms of ex-post-facto bribery that our system has perfected. Why pay a bunch of politicians to do your bidding? Let them vie with each other to do your bidding and then only pay off the ones who were successful. Ah, the genius of American capitalism! As any procurer knows, you only pay the whore after she puts out.
When you think about it, our government is actually one of the most corrupt governments on Earth. And it stands to reason it would be. It has the most power. It has the most to offer. And therefore it would command the highest asking price for its services.
==
One problem with this thesis is that all of them had this money thrown at them with the possible exception of Nixon, who was treated as a pariah for years. We're they all successful competitors?Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Stan Adams
Let’s also not forget that Carter gave us many of the problems we have today with Central America and Venezuela.
Carter is portrayed as being weak and taking a hands off approach that allowed the Sandinistas to kick Somoza out. Carter blockaded an Israeli ship carrying weapons that Somoza had bought, in effect putting a thumb on the scale in favor of Somoza’s adversaries, all because Carter thought that Somoza was “immoral.” From there, Cuba and the USSR went on to support insurgencies in El Salvador, and to a lesser extent Guatemala. And guess what? Daniel Ortega, the original Sandinista comandante is once again ruling Nicaragua.
No Sandinista revolution means no Hugo Chavez, and also probably means the DC establishment would not have viewed the spike in illegal immigration as a necessary evil, a “safety valve” they called it. If the price of not having communist governments on our doorstep was letting in several million disaffected peasants, well so be it. How’d that work out for us?
OT:
Apparently publishers are making secret edits— and changing words, phrases, and characters— to suit modern sensibilities or something like that. In this case to the late children’s literature author Roald Dahl.
Nb: conspiracy nuts use to frown on digital books for fear that publishers/TPTB would make alterations of a book for political reasons.
Anti-Semitism?? The Scandinavian bastard! He doesn’t need re-editing he needs canceling!
Jimmy Carter seemed like a decent man. And yet he was about as reliable a stooge of the MIC and the globalist oligarch class as any of them. He continued the “opening to China” started under Nixon, a much beloved program of the Bilderberg/CFR/Trilateral Set, which ultimately resulted in out cheap-crap-sold-in-big-box-stores based economy. He also oversaw the creation of the Department of Education and the abolition (or at least the beginning of the abolition) of a merit-based civil-service.
Thanks for the recitation of palaeotrash character strings. We're all enlightened. Looking forward to long quotations from Smedley Butler.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @War for Blair Mountain
Deferred bribery for the most part.
The identical inflation patterns in England, France, etc probably were all the result of their own bad “personalities,” right?
There’s no comparison of commodity price increases post-2000 as the commodity intensity of GDP is down more than half compared to the 1970s and they were largely the result of rapid demand growth straining supplies in a worldwide boom, not a sudden and drastic supply shock.Replies: @Art Deco
Global inflation went from 5.5% in 1970 to 14% in 1980.
==
There is no such thing as ‘global inflation’. The term inflation makes sense only in relation to particular currency units.
==
The identical inflation patterns in England, France, etc probably were all the result of their own bad “personalities,” right?
==
Strange as it may seem to you, bad policies can be adopted by multiple actors, very often under the influence of the fashions of the time.
==
Fed rather than vice versa, since PV had that One Weird Trick.
==
He had no weird trick. He and his confederates put controls on the growth of monetary aggregates and let interest rates fluctuate. Jimmy Carter in March of 1980 insisted he abandon this policy, and he complied. He implemented it again in January of 1981 with Reagan’s blessing. Prices were re-stabilized in 21 months.
==
There’s no comparison of commodity price increases post-2000 as the commodity intensity of GDP is down more than half compared to the 1970s and they were largely the result of rapid demand growth straining supplies in a worldwide boom, not a sudden and drastic supply shock.
==
I have no clue where you’re mining this nonsense, but you should consult other sources.
Additionally, who knows who the last honest Christian gentleman like him came before - had to be a century ago now, and, no, we'll never see another one in the Potomac Regime.
I also like how he disdained the pomp and ceremony, and went with Jimmy vs. James Earl.
Here's a contrast between ex-President Reagan (who I like better) and ex-President Carter: Ronnie's got the busy Regime-adjacent DCA airport named after him, "Ronald Reagan Airport". Jimmy's got the airport in Americus, Georgia (near Plains, which also has a strip) named "Jimmy Carter Regional". It's uncontrolled, i.e. no tower, and you can get off a plane and go piss into the grass by the taxiway if you need to, like his brother did.Replies: @Rooster16, @bomag, @Trinity, @epebble
President Carter was still WITH Americans and FOR Americans.
Probably the last President who put the country’s interest above his.
Additionally, who knows who the last honest Christian gentleman like him came before – had to be a century ago now, and, no, we’ll never see another one in the Potomac Regime.
Absolutely.
Of course, Reagan had made a lot of money from speaking engagements before he ran in 1980 too.
The speaking-fee gig is just one of the forms of ex-post-facto bribery that our system has perfected. Why pay a bunch of politicians to do your bidding? Let them vie with each other to do your bidding and then only pay off the ones who were successful. Ah, the genius of American capitalism! As any procurer knows, you only pay the whore after she puts out.
When you think about it, our government is actually one of the most corrupt governments on Earth. And it stands to reason it would be. It has the most power. It has the most to offer. And therefore it would command the highest asking price for its services.Replies: @Art Deco
Let them vie with each other to do your bidding and then only pay off the ones who were successful.
==
One problem with this thesis is that all of them had this money thrown at them with the possible exception of Nixon, who was treated as a pariah for years. We’re they all successful competitors?
To bail him out, Congress established a pension for former presidents, only two of whom were alive at the time. Herbert Hoover didn’t need the money but he accepted the pension to avoid embarrassing Truman.Replies: @Art Deco
And yet he was about as reliable a stooge of the MIC and the globalist oligarch class as any of them. He continued the “opening to China” started under Nixon, a much beloved program of the Bilderberg/CFR/Trilateral Set,
Thanks for the recitation of palaeotrash character strings. We’re all enlightened. Looking forward to long quotations from Smedley Butler.
You find it hard to believe that these groups are important because they don't invite you - Art Deco, World Historical Genius - to take part in their deliberations.
You are not invited because you are a nobody. A ridiculously naive and deluded nobody, as it happens.Replies: @Art Deco
==
One problem with this thesis is that all of them had this money thrown at them with the possible exception of Nixon, who was treated as a pariah for years. We're they all successful competitors?Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Stan Adams
The trend only picked up after Reagan, and – yes, since then, they mostly all have cashed in. They all do the bidding of their masters while in office. I expect that Phil Graham and Newt Gingrich cashed in big time as well.
Trump should have emulated him.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @Kylie, @Charles Erwin Wilson
True to his habit of doing everything his predecessors did, only more bigly, Trump decided to go away for a few years after his own inauguration.
Open a web browser: Trump.
Turn on the TV: Trump.
Turn on the radio: Trump.
Of course, the only place I only saw Trump actually in action and heard his words taken in context was on OANN. He looked pretty busy IRL and he seemed to be quite up-to-date on the issues du jour IRL.
But you seem to be having a lot of fun attacking an effigy.
Gravitas
Thanks for the recitation of palaeotrash character strings. We're all enlightened. Looking forward to long quotations from Smedley Butler.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @War for Blair Mountain
What part of what I said is wrong? Is there not such a thing as the Bilderberg Conference? Do the CFR and Trilateral Commission not exist? Are they not influential? These groups hold meetings to which rich / influential / powerful people are invited and where they confer in secret.
You find it hard to believe that these groups are important because they don’t invite you – Art Deco, World Historical Genius – to take part in their deliberations.
You are not invited because you are a nobody. A ridiculously naive and deluded nobody, as it happens.
Did Nixon start a war or invade?
He was hated here in Missoula for making cuts to the Forest Service and moving the regional hdq to Boise. Lot of guys had to move or quit.
A little girl even wrote a letter to the editor saying Carter was a Big Meanie.
About six years later he came through on a speaking tour and he was the greatest thing ever, a god among men.
My understanding is that’s also true for the A-10. Two sustained damage from AA over Kosovo to such an extent they had to abort their missions. After that no more A-10s over Kosovo. A very scary and effective weapons system against the sandal wearing goatheard of legend, but not so much against even marginal post-Soviet AA, let alone modern Russian systems.
So many vapid comments here…..Carter got the Chinese Legal Immigrant Policy going….Carter should be despised for his treason…Instead we got a torrent of vapid comments from Boomer White Men who read National Review in their Youth……You have lost your Nation to the Han….You are Cucks….
OT: You may not want to see this – Art Deco would prefer that you not – as it upsets his New York Times infused World view.
However, this is what the Lords of Davos have in mind for you:
https://vigilantcitizen.com/vc-videos/the-wef-wants-to-monitor-your-brainwaves-to-raise-productivity-and-to-fight-crime/
I don’t know how people can say that things like this are not important. Some of the richest most powerful people in the World sponsor these gatherings, where stuff like this is presented as inevitable – that it will happen, whether you like it not. Of course, they think it will happen because they want it to happen.
NPCs like Art Deco will say it is not happening, right up to the point when it is unmistakably happening, at which point they will say: what are you complaining about, things like this have always happened?
I still remember Peter Brimelow’s line in his obituary of Reagan that Reagan’s victory over the Soviets and inflation were so total that people in the future won’t even understand the problems, let alone the solution.
We are about to get gaslighted about how great a president Carter was and how Reagan was irrelevant or worse. Don’t fall for it.
Thank you for the reference to the Peter Brimelow quote. That was very good.
Thanks for the recitation of palaeotrash character strings. We're all enlightened. Looking forward to long quotations from Smedley Butler.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @War for Blair Mountain
Oh..It would so much better quoting William F Buckley and Ronald Reagan…..What a turd you are…
==
One problem with this thesis is that all of them had this money thrown at them with the possible exception of Nixon, who was treated as a pariah for years. We're they all successful competitors?Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Stan Adams
Truman was dead broke when he left the White House. He was showered with endorsement deals, one of which would have netted him hundreds of thousands of dollars for one half-hour of his time. Despite his severe financial difficulties, he refused them all.
To bail him out, Congress established a pension for former presidents, only two of whom were alive at the time. Herbert Hoover didn’t need the money but he accepted the pension to avoid embarrassing Truman.
“Modern medicine has completely failed to fight the major health problems afflicting Americans and Russians: obesity, mental illness, substance abuse, diabetes, and bad teeth.”
Obesity, Type II diabetes and substance abuse are largely within the power of individuals either to avoid or failing that, control. To a lesser extent, the same is true of some kinds of mental illness and dental problems.
Modern medicine should never have been prioritized over personal responsibility, as it is today, (certainly wrt obesity, Type Ii diabetes and substance abuse). I won’t argue that genetics are not a factor. But healthy lifestyle choices play a big part, too.
Now they don't. It's over. It always ends this way in a dying society.Replies: @Kylie
https://youtu.be/xW4SVoTd4EQDon't miss his 540°Replies: @Gore 2004, @propagandist hacker
Mac McClung is a good slam dunker, not much else defensively
He’s the new wigger
The Deep State candidate in 1976 was clearly Mr. Insider (and former Warren Commissioner in charge of leaking documents to the FBI), Gerald Ford.
https://www.denverpost.com/2008/08/09/fbis-file-adds-detail-on-using-ford-as-informant-in-probe-of-jfks-death/amp/
Carter irritated insiders right from the start by planning to withdraw all U.S. forces from Korea.
He was “overruled.”
https://thediplomat.com/2018/06/how-the-deep-state-stopped-a-us-president-from-withdrawing-us-troops-from-korea/
He relied on economic and political pressure (but not military) to try to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/30/archives/carter-tells-soviet-to-pull-its-troops-out-of-afghanistan-he-warns.html
His “Carter Doctrine” was an attempt to avoid endless war, not foment it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Doctrine
In short, Carter was a dove in the eyes of the Deep State.
And the last president was alive and came of age during the Second World War.
He might have killed Solemani, but Mr. Trump went four years without invading or starting anything. Then again, he didn’t end anything too.
You would think that would be so but then, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a disorder of non-thinking.
Carter was a micro manager, who was unable or unwilling to delegate, the authority to manage, even the most trivial of tasks. Like the other engineer president, Hoover, the job simply swallowed him.
Much to his credit, unlike, like any of his successors Mr. Carter, didn't get super rich as an ex-president.
God Bless, Jimmy CarterReplies: @Art Deco, @Cato
Don’t believe the job swallowed Hoover because he refused to delegate. He and his Treasury secretary and the Fed made bad bets on how to address the economic crisis.
He put a lot of effort into reforming the fed bureaucracy, which was a regular thing that national leaders at least mentioned (example: Al Gore's Reinventing Government).
Now, the worst habits of bureaucracy are lauded as the proper way to do things.Replies: @Art Deco, @Vito Klein
Nixon and Carter took an interest in that. No other president did. The problem was that you have to sell re-organization efforts to Congress, and extant agencies have their patrons in gatekeeper positions. Also, the Democratic Party was and is a holding company of rent-seekers. Carter’s attempt at reforming the federal civil service was a ruin by the time Congress got done with it. He also had some ideas of dubious value. The Departments of Energy and Education were incorporated by Congress during his tenure.
“The democrat party was caught flat-footed by …” Alvin Green when he defeated Vic Rawl in the South Carolina Democrat primary in 2010.
Changes, behind the scenes, were made in Dem circles. In 2020 Joe Biden’s victory was assured over Bernie et. al.
Greene would have been an excellent addition to the Senate had he beaten DeMint in the general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Greene
I can't believe some of the comments (or the original post).
Ah, well, most of the bloviators online, "cons" or libwipes, are either soft, clueless older folks, the "lucky Boomers" who grew up as affluent suburbanites that, unlike working class/poor Boomers, weren't touched or affected by the political disasters of the past 60 years--like Dubya: born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.
Or else the children of the cornholes--Gen X/Y/Z Millenials Etc (almost as goofy a moniker as LBGTQE-IE-I-O)-growing old without ever growing up, navel gazing, educationally malnourished, and half of them thinking that the world began in 2010, leaving them laughably unequipped for opining about things like this that were before their time.
Carter's four years brought America down more than just about any other administration has--although this current jackwagon, who helped Jimmuh fk up back then, will no doubt eclipse Peanut Boi.Replies: @anonymous
Ah, c’mon. Two things have “brought America down”: Repeal of Glass-Steagall (Clinton), and preventing the profiling of muslims (Dubya). That’s it. We easily weathered everything else, even disco.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/eerie-video-of-drone-floating-down-street-entering-building-before-israeli-raid
John F. Kennedy was shot dead, Gov. Connolly wounded, and a Dallas police officer also shot dead by a raging narcissist for his own reasons. Jack Ruby was a sentimental and impetuous man who made a modest living owning and operating skeezy nightclubs and was running quite unremarkable errands (with his dog in the car) when he happened upon the prisoner transfer. Robert Kennedy was shot dead by a low grade head case incensed by his admiration for Israel; there’s some reason to believe Sirhan Sirhan had an accomplice, not Lee Harvey Oswald. Reagan and his press secretary were badly wounded by a schizophrenic who fancied it would impress Jodie Foster. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I assumed, from the other side of the Atlantic, that Carter got a worse press than he deserved.
The media at that time favored the Democratic Party, but they were not yet an extension of it. Carter was generally disliked by the Democratic establishment in Washington, so was regarded by reporters and editors with more critical distance than Democratic pols usually are. He didn’t get a worse press than he deserved, he just didn’t get the mulligans Democratic presidents usually get (Johnson didn’t get them after the summer of 1967, either).
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51j6F7aAOXL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg
I see where newly elected Senator Fetterman is now commenting here on iSteve.
Welcome to all.
However, best not to air your depressive thoughts here at the moment. Not a real empathetic bunch usually.
The usual gloom-and-doomers don’t get much love, but they keep coming back.
Odd that poor ole Jimmy Carter, one of the oldest former presidents (who did relatively little harm) has set you off on your spiral to extinction.
And don’t use the pronoun “we” when you really mean “I”.
I assumed, from the other side of the Atlantic, that Carter got a worse press than he deserved.The media at that time favored the Democratic Party, but they were not yet an extension of it. Carter was generally disliked by the Democratic establishment in Washington, so was regarded by reporters and editors with more critical distance than Democratic pols usually are. He didn't get a worse press than he deserved, he just didn't get the mulligans Democratic presidents usually get (Johnson didn't get them after the summer of 1967, either).Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Pixo, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @Reg Cæsar
You don’t know anymore than the rest of us. You do not have access to any more definitive sources than we have. All you have is an arrogant sense of infallibility and a credulous nature that leads you to believe the official pronouncements of government.
Keep inquiring there fella.Replies: @Bill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmfsmasjVA?t=0m50sReplies: @Bill Jones, @Dmon, @Kolya Krassotkin, @AndrewR
You are unnecessarily eponymous. Learn to read.
https://www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/2023/statement-on-president-carters-health.html
Another positive about Carter is that he kept the Neoconservatives, who were still mostly Democrats in 1976, out of his administration.
the only good thing Jimbo did
was getting Reagan elected prez.
Another Jimmy Carter note.
Anyone here recall the 55 MPH federal speed limit?
Now Memory Holed, of course. We won’t be reading about that in most MSM obits for poor Jimmy.
Of course it was widely ignored in the West, where distances are far and highway patrols are scarce.
It was the dumbest thing a US President has done since Biden’s anti COVID “mandatory” mania.
Of course given the universe of dumb presidential actions, I’m sure many here will have their own favorite.
Was it actually aggressively enforced?
Now such a limit would be awful. I drive 80-89 when traffic permits and can’t imagine having to stick to 55.
But in some giant anti-aerodynamic 1970 Chrysler that can barely wheeze its way to 80mph?
Interesting: “ Between 1975 and 1985, average passenger vehicle mileage doubled from about 13.5 mpg to 27.5”Replies: @Ralph L
Tell me, is the expulsion of the French from Algeria after 300 years also a crime against humanity?
. The French are human. Muslims?
** Unreliable source: Moi (alas, unlike Ira, I can't do Frogsprach)
*** The day the mistress diedAlso see: Charlie Hebdo, Is Le Pen mightier than the Sword of Allah?, "Je suis Charlie Martel!"
See also: Gavin Newsome, Wogs begin at Cali
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFtGfyruroU
Spy balloons, UFOs and now … The vax takes another man …
… he wasn’t paranoid enough!
I assumed, from the other side of the Atlantic, that Carter got a worse press than he deserved.The media at that time favored the Democratic Party, but they were not yet an extension of it. Carter was generally disliked by the Democratic establishment in Washington, so was regarded by reporters and editors with more critical distance than Democratic pols usually are. He didn't get a worse press than he deserved, he just didn't get the mulligans Democratic presidents usually get (Johnson didn't get them after the summer of 1967, either).Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Pixo, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @Reg Cæsar
Agree on the anti-conspiracy theory points.
“Carter got a worse press than he deserved.”
He alienated the left by moderating the demands of the left-wing landslide Congressional class of 1974, which hoped Carter would mark the first period of undivided leftist control since LBJ. His responsible center-left technocrat policies lacked any big popular base.
There might have been some snobbery by the MSM against him too, though a lot of them also had rural middle American backgrounds. Carter seemed to play up his rural goober persona. He was well before my time, but from the clips I’ve seen of him on TV as President and after, he’s kind of smarmy and uncharismatic, and an inferior presence to Ford, Reagan, Ted Kennedy, or Mondale.
Inflation, the hostages and Desert One were the straws that broke Carter’s presidency.
Of course you do.
I met him once on a flight. He was coming back from a summit in Egypt and was on commercial with a ton of secret service, for some reason. He was paraded around the plane like rotalty and everyone got the chance to shake his hand. He is tiny, and he seemed like a creep to me. And the secret service near me were up all night talking about their conquests. Great group of people.
Since you got to listen to those conversations, what do men who really do work for the Secret Service use for a pickup line?Replies: @OilcanFloyd
You can bet they were very interested in learning how he did that.Replies: @prosa123, @OilcanFloyd
A terrible President. Tried to claim the failed Iranian hostage rescue was not a military mission. Thought that Khomeini was more religious than the Shah, thus opening the door to Islamic fundamentalism which just so happened to take down the World Trade Centers. Spent more time overseeing the White House tennis court schedule than getting inflation down. Gas went sky high under him. Heard a great personal story that he was NOT a nice guy. Lucky we only had him 4 years.
Ronald Reagan was no phony. He fought Communism with words for 3 decades, and then he ended the Cold War, which was THE biggest problem* for 4 decades. Pretty good for a former actor, IMO.
And, no, that wasn’t singlehandedly, as he had the help of millions of American and other Western soldiers, sailors, airmen, engineers, and technicians, along with Pole Lec Walesa and other Pole Pope John Paul II, Maggie Thatcher, etc …
.
* “Known problem”, I should state, as nobody seemed to realize that there was an internal Communist infiltration – Long March through the Institutions – going on in parallel. Alas, we lost that one.
ending civil service exams. creating Education Department. 55 mile per hour speed limit which had zero effect on oil consumption and lasted decades. permanently blocking the recycling of nuclear fuel. blocking oil products exports for decades. plenty more that i don't want to make a lengthy post about. the amount of long term knock-on damage any Democrat President can do in a single term is tremendous.
inflation was insane when this guy was in office. cars sucked A LOT. only the music was good.
lead gasoline phaseout and catalytic converters started in 1975, before Carter was in office.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Old Prude
Jimmy Carter was responsible for neither the sucky cars nor the kick-ass rock. The 55 mph national speed limit was enacted by the US Congress long before Jimmy, as signed by Richard Nixon in early 1974.
Yes, that sucked very badly. For one thing, it was a precedent for the Feral Gov’t to blackmail States using the people’s income tax money to do it. That’s the most egregious, but this thing cost me personally for years afterwards.
Even after it was removed from Interstates, other roads had the 55 mph limit for a few more years. Yes, I got pulled a lot, and yes, Sammy Hagar was absolutely right. I can’t drive fifty-five!, and if you’ve ever done it, you’ll see it’s almost mathematically impossible to go 55 mph across the US of A.
Anyone here recall the 55 MPH federal speed limit?
Now Memory Holed, of course. We won't be reading about that in most MSM obits for poor Jimmy.
Of course it was widely ignored in the West, where distances are far and highway patrols are scarce.
It was the dumbest thing a US President has done since Biden's anti COVID "mandatory" mania.
Of course given the universe of dumb presidential actions, I'm sure many here will have their own favorite.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Chris Renner, @Pixo
That wasn’t me, y’all. I was the one wearing sweaters around the White House and telling you all to turn down your thermostats to 55, or was it 65, hey, I’m 98, to conserve energy, as the world’s premier nuclear power program was nipped in the bud due to that one accident that didn’t kill a soul.
– Jimmah!
Normal-psychology leaders often disgust the electorate with their reasonable governance. E.g., Carter implemented the then-cutting edge ideology of neoliberalism. The only non-sociopathic presidents in my lifetime were Carter and H.W. Bush, both one-termers.
Sociopaths exhibit “fearless dominance” which we on the receiving end experience as sound leadership.
His failures as President centered on his being a good man , the kind rather easily played upon by the perennially sneaky and devious. The left wing of the Democrat Party, controlled fiscally and intellectually by Jews, wanted him rendered impotent, so they could claim the right to begin purging Middle American whites from Democrat positions off power, so they could redirect the party totally. Allied with them were the emerging Neocons. Those Jews whose foreign policy had 2 prongs (PRO-Israel and anti-Russia {even more than anti-USSR}) began migrating into the Republican Party in droves during the Carter years. And yes, many of them had strong family ties to the Trotsky wing of Bolshevism. So, anti-USSR hawks in the Republican Party got a boost, but one that was anything but conservative and, in fact, was influened significantly by a brand of Marxism that was even more brutal, even more anti-christian and anti-white Gentile, than was Stalinism.
Carter did not grasp those things, but then neither did Reagan, who actually was the bigger dupe in the process. The result was that each party got a hard kick toward the Left in key ways, with Jews emerging with near total control of national foreign policy and national 'racial' policy. It has been all downhill since.Replies: @Patrick McNally, @James Forrestal
> And yes, many of them had strong family ties to the Trotsky wing of Bolshevism.
Nonsense. There were about 4 original neocons who had had some previous limited association with Trotskyist organizations, without ever joining the party. Bill King gave a rational rundown on all of the relevant way back in here:
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0304/0304neocontrot.txt
“As part of the two-decade old civil war within intellectual conservatism, paleoconservatives have forcefully asserted that neoconservatism is a descendant of American Trotskyism, and that neoconservatives continue to be influenced by the ideas of the exiled Soviet revolutionary in their view of foreign policy…
“In fact quite the opposite. While it is based on elements of truth, the assertion for the most part consists of exaggerations, misrepresentations, and even outright falsifications whose end result is a thoroughly distorted view of the history of neoconservatism.”
Anyone here recall the 55 MPH federal speed limit?
Now Memory Holed, of course. We won't be reading about that in most MSM obits for poor Jimmy.
Of course it was widely ignored in the West, where distances are far and highway patrols are scarce.
It was the dumbest thing a US President has done since Biden's anti COVID "mandatory" mania.
Of course given the universe of dumb presidential actions, I'm sure many here will have their own favorite.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Chris Renner, @Pixo
It was introduced before I was born, but in the Nixon administration (1974).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmfsmasjVA?t=0m50sReplies: @Bill Jones, @Dmon, @Kolya Krassotkin, @AndrewR
If you think Carter was not installed by the Deep State, you’re way off the mark.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1976/1/12/carters-trilateral-connection-pmondale-vance-brzezinski/
Leaving aside debates over his efficacy as President, Jimmy Carter was a good man.
Right, the Kennedys never forgave Carter for denying their golden boy the nomination.
Anyone here recall the 55 MPH federal speed limit?
Now Memory Holed, of course. We won't be reading about that in most MSM obits for poor Jimmy.
Of course it was widely ignored in the West, where distances are far and highway patrols are scarce.
It was the dumbest thing a US President has done since Biden's anti COVID "mandatory" mania.
Of course given the universe of dumb presidential actions, I'm sure many here will have their own favorite.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Chris Renner, @Pixo
Was the 55mph limit really so bad in light of the national emergency caused by the oil embargo? I know the car and life insurance industry liked it.
Was it actually aggressively enforced?
Now such a limit would be awful. I drive 80-89 when traffic permits and can’t imagine having to stick to 55.
But in some giant anti-aerodynamic 1970 Chrysler that can barely wheeze its way to 80mph?
Interesting: “ Between 1975 and 1985, average passenger vehicle mileage doubled from about 13.5 mpg to 27.5”
Indeed, people rarely drove over 65 in populated areas of the country for years. It wasn't safe in the sloppier cars of the time with most people a few miles above the limit. A federal bureaucrat named Nestor created a long firestorm in the WaPoo local section by bragging about slowing Beltway traffic by driving 55 in the fast lane, which came to be called Nestoring. Occasionally, state troopers would do that with their cars in every lane.
Carter was a Southern Democrat. In most respects he was to the right of the median Democrat in Congress. One reason why his ability as a Democrat to get his policies enacted by a Democratically controlled Congress was limited. He also preached a foreign policy that was moral, as opposed to Nixon’s more pragmatic “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB” approach. Carter’s policy sounds good in speeches but sometimes nations have to choose between two evils.
Inflation, the hostages and Desert One were the straws that broke Carter’s presidency.
I’m surprised to see so many in these parts leading their comments with a ritual assurance that Carter was “a good man.”
“Good” can be a relative term, of course; and certainly he stands apart from the weirdos and perverts that have dominated our politics for the last generation. But anyone who has been blessed to know true goodness in a human being, anyone who has been acquainted with true nobility of the soul, will not be fooled by a C-Grade simulacrum.
Carter strikes me as such a man: a figure *our culture* deems “good”—which is quite different from goodness per se. In Carter’s case, “good” was the epithet applied to him by a corrupt but temporarily humiliated culture—and which he eagerly accepted—as a euphemism for “incompetent condescending loser.” It is a “goodness” that never inspired a living soul, and to which no one would ever willingly aspire.
He was the first president in my lifetime to express public contempt for the people who elected him—and that was during the twilight of his term. After that same public rejected him at the polls, he spent the next two decades (in his ostentatious Habitat for Humanity phase) never allowing himself to be photographed without a wood timber astride his shoulder, to drive home a comparison with another J.C.
In the late 1990s, when the country was going through a painful crisis over the low morals of a sitting president, Carter remained mum on the issue, at a time when his voice and “moral standing” would have held meaning. Later, when Clinton was safely out of office, Carter boasted that he had heroically restrained himself from expressing his distaste at the time, due to the “code” of non-criticism ex-presidents abide by. But just a few years after, that code was evidently null and void for him when he seized a chance to publicly criticize the feckless Bush Jr.
In fact, in the forty years since his time in office, nothing has ever escaped Carter’s mouth that contradicted, or even challenged, his party. Strange that—because he certainly didn’t owe such loyalty to the Democrat leadership, who act as if the portrait of Carter hanging in DNC headquarters is decorated with the slogan, “Never Again!” But he’s willingly carried water for them to the end.
Had Carter pursued a destiny more suitable to his character—as a friendly high school teacher, perhaps, or the pastor of a small evangelical congregation, or the host of a Mr. Rogers type program—I’d raise no objection to the judgments about his “goodness” that we’ll most certainly be subjected to after his death. But in the present forum, we should not forget that he was a man of political ambition; he did not have high office thrust upon him, but grasped it like so many others. And like those others, he surely made whatever deals with whatever devils were necessary in 1976 to attain the top job. A reputation for “goodness” was just the popular brand for that year.
Like I said above, had I never been blessed to witness the breathtaking beauty of a truly good soul, I too might be fooled by its apparition in ex-President Carter. But he’s just the “NYT-approved” candidate, not the real thing.
They say don’t speak ill of the dead, and I’ll try to abide by that when the time comes. But Carter’s not dead yet, and these may be the last days one can speak truthfully about him. So I’ll speak in my mind, if you please. I’m sure at least some readers of iSteve will get it.
Carter did not make the clear distinction between his public duties and his private beliefs that I prefer in public figures.
I thought Rosalynn Carter sitting in on Cabinet meetings while he was POTUS was inappropriate. And I found the whole Habitat for Humanity thing very off-putting though I realize it was after he left the Oval Office. Still because he was a former president, his involvement garnered a lot of publicity.
Actually, Dritz makes a traditional darning egg, but I've never seen one in a store, even stores that carry dozens of other Dritz products. The package features a prominent ligature, something close to my heart-- the French is Œuf à repriser.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71jMPP2rgYL._AC_SY879_.jpg
There was the failed raid on Iran.
The Carter after presidency was so long that probably no person below 50 has a living memory of his presidency
I thought Rosalynn Carter sitting in on Cabinet meetings while he was POTUS was inappropriate. And I found the whole Habitat for Humanity thing very off-putting though I realize it was after he left the Oval Office. Still because he was a former president, his involvement garnered a lot of publicity.Replies: @Corn, @Reg Cæsar
I didn’t mind the Habitat for Humanity work but he let his wife sit in on Cabinet meetings?
Yes, I remember it. But you don't need to take my recollection as gospel, this is from her Wikipedia entry:
"Carter was politically active during her White House years, sitting in on Cabinet meetings. She was her husband's closest adviser. She also served as an envoy abroad, particularly in Latin America, and is considered a key figure in the Habitat for Humanity charity."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalynn_Carter
My objection was not based on the fact that she was a woman, rather that she was there as a private citizen not an elected or appointed government official.
. The French are human. Muslims?Replies: @Colin Wright, @Colin Wright, @reactionry, @reactionry
? 1962-1830 = ?
The French were also never ‘expelled.’ That they chose to leave when they could no longer be a master race is a different matter.
‘…After Algeria became independent in 1962, about 800,000 Pieds-Noirs of French nationality were evacuated to mainland France, while about 200,000 remained in Algeria. Of the latter, there were still about 100,000 in 1965 and about 50,000 by the end of the 1960s…’
The situation could probably be compared to ethnic Germans in what became the Polish Corridor after Versailles. They were treated unfairly, and certainly they were no longer top dog, but were they expelled? No.
“I’d like to understand more about the assassination attempt on Reagan.”
The unsuccessful assassin of President Reagan was named John Hinckley Jr. Hinckley’s father, John Hinckley Sr. had been a friend and oil business partner of George H.W. Bush since H.W. and family settled in Midland, Texas in the late 1940s. The dusty central Texas town had been a magnet for parasitic Eastern Seaboard gentry looking to exploit the oil boom.
Whilst the Hinckley and Bush families bonded Hinckley Sr. became deeply involved with World Vision, an NGO involved in humanitarian work. World Vision became the prototype for the archipelago of NGOs stringed across the globe serving as cover and base of operations for the CIA.
Espionage is a preoccupation of the Bush family. Prescott Bush, H.W.’s father, was a Wall Street banker and senator representing Connecticut. Prescott was one of the conspirators of the 1934 plot devised by Wall Street oligarchs to coup FDR.
After the war, Prescott encouraged H.W. to become one of Allen Dulles’s minions in the oil and financal sectors. After his stint in the U.S. Liaison Office in China, H.W. became DCI at CIA. During his short term at Langley, CIA became deeply involved with the Operation Condor assassination squads and the establishment of narco-military dictatorships throughout Latin America. He would continue to do business with these regimes in the 1980s as vice president and into the 1990s whilst president.
During the presidential election year of 1980, Neil Bush, son of H.W., was a friend and business partner of Scott Hinckley, brother to John Hinckley Jr. Both were based in Denver and attached to Vanderbilt Oil, a company owned by John Hinckley Sr. And during this period of time John Hinckley Jr. was in psychiatric care and under the influence of various psychoactives prescribed by his shrink. This mind management did not prohibit Hinckley Jr.’s arrest during the Fall of 1980 at the Nashville airport carrying three handguns on the very same day President Jimmy Carter was in town.
In the 1980 Republican contest, the Reagan’s loathing of George H.W. Bush was not a secret. However, the political operators behind Reagan knew H.W. was the candidate supported by Langley. Saying no to the CIA is not a wise idea whilst competing for the White House. It is thought that in the end it didn’t matter: CIA was going to control the executive through assassination, and if that didn’t work, and it didn’t, VP Bush was going to operate his office like a shadow CIA, in partnership with DCI William Casey.
And that’s how things turned out. Now, will you join me in my War Against Pants?
“Agree on the anti-conspiracy points.”
Of course you do.
Robert Novak in “The Prince of Darkness” wrote that Carter was one of the two most dishonest politicians he covered in over 50 years in Washington. Not dishonest in the corrupt Biden-type sense, but in the “if you asked him the time he’d lie just for the sake of it” sense.
He also agreed to give away the Panama Canal (not give back or return, it was never theirs). He should have told the Panamanians to pound sand. The only reason there is a Panama is because of that canal – show some gratitude and be quiet.
Carter post-presidency spent a lot of time criticizing current Presidents while overseas – very unseemly. That said he was the last Dem prez that seemed to actually like America and Americans.
I hear tell you got the scoop on the Barbara “Babs” Bush is the daughter of Aleister Crowley story. Spill the beans. And if you don’t have those beans you owe me the Buddy Ebsen nudes taken poolside at the McDowall mansion during season three of Barnaby Jones.
OT:
Is a major Russian offensive imminent?
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-update-218-major-war-confirmed
https://twitter.com/HumzaYousaf/status/1627084149071945730?t=xuHWPKBkzBiAjMHv4iak6w&s=19Replies: @anonymouseperson, @Anon
Why bother with Scottish independence if you are not going to have a Scottish people to enjoy it?
He took his oath of office in Urdu and spent his formative years agitating for mass “asylum-seeker” settlement in Scotland.
https://twitter.com/ThomasEvansAdur/status/1627282330179051520Replies: @Anonymous, @anonymouseperson
It should be 100% white.
=
He inherited Arthur Burns as Fed chairman; Burns may have been the least capable man to have held that that job during the period running from 1933 to 2018. Instead of replacing him immediately, Carter let him finish out his term and then appointed an industrialist to the position who had been on the board of one of the Federal Reserve Banks but otherwise had no background in economics and finance. Note, the intellectual kultursmog at the time in the Democratic Party was influenced by James Tobin, who fancied it would take 15 years to restabilize prices so the task wasn't worth doing. Arthur Burns approach to inflation had been one of learned helplessness. (Burns predecessor Wm. Martin had rapidly restabilized prices in 1951-52 and his successor managed the same in 1981-82). The escalating inflation may have been the most salient factor in sinking Carter. Then there was the secular increase in labor market sclerosis, which reached its peak around 1979. The implication of that was that you'd experience higher unemployment in an effort to re-stabilize prices.
=
Carter was given to dithering as well, as seen in his responses to various problems in foreign affairs. For all that he was an experienced executive, he couldn't seem to set priorities and got bogged down in minutiae. He also made an attempt to run the White House without a chief of staff (an attempt Jerry Ford had made as well), then put Hamilton Jordan in the job.
==
Still, you remember what counted as a scandal in 1979 and you see what's ignored today, you realize there has been a catastrophic decline in standards.Replies: @bomag, @Pixo, @George, @Dr. Doomngloom, @Ralph L, @JR Ewing
Carter did manage to accomplish partial decontrol of natural gas prices, because it could be done administratively
I had a summer job with the part of DoE that made the ’79 gas crisis worse with emergency allocation red tape and retail price caps for gas to prevent gouging, thus fucking up supply. The Administrator rode the bus to work in his sandals, but had a government car (with phone and driver) for meetings. If Carter didn’t like what his people were doing, I never heard about it.
He is a gracious man. He was gracious enough about his political defeats.
Compare to the likes of Michelle Obama, who used the microphone to let slip her inner feelings.
Can’t think of a President since Hoover who killed fewer people and started fewer wars than Carter.
https://archives.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention... We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would... That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire... What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
But very little talk about that interview ever touches on Iran. The Iranian policy of the Carter administration fit in with the Afghan policy, in ways which Carter himself may not have understood. Carter pressured the Shah into making concessions to the Ayatollah Khomeini in ways which helped to trigger an Islamic revolution in Iran. At the time this seemed like a titanic defeat for US imperialism in the Middle East. But eventually Khomeini played an important role in rallying Muslim fighters to support the war in Afghanistan against the USSR. Not only that, but the sense that Islamic fundamentalism had beaten US imperialism in Iran helped to strengthen the credibility of appeals among Muslims to support the war in Afghanistan. If the Shah had remained in power, while Carter or Reagan tried to stir Muslims into fighting the USSR in Afghanistan, there would probably have been much less enthusiasm.
Brzezinski and other State Department strategists seemed to have worked out a plan which involved sacrificing the Shah and Carter as rooks in order to lure the Soviet queen into Afghanistan. Carter comes off like a dumb humanitarian, criticizing the Shah and pressuring him to make concessions to Khomeini, only to end up helping Khomeini take power and denounce the US as "the Great Satan." Then Reagan comes in and actually sells more arms to Khomeini, but it's no longer the act of the dumb humanitarian. It's now the strong cowboy giving aid for an Islamic jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan, which Khomeini supports. A lot of it seems politically contrived, with Brzezinski probably one of the masterminds behind it.Replies: @anonymouseperson, @Colin Wright, @James N. Kennett, @YetAnotherAnon, @Art Deco
“and the end of the cold war.”
But it didn’t end. Americans never got a peace dividend. More money then ever is spent by the M.I.C. The Washington imperial Zionist machine just invented new enemies, China, Russia, etc.
Cool!
Since you got to listen to those conversations, what do men who really do work for the Secret Service use for a pickup line?
“Good” can be a relative term, of course; and certainly he stands apart from the weirdos and perverts that have dominated our politics for the last generation. But anyone who has been blessed to know true goodness in a human being, anyone who has been acquainted with true nobility of the soul, will not be fooled by a C-Grade simulacrum.
Carter strikes me as such a man: a figure *our culture* deems “good”—which is quite different from goodness per se. In Carter’s case, “good” was the epithet applied to him by a corrupt but temporarily humiliated culture—and which he eagerly accepted—as a euphemism for “incompetent condescending loser.” It is a “goodness” that never inspired a living soul, and to which no one would ever willingly aspire.
He was the first president in my lifetime to express public contempt for the people who elected him—and that was during the twilight of his term. After that same public rejected him at the polls, he spent the next two decades (in his ostentatious Habitat for Humanity phase) never allowing himself to be photographed without a wood timber astride his shoulder, to drive home a comparison with another J.C.
In the late 1990s, when the country was going through a painful crisis over the low morals of a sitting president, Carter remained mum on the issue, at a time when his voice and “moral standing” would have held meaning. Later, when Clinton was safely out of office, Carter boasted that he had heroically restrained himself from expressing his distaste at the time, due to the “code” of non-criticism ex-presidents abide by. But just a few years after, that code was evidently null and void for him when he seized a chance to publicly criticize the feckless Bush Jr.
In fact, in the forty years since his time in office, nothing has ever escaped Carter’s mouth that contradicted, or even challenged, his party. Strange that—because he certainly didn’t owe such loyalty to the Democrat leadership, who act as if the portrait of Carter hanging in DNC headquarters is decorated with the slogan, “Never Again!” But he’s willingly carried water for them to the end.
Had Carter pursued a destiny more suitable to his character—as a friendly high school teacher, perhaps, or the pastor of a small evangelical congregation, or the host of a Mr. Rogers type program—I’d raise no objection to the judgments about his “goodness” that we’ll most certainly be subjected to after his death. But in the present forum, we should not forget that he was a man of political ambition; he did not have high office thrust upon him, but grasped it like so many others. And like those others, he surely made whatever deals with whatever devils were necessary in 1976 to attain the top job. A reputation for “goodness” was just the popular brand for that year.
Like I said above, had I never been blessed to witness the breathtaking beauty of a truly good soul, I too might be fooled by its apparition in ex-President Carter. But he’s just the “NYT-approved” candidate, not the real thing.
They say don’t speak ill of the dead, and I’ll try to abide by that when the time comes. But Carter’s not dead yet, and these may be the last days one can speak truthfully about him. So I’ll speak in my mind, if you please. I’m sure at least some readers of iSteve will get it.Replies: @anon, @AnotherDad
Thanks, Chris, for saying what is true. The poor man was strongly allied to many of the bad people of Georgia of his day, because he was ambitious, and wanted a great destiny, rather than the humble destiny which, as you said, would have been so good for him. Most people don’t know that.
Most folks who call him a good man (maybe because his hobby was spending a few fun hours every once in a while on a construction site where he was always treated as God’s gift to everyone) have no idea of what the powerful politicians of his day – including him – were up to.
I pray for his soul, but I will never say, as flatterers do, that he was much more of a good man than would have been expected from someone like him – a rich man, a fairly stupid man, and a man who liked to be thought ‘not rich’ and ‘not selfish’, while being rich and selfish.
And for the record, when you are rich and retired, it is FUN to go out and work as a carpenter on a housing site. The man never asked, however, if he was making houses for bad people who would be bad next door neighbors. That was unkind on his part. I am sure he never thought about it much.
Pray for him.
. The French are human. Muslims?Replies: @Colin Wright, @Colin Wright, @reactionry, @reactionry
My God.
I hope he doesn’t linger to any degree, he will end up being paired with Francisco Franco – which would be hilariously awful even for a goober like Carter.
The planned operation to rescue the hostages was insanely complicated and highly unlikely to succeed. If it hadn’t ended on Desert One, it surely would have been a bloody debacle.
That’s funny. Commenter “Inquiring Mind” labels any questioning of orthodoxy as “trolling”.
Keep inquiring there fella.
Modernists have a fetish for naming things after their opposites.Replies: @Mr. Anon
You find it hard to believe that these groups are important because they don't invite you - Art Deco, World Historical Genius - to take part in their deliberations.
You are not invited because you are a nobody. A ridiculously naive and deluded nobody, as it happens.Replies: @Art Deco
What part of your thesis is non-imaginary? A man named Gary Allen wrote a book in 1971 called None Dare Call it Conspiracy insisting that the Council on Foreign Relations was actually running the world. (He was on the staff of the John Birch Society). The book wouldn’t impress someone who had seen schizophrenia up close and personal, but it evidently impressed you.
What do you imagine the CFR does? Why do they exist? To not be influential? Do billionaires and multinational corporations bankroll organizations like that out of the goodness of their hearts? As a tax dodge?
You're an idiot. A credulous idiot.
Worst to Least Worst
1. Joe Biden
2.LBJ
3.George Bush Jr.
4.Barack Obama
5.Donald Trump
6.George Bush Sr
7. Jimmy Carter
8.Gerald Ford
9. Richard Nixon
10. Bill Clinton
11.Ronald ReaganCue: Georgia by Ray CharlesReplies: @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @Prester John
LBJ was almost indescribably worse than Carter.
You people all realize LBJ was the mastermind of the JFK assassination, don’t you? In addition to a veritable litany of other crimes and sins.
ending civil service exams. creating Education Department. 55 mile per hour speed limit which had zero effect on oil consumption and lasted decades. permanently blocking the recycling of nuclear fuel. blocking oil products exports for decades. plenty more that i don't want to make a lengthy post about. the amount of long term knock-on damage any Democrat President can do in a single term is tremendous.
inflation was insane when this guy was in office. cars sucked A LOT. only the music was good.
lead gasoline phaseout and catalytic converters started in 1975, before Carter was in office.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Old Prude
You were on a roll until the bit about music. Disco sucked.
To bail him out, Congress established a pension for former presidents, only two of whom were alive at the time. Herbert Hoover didn’t need the money but he accepted the pension to avoid embarrassing Truman.Replies: @Art Deco
That’s what I thought. Supposedly, new research into his household ledgers has revealed his had a store of hidden assets.
Trump should have emulated him.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @Kylie, @Charles Erwin Wilson
“Carter at least knew how to act after losing. IIRC he conceded, attended the inauguration and then went away for a few years.
Trump should have emulated him.”
Apples and oranges.
Carter lost his bid for reelection, fair and square. Trump is far from the only person who believes he would have won a second term had the election not been stolen from him.
I assumed, from the other side of the Atlantic, that Carter got a worse press than he deserved.The media at that time favored the Democratic Party, but they were not yet an extension of it. Carter was generally disliked by the Democratic establishment in Washington, so was regarded by reporters and editors with more critical distance than Democratic pols usually are. He didn't get a worse press than he deserved, he just didn't get the mulligans Democratic presidents usually get (Johnson didn't get them after the summer of 1967, either).Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Pixo, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @Reg Cæsar
At best, you’re ignorant. At worst, you’re an idiot.
As Senator Schweiker said, Oswald had the “fingerprints of intelligence” all over him. Probably the Office of Naval Intelligence. In any event, the sheer volume of evidence – even after the attempted, partially successful cover-up – states quite clearly that there were multiple shooters, and that Oswald was framed.
As for the actual killers, well, it is true that Lyndon Baines Johnson was a raging narcissist.
Of all of the laughable nonsense in your “post,” the bolded part made me laugh the hardest. Multiple videos, and a large number of witnesses, confirm that Ruby was present in the Dallas Police HQ for, as a matter of fact, the entire weekend that November. He most certainly did not “happen” upon the transfer. He was stalking Oswald, as it were.
It is so, so well-documented that Ruby was present at police HQ for most of the weekend that to say he “happened” upon the prisoner transfer is stupendously idiotic. Only an idiot or a troll would say such a stupid, insane statement so clearly disproven by all evidence.
Now, from there, if you want to ignore the substance of Ruby’s connections to underworld figures themselves connected to the CIA, etc, be my guest.
And sometimes a moron is just a moron.
I don't amuse myself with onanistic pursuits, and the body of Kennedy assassination literature is just such a thing. If it pleases you to waste your time with this, that's your business. History will remain what it was, which is not what you fancy it was.Replies: @Mr. Anon
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Francis_Gary_Powers&oldid=39164675
The B-1 was never supposed to be anything more than a stopgap until the stealth tech for the B-2 was fully developed. There was nothing wrong with the Valkyrie. One crashed, but it was it wasn’t due to the airplane – it was a mid-air collision with a formation (a chase/photo plane or something). I read a book about the Valkyrie – hell of a plane!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NYPWip7H2g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ui2CE--jb8Replies: @Jim Don Bob
“Good” can be a relative term, of course; and certainly he stands apart from the weirdos and perverts that have dominated our politics for the last generation. But anyone who has been blessed to know true goodness in a human being, anyone who has been acquainted with true nobility of the soul, will not be fooled by a C-Grade simulacrum.
Carter strikes me as such a man: a figure *our culture* deems “good”—which is quite different from goodness per se. In Carter’s case, “good” was the epithet applied to him by a corrupt but temporarily humiliated culture—and which he eagerly accepted—as a euphemism for “incompetent condescending loser.” It is a “goodness” that never inspired a living soul, and to which no one would ever willingly aspire.
He was the first president in my lifetime to express public contempt for the people who elected him—and that was during the twilight of his term. After that same public rejected him at the polls, he spent the next two decades (in his ostentatious Habitat for Humanity phase) never allowing himself to be photographed without a wood timber astride his shoulder, to drive home a comparison with another J.C.
In the late 1990s, when the country was going through a painful crisis over the low morals of a sitting president, Carter remained mum on the issue, at a time when his voice and “moral standing” would have held meaning. Later, when Clinton was safely out of office, Carter boasted that he had heroically restrained himself from expressing his distaste at the time, due to the “code” of non-criticism ex-presidents abide by. But just a few years after, that code was evidently null and void for him when he seized a chance to publicly criticize the feckless Bush Jr.
In fact, in the forty years since his time in office, nothing has ever escaped Carter’s mouth that contradicted, or even challenged, his party. Strange that—because he certainly didn’t owe such loyalty to the Democrat leadership, who act as if the portrait of Carter hanging in DNC headquarters is decorated with the slogan, “Never Again!” But he’s willingly carried water for them to the end.
Had Carter pursued a destiny more suitable to his character—as a friendly high school teacher, perhaps, or the pastor of a small evangelical congregation, or the host of a Mr. Rogers type program—I’d raise no objection to the judgments about his “goodness” that we’ll most certainly be subjected to after his death. But in the present forum, we should not forget that he was a man of political ambition; he did not have high office thrust upon him, but grasped it like so many others. And like those others, he surely made whatever deals with whatever devils were necessary in 1976 to attain the top job. A reputation for “goodness” was just the popular brand for that year.
Like I said above, had I never been blessed to witness the breathtaking beauty of a truly good soul, I too might be fooled by its apparition in ex-President Carter. But he’s just the “NYT-approved” candidate, not the real thing.
They say don’t speak ill of the dead, and I’ll try to abide by that when the time comes. But Carter’s not dead yet, and these may be the last days one can speak truthfully about him. So I’ll speak in my mind, if you please. I’m sure at least some readers of iSteve will get it.Replies: @anon, @AnotherDad
Well said ChrisZ.
This idea that his wear-it-on-your-sleeve Christianity and “aw shucks” posturing makes him a “good man” is ridiculous. To me–hammered home by the arc of his post-Presidential behavior– Carter comes across as some sort of male AWFL–a yard sign virtue signaler. Being a tedious schoolmarm is fine–for schoolmarms. It is not fine for leaders.
Here’s the deal: When you seek and assume leadership you take on a duty to bust your ass to the limit of your capabilities to your utmost to look out for the long term interests of the people you have aspired to lead. If you choose not to do that for whatever reason–greed, will to power, laziness, sheer incompetence … including the desire to preen and virtue signal–you are not “a good man”. You are putting your interests above the people you lead. Not my idea of “a good man”.
https://archives.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention... We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would... That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire... What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
But very little talk about that interview ever touches on Iran. The Iranian policy of the Carter administration fit in with the Afghan policy, in ways which Carter himself may not have understood. Carter pressured the Shah into making concessions to the Ayatollah Khomeini in ways which helped to trigger an Islamic revolution in Iran. At the time this seemed like a titanic defeat for US imperialism in the Middle East. But eventually Khomeini played an important role in rallying Muslim fighters to support the war in Afghanistan against the USSR. Not only that, but the sense that Islamic fundamentalism had beaten US imperialism in Iran helped to strengthen the credibility of appeals among Muslims to support the war in Afghanistan. If the Shah had remained in power, while Carter or Reagan tried to stir Muslims into fighting the USSR in Afghanistan, there would probably have been much less enthusiasm.
Brzezinski and other State Department strategists seemed to have worked out a plan which involved sacrificing the Shah and Carter as rooks in order to lure the Soviet queen into Afghanistan. Carter comes off like a dumb humanitarian, criticizing the Shah and pressuring him to make concessions to Khomeini, only to end up helping Khomeini take power and denounce the US as "the Great Satan." Then Reagan comes in and actually sells more arms to Khomeini, but it's no longer the act of the dumb humanitarian. It's now the strong cowboy giving aid for an Islamic jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan, which Khomeini supports. A lot of it seems politically contrived, with Brzezinski probably one of the masterminds behind it.Replies: @anonymouseperson, @Colin Wright, @James N. Kennett, @YetAnotherAnon, @Art Deco
It’s worth pointing out that this also led to the death of as many as two million people and the creation of seven million refugees — a veritable Holocaust, to recycle a term.
That too should be entered into the ledger.
“I didn’t mind the Habitat for Humanity work but he let his wife sit in on Cabinet meetings?”
Yes, I remember it. But you don’t need to take my recollection as gospel, this is from her Wikipedia entry:
“Carter was politically active during her White House years, sitting in on Cabinet meetings. She was her husband’s closest adviser. She also served as an envoy abroad, particularly in Latin America, and is considered a key figure in the Habitat for Humanity charity.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalynn_Carter
My objection was not based on the fact that she was a woman, rather that she was there as a private citizen not an elected or appointed government official.
Obesity, Type II diabetes and substance abuse are largely within the power of individuals either to avoid or failing that, control. To a lesser extent, the same is true of some kinds of mental illness and dental problems.
Modern medicine should never have been prioritized over personal responsibility, as it is today, (certainly wrt obesity, Type Ii diabetes and substance abuse). I won't argue that genetics are not a factor. But healthy lifestyle choices play a big part, too.Replies: @Anon
Wrong. We were promised cures for obesity and mental illness. Same with substance abuse. Pills for all of these conditions exist.
Medicine used to work. Doctors used to cure things.
Now they don’t. It’s over. It always ends this way in a dying society.
Medicine used to work. Doctors used to cure things.
Now they don’t."
I sure don't recall those promises. The cure for obesity is to consume fewer calories. There's no cure for severe mental illness but medication can control the symptoms. There is already a cure for substance abuse. It's abstinence on the part of the abuser and it works.
You write like some spoiled brat angry with Santa on Christmas morning because he didn't bring you all the presents you demanded.Replies: @Anon
When 750,000 of 800,000 leave in an 8-year period you refuse to call that expulsion because there wasn’t an official “whites must leave” edict?
Only the higher races can do expulsions then, since the browns and blacks don’t organize and plan out their genocides and ethnic cleansings.
Call it what you like. It wasn't 'expulsion.'Replies: @bomag
I remember the XB-70 crash in the picture magazines in 1966.
1) This was a photo op for GE, period.
2) The plane cost $750 million in 1960 dollars
3) It was already obsolete given improved AA missiles
That said, it was a beautiful plane.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDze-NIz3QsReplies: @Jim Don Bob
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmfsmasjVA?t=0m50sReplies: @Bill Jones, @Dmon, @Kolya Krassotkin, @AndrewR
Jimmy Carter dies a happy man and among the happiest men who has or will ever live: he has lived to see a Presidential administration, (Brandon’s), worse than his own. He knows that when future generations speak of failed American presidencies, it will be Biden’s they first recall, instead of his.
RIP, President Carter.
(Looking forward to Brandon’s eulogy for Carter. It will be comedy gold.)
We are about to get gaslighted about how great a president Carter was and how Reagan was irrelevant or worse. Don't fall for it.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
In fairness, the Lyin’ Press had lots of good to say about Ronnie, but only when he died. The ctrl-left (of which the Lyin’ Press is an integral part) hated “Ronnie Raygun” because he called out the Communists for what they were. Then he ended it. Then, afterwards, they got jealous of that military power and many became neocons.
Thank you for the reference to the Peter Brimelow quote. That was very good.
It was under Carter that building up China became policy. Crucial steps were taken.
Zbigniew Brzezinski prevailed on Carter to let the Shah come to the US. A fatal error.
It worked too. It worked splendidly. Well, not for the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who were killed in the war. But who cares about them, really? Certainly not foreign policy gurus like Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Carter established formal relations with PRC in 1979 and received visit from Deng Xiaoping. He withdrew the American Military Assistance Advisory Group from ROC-Taiwan, more background here,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Relations_Act
This was a bestselling book in 1979–
When did Obama cast his first vote? He was the second president able to vote before age 21; Carter was the first. But Carter didn’t take advantage of it. Did BHO?
Mitch McConnell (happy birthday!) could have voted at 18 in the 1960 election. His family moved to Georgia in 1950, then to Kentucky in 1956, the year after that state joined Georgia in allowing teens to vote. It’s like his family was determined to get little Codeine Mitch into the polling booth.
Now they don't. It's over. It always ends this way in a dying society.Replies: @Kylie
“We were promised cures for obesity and mental illness. Same with substance abuse. Pills for all of these conditions exist.
Medicine used to work. Doctors used to cure things.
Now they don’t.”
I sure don’t recall those promises. The cure for obesity is to consume fewer calories. There’s no cure for severe mental illness but medication can control the symptoms. There is already a cure for substance abuse. It’s abstinence on the part of the abuser and it works.
You write like some spoiled brat angry with Santa on Christmas morning because he didn’t bring you all the presents you demanded.
We were promised miracle cures for every disease and syndrome and even re-grown limbs and teeth from stem cells. Literally nothing has improved and public health measures continue to plummet despite widespread administration of drugs, surgeries and rehab. This is not a failure of personal responsibility but a system.
If you're not aware of this then it doesn't surprise me, because you know nothing about the medical industry and have lived under a rock for the last 25 years, consuming nothing but right wing fake news. Add to that a learning disability compounded by defiant personality disorder.Replies: @Ron Mexico
Never read it.
What do you imagine the CFR does? Why do they exist? To not be influential? Do billionaires and multinational corporations bankroll organizations like that out of the goodness of their hearts? As a tax dodge?
You’re an idiot. A credulous idiot.
He also prevailed on Carter to begin backing what would become the mujahadeen, about six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. All for the purpose of giving the USSR its own Vietnam.
It worked too. It worked splendidly. Well, not for the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who were killed in the war. But who cares about them, really? Certainly not foreign policy gurus like Zbigniew Brzezinski.
I thought Rosalynn Carter sitting in on Cabinet meetings while he was POTUS was inappropriate. And I found the whole Habitat for Humanity thing very off-putting though I realize it was after he left the Oval Office. Still because he was a former president, his involvement garnered a lot of publicity.Replies: @Corn, @Reg Cæsar
Darning eggs are hard to find these days, so I got a bedpost finial at HfH’s ReStore and shoved a dowel into it. Perfect. I guess I can thank Jimmy for saving me money on new sox!
Actually, Dritz makes a traditional darning egg, but I’ve never seen one in a store, even stores that carry dozens of other Dritz products. The package features a prominent ligature, something close to my heart– the French is Œuf à repriser.
The F-117 shoot down was a mission planning fuckup; the airplane flew the same route three days in a row, and the Yugos were waiting for it the third day.
I assumed, from the other side of the Atlantic, that Carter got a worse press than he deserved.The media at that time favored the Democratic Party, but they were not yet an extension of it. Carter was generally disliked by the Democratic establishment in Washington, so was regarded by reporters and editors with more critical distance than Democratic pols usually are. He didn't get a worse press than he deserved, he just didn't get the mulligans Democratic presidents usually get (Johnson didn't get them after the summer of 1967, either).Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Pixo, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @Reg Cæsar
He also hired a needlepoint buff as bodyguard. I can’t imagine Deion Sanders would.
He put a lot of effort into reforming the fed bureaucracy, which was a regular thing that national leaders at least mentioned (example: Al Gore's Reinventing Government).
Now, the worst habits of bureaucracy are lauded as the proper way to do things.Replies: @Art Deco, @Vito Klein
Carter did away with the civil service exam. Massive mistake.
https://vdare.com/posts/whatever-happened-to-the-federal-civil-service-exam
He lived a pretty great life, but he wasn’t my cup of tea. I do remeber the beat-down P.J. O’Rourke have his and his wife’s book. GAWD that was funny.
https://archives.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention... We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would... That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire... What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
But very little talk about that interview ever touches on Iran. The Iranian policy of the Carter administration fit in with the Afghan policy, in ways which Carter himself may not have understood. Carter pressured the Shah into making concessions to the Ayatollah Khomeini in ways which helped to trigger an Islamic revolution in Iran. At the time this seemed like a titanic defeat for US imperialism in the Middle East. But eventually Khomeini played an important role in rallying Muslim fighters to support the war in Afghanistan against the USSR. Not only that, but the sense that Islamic fundamentalism had beaten US imperialism in Iran helped to strengthen the credibility of appeals among Muslims to support the war in Afghanistan. If the Shah had remained in power, while Carter or Reagan tried to stir Muslims into fighting the USSR in Afghanistan, there would probably have been much less enthusiasm.
Brzezinski and other State Department strategists seemed to have worked out a plan which involved sacrificing the Shah and Carter as rooks in order to lure the Soviet queen into Afghanistan. Carter comes off like a dumb humanitarian, criticizing the Shah and pressuring him to make concessions to Khomeini, only to end up helping Khomeini take power and denounce the US as "the Great Satan." Then Reagan comes in and actually sells more arms to Khomeini, but it's no longer the act of the dumb humanitarian. It's now the strong cowboy giving aid for an Islamic jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan, which Khomeini supports. A lot of it seems politically contrived, with Brzezinski probably one of the masterminds behind it.Replies: @anonymouseperson, @Colin Wright, @James N. Kennett, @YetAnotherAnon, @Art Deco
From that interview:
Brzezinski got what he wanted – the liberation of Poland, the country of his birth. His is a classic case of dual loyalties.
What Brzezinski did not know in 1998 was that the USA would itself become trapped in an Afghan war against his “stirred-up Moslems” and “unimportant” Taliban, and would remain there for twice as long as the USSR; Europe would be flooded with unassimilable Afghan refugees; and neither the stirred-up Moslems nor the Russian threat would go away.
Despite these grave adverse consequences, Washington hawks regarded Brzezinski’s Afghan strategy as so successful that they repeated it in Ukraine thirty years later, with potentially apocalyptic results.
Sociopaths exhibit "fearless dominance" which we on the receiving end experience as sound leadership.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2V0vOFexY4Replies: @Anonymous
Ford may have also not been a Sociopath. Not sure if you were alive.
The military wouldn’t allow Trump to end anything.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/canada-cases-right-to-die-lawsReplies: @Hibernian
I think his Christian beliefs would rule that out.
Grant wrote his memoirs for money but he needed the money very badly.
Well as a non American who knew people with Olympic dreams I don’t think fondly of Carter .
Carter didn’t seem to much like international organisations not controlled by America
America really put a lot of ugly bullying pressure on other countries to join it’s Olympic boycott .
Apollo Robbins chatted with several members of Carter’s SS detail at an event. He then sought out their supervisor, to return all the watches he had taken off them unawares.
You can bet they were very interested in learning how he did that.
“Hating Israel” = Voicing any criticisms at all of Israel’s many crimes and atrocities, no matter how mild and circumspect.
“Keeping your mouth shut / avoiding the gates of hell” = You can’t criticize Jews, goy, or else you’ll go to hell. Jews are the apple of God’s eye! Salvation is of the Jews! Shut your mouth and stop noticing what Jews are doing, or else you’re damned. It’s true because this holy book of lies that the Jews wrote says so. QED.
Comedians supposedly do million dollar private parties (to Saudi trash, etc.) "Influencers" apparently turn tricks for similar amounts to rich scumbags. This sort of thing seems quaint:
https://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/My-big-fat-10-million-bat-mitzva
A million dollars for an evening with Don Henley? Just an evening?
Even "D" list celebrities charge 5000 dollars for giving talks. So, it's hardly a surprise that former presidents, even horrible ones like the ones we've got, can make huge money. The 150k-300k that Clinton charged was probably calibrated to not seem like too much.
The question is--are the bribes worth it? Trump's greatest gift may well have simply been preventing Hillary from winning--because she never could make good those debts.Replies: @Ron Mexico
“A million dollars for an evening with Don Henley?”
Does he promise to make it “the last worthless evening you have to spend”?
Carter irritated insiders right from the start by planning to withdraw all U.S. forces from Korea.
He was “overruled.”https://thediplomat.com/2018/06/how-the-deep-state-stopped-a-us-president-from-withdrawing-us-troops-from-korea/He relied on economic and political pressure (but not military) to try to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan.https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/30/archives/carter-tells-soviet-to-pull-its-troops-out-of-afghanistan-he-warns.htmlHis “Carter Doctrine” was an attempt to avoid endless war, not foment it.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_DoctrineIn short, Carter was a dove in the eyes of the Deep State.Replies: @Corn
Years ago I read a book whose title I can’t recall about the M-I-C. It stated when Carter took office he met with the generals and proposed defense spending cuts and cuts to nuclear weapons. What I remember distinctly is the author writing that the generals reacted as if “he asked them to wear sackcloth and takes vows of poverty”.
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/21/archives/carter-to-propose-defense-fund-cuts-as-signal-to-soviet-spending.html
with Carter in 1980:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/01/29/carter-is-converted-to-a-big-spender-on-defense-projects/6a04fed3-ca48-433e-a972-cca13bdf83a0/
They got to him, just as they get through to every president, Democrat or Republican.
Don’t know him but I’ve heard it suggested that he was indeed, not a nice person. That he was rather nasty in that passive-aggressive, Southern, “bless your heart” way.
“Tributes” to Carter on his deathbed skip right past his commendable book exposing Israeli apartheid against Palestinians:
— (https://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Peace-Apartheid-Jimmy-Carter/dp/0743285034)
A lot of Jimmy Carter in SCTV’s Mayor Tommy Shanks.
Carter 1980 was the only Democratic candidate for President, in the last 100 years, to not win the Jewish vote (in fact to win it overwhelmingly). (47% Carter, 39% Reagan, 14% Anderson. So says Norman Podhoretz in Why are Jews Liberal?)
They say that Carter was the worst President ever, but I don’t think that’s true. And I don’t think this is really a partisan issue, since there have been terrible Presidents from *both* Republican and Democratic parties.
When they say that Carter was the worst, I think;”Really?” What about Nixon, that lied on an almost pathological level to the American People? Not to mention that he illegally bombed Cambodja, committing an act that can only be described as genocide. And used the U.S Military as his private army without getting consent from either Congress or the American People on anything.
Or Bill Clinton, a man that not only lied, but lied under oath repeatedly. A man that would receive fellatio in his office, the same office of the Founders, demeaning the importance of one of tyhe most iconic places in the country with vulgarity and debauchery. A man that would blatantly use his power to prmote the business of his family, getting enormously rich in the process. A man that, in his final days in office, literally sold Presidential Pardons for cash. A special power that was given to Presidents to be used in rare circumstances with enormous gravitas, and he literally sold those Pardons for cash. You committed fraud on a titanic scale and were loking at 20 years in Federal Prison, you gave good ol’ Bill 5MIL and he pardoned you and got free.
Or Trump? You need to be absolutely brain-dead to think that Trump was great. It’s obvious at this point that Trump will say and do whatever it takes to be elected. He is a narcissistic megalomaniac that doesn’t care one bit about anything else but himself. It’s obvious that Trump doesn’t care one bit about any of the things that he claim to care about. He only cares about himself. As President, he did the opposite of everything that he claimed that he would do. He didn’t build any wall, he let more immigrants in, he increased government spending on a level that puts to shame e New Deal Democrat like Roosevelt, etc. No to mention that he got elected, paradoxically, as the candidate of the “family values party”. A man that was not only divorced multiple times, but cheated repeatedly on all of his wives. But this is what you get when you elect a male diva as Preseident. Nobody noticed that Trump was a male diva because this personality type is more common in women and homosexual men than in heterosexual men. The type of person that is a narcissist that likes to be the center of attention, to receive applause and be praised
What about Geroge Bush Junior? A man of limited intellect and ability, that probably got into Yale via at least some degree of nepotism. A man that started a war under false pretext, risking the lives of American boys unnecessarily. A man that lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction or being able to make them to justify his war, when in reality that real reason is because he wanted to surpass daddy’s accomplishemnt for his own personal glory – at the cost of the lives of other people’s sons and brothers.
Now George Bush Senior was, IMO, a great President. He was a man of honor, integriity and principles. A war hero and genuine public serveant. A man that preached family values and unlike Trump actually lived them. staying married to the same woman tor 70 years and never cheating on them. Bush Senior was a good example of the kind of educated and capable Yankee businessman that made up the elite of the old Republican Party(today’s elite…well, not so great). But rhe son was a shadow of his father.
Reagan was also a very bad President. Conservatives worship him, but his Presidency was a disaster. He takes credit for the end of the U.S.S.R, when it was going to fall anyway. During his two terms, America went from the World’s greatest creditor nation to being the World’s largest debtor nation. Income inequality skyrocketed during his two administrations, as he greenlighted the FED lowering interest rates to unprocedented low levels, leading the financial sector to grow at the expense of the real economy. He accelerated the desindustrialization of America keeping tariffs low so as encourage exports from Third World nations to make them embrace capitalism at the cost of American workers which saw their jobs go to those countries. He escalated the War on Drugs to unprecedented levels, ruining the lives of many young people that had bright futures ahead of them, and that would now spend the prime years of their lives in jail because they were caught with small amounts of cocaine, amphetamines or even pot for personal consumption. No sane American that praises personal freedom can gree with this.
Carter was not perfect, but he was a good man. You might not agree with his liberal ideology, but he was a true believer in it. Like George Bush Senior, he was a man of principles that practiced what he preached. That is admirable, and rare in a politician.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Carter_(politician)
Life well lived? A former Prez can still lead. And Carter did not even when he understood what was at stakeReplies: @Hibernian
George Bush the Elder had many virtues as a person and accomplishments outside the world of politics. He was never anything resembling a principled politician. For him, issues were fungible.
After Carter book on Israel , TPTB banned Carter from speaking at the Dem conventions. And did Carter complain? Did he use his stature as an ex-prez to highlight the undemocratic forces in USA society that permitted that? Nope !
Presumably, Sailer still likes PJB and his failed attempt to rally the Right in 1992 to fight in the culture war. What did Carter do during the Culture War ? Whose side did he always take? And Sailer describes Carter’s life as well lived?
After the Watergate coup, the Dems hoped to take charge for a generation. Instead, they got Carter who pretty much took the baton with his team in the lead, and lost them the race.Replies: @Vito Klein
Yes, Trump did not start any wars.
Was it actually aggressively enforced?
Now such a limit would be awful. I drive 80-89 when traffic permits and can’t imagine having to stick to 55.
But in some giant anti-aerodynamic 1970 Chrysler that can barely wheeze its way to 80mph?
Interesting: “ Between 1975 and 1985, average passenger vehicle mileage doubled from about 13.5 mpg to 27.5”Replies: @Ralph L
Was it [55 mph limit] actually aggressively enforced?
Indeed, people rarely drove over 65 in populated areas of the country for years. It wasn’t safe in the sloppier cars of the time with most people a few miles above the limit. A federal bureaucrat named Nestor created a long firestorm in the WaPoo local section by bragging about slowing Beltway traffic by driving 55 in the fast lane, which came to be called Nestoring. Occasionally, state troopers would do that with their cars in every lane.
Your only criticism of Trump’s presidency is that he let too many immigrants in, and spent too much money. He has been replaced by Pres. Biden. Have you noticed how that is working out?
. The French are human. Muslims?Replies: @Colin Wright, @Colin Wright, @reactionry, @reactionry
OT
“…expulsion of the French from Algeria…”
From Boudoir to Pied-Noir?*
Before fleeing to France, Ira Einhorn (as suggested earlier, not related to Lois Einhorn/Ray Finkle/Sean Young) reportedly** told his (Occidental) buddy, Holly*** Maddux,”The suitcase or the coffin – or the trunk.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Einhorn
* Pied-Noir – It seems likely that when Maddux’s decomposing corpse was discovered, her feet were black.
** Unreliable source: Moi (alas, unlike Ira, I can’t do Frogsprach)
*** The day the mistress died
Also see: Charlie Hebdo, Is Le Pen mightier than the Sword of Allah?, “Je suis Charlie Martel!”
See also: Gavin Newsome, Wogs begin at Cali
He’s Scottish. There have been Muslims in Scotland for generations now. It’s not the 1920s anymore.
Carter could be expedient. Once banished from any role at the Dem Party Conventions after his book on Israel, Carter made no complaint , failed to alert border USA society what was at stake……Carter wanted to maintain his kids’ political viability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Carter_(politician)
Life well lived? A former Prez can still lead. And Carter did not even when he understood what was at stake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine:_Peace_Not_Apartheid
He was deemphasized but not banished in 2008:
https://observer.com/2008/08/at-the-2008-convention-carter-wanes-again/
A: Cambodia
https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/conservative-con-man/Rothbard debunks and demythologizes this conservative con man's aura.Carter's worst crime may well have been helping to establish the Trilateral Commission.Replies: @Not Raul, @Reg Cæsar, @Post-Postmodernist
The Rothbard column was great!
I encourage everyone to read it.
A summary wouldn’t do it justice. Too much good stuff.
“Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?” ― Murray N. Rothbard
Ford
Carter
Reagan
Bush Jr
Obama
Biden
Presidents with agency:
Bush Sr.
Presidents with slight agency through political maneuvering and horse trading:
Johnson
Nixon
Clinton
Presidents who were acting to CREATE their agency
Trump
YMMVReplies: @Art Deco
. The French are human. Muslims?Replies: @Colin Wright, @Colin Wright, @reactionry, @reactionry
Does Dhimmi Carter regret his apparent silence with respect t0 our ongoing annihilation by the in-your-face-genocidal, communist, limousine Leninist (often corporate-based) monsters of the Biden regime? The narrator in The Camp of the Saints notes that French paratroopers sang the following while in Zeralda, Algeria (chapter 46). In my opinion Edith Piaf sounds better here than did Sid Vicious when he covered I Did It My Way (alas – only have the latter on vinyl):
But it didn't end. Americans never got a peace dividend. More money then ever is spent by the M.I.C. The Washington imperial Zionist machine just invented new enemies, China, Russia, etc.Replies: @Patrick McNally
The phrase you’re quoting was Brzezinski’s, not mine. I just quoted his passages to indicate what his strategy was.
There was a CIA “message” to Carter.
https://www.grunge.com/307725/a-look-at-the-assassination-attempt-plotted-against-jimmy-carter/
- Milton FriedmanReplies: @YetAnotherAnon
What happens when the output increase is a negative?
The US/UK/EU economic (military for NS2) war on Russia removed Russian oil and gas aka “energy” from Europe.
Economies run on energy, we have 10.3% inflation. No increase in money supply (?? although I’m sure the usual suspects are fiddling the stats), but a decrease in output.
The extra costs we are seeing in Europe are extra benefits to India and China.
https://archives.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention... We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would... That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire... What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
But very little talk about that interview ever touches on Iran. The Iranian policy of the Carter administration fit in with the Afghan policy, in ways which Carter himself may not have understood. Carter pressured the Shah into making concessions to the Ayatollah Khomeini in ways which helped to trigger an Islamic revolution in Iran. At the time this seemed like a titanic defeat for US imperialism in the Middle East. But eventually Khomeini played an important role in rallying Muslim fighters to support the war in Afghanistan against the USSR. Not only that, but the sense that Islamic fundamentalism had beaten US imperialism in Iran helped to strengthen the credibility of appeals among Muslims to support the war in Afghanistan. If the Shah had remained in power, while Carter or Reagan tried to stir Muslims into fighting the USSR in Afghanistan, there would probably have been much less enthusiasm.
Brzezinski and other State Department strategists seemed to have worked out a plan which involved sacrificing the Shah and Carter as rooks in order to lure the Soviet queen into Afghanistan. Carter comes off like a dumb humanitarian, criticizing the Shah and pressuring him to make concessions to Khomeini, only to end up helping Khomeini take power and denounce the US as "the Great Satan." Then Reagan comes in and actually sells more arms to Khomeini, but it's no longer the act of the dumb humanitarian. It's now the strong cowboy giving aid for an Islamic jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan, which Khomeini supports. A lot of it seems politically contrived, with Brzezinski probably one of the masterminds behind it.Replies: @anonymouseperson, @Colin Wright, @James N. Kennett, @YetAnotherAnon, @Art Deco
Anyone here know? I hear of the Wolfowitz strategy, Brzezinski strategy, and the (some Jewish name I forget) strategy – all seeming to refer to the same thing re “Commies gone, US is only world power, this is how we get to stay that way“.
Which came first? Brzezinski wrote The Grand Chessboard in 1997.
See 1988 Piece in The Nation"The Harvard Boys do Russia".
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russia/Replies: @Bill Jones
He’s also a cousin to Elvis Presley, through the Presslar who brought that name to America. Who isn’t the King’s male line ancestor, by the way. Check out scandalous grandma Presley.
Medicine used to work. Doctors used to cure things.
Now they don’t."
I sure don't recall those promises. The cure for obesity is to consume fewer calories. There's no cure for severe mental illness but medication can control the symptoms. There is already a cure for substance abuse. It's abstinence on the part of the abuser and it works.
You write like some spoiled brat angry with Santa on Christmas morning because he didn't bring you all the presents you demanded.Replies: @Anon
Wrong.
First drug specifially designed to cure obesity (Contrave) was released in 2014:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/fda-approves-weight-loss-drug-contrave-201409127431
Long before that, high quality stimulants such as phentermine designed to suppress appetite and induce weight loss through thermogenesis:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/expert-answers/phentermine/faq-20057940
Latest FDA approved obesity drug (Wegovy) was introduced in 2021:
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-new-drug-treatment-chronic-weight-management-first-2014
We were promised miracle cures for every disease and syndrome and even re-grown limbs and teeth from stem cells. Literally nothing has improved and public health measures continue to plummet despite widespread administration of drugs, surgeries and rehab. This is not a failure of personal responsibility but a system.
If you’re not aware of this then it doesn’t surprise me, because you know nothing about the medical industry and have lived under a rock for the last 25 years, consuming nothing but right wing fake news. Add to that a learning disability compounded by defiant personality disorder.
What is your prescription for that Dr. Anon?
At best, you’re ignorant. At worst, you’re an idiot.
I don’t amuse myself with onanistic pursuits, and the body of Kennedy assassination literature is just such a thing. If it pleases you to waste your time with this, that’s your business. History will remain what it was, which is not what you fancy it was.
=
He inherited Arthur Burns as Fed chairman; Burns may have been the least capable man to have held that that job during the period running from 1933 to 2018. Instead of replacing him immediately, Carter let him finish out his term and then appointed an industrialist to the position who had been on the board of one of the Federal Reserve Banks but otherwise had no background in economics and finance. Note, the intellectual kultursmog at the time in the Democratic Party was influenced by James Tobin, who fancied it would take 15 years to restabilize prices so the task wasn't worth doing. Arthur Burns approach to inflation had been one of learned helplessness. (Burns predecessor Wm. Martin had rapidly restabilized prices in 1951-52 and his successor managed the same in 1981-82). The escalating inflation may have been the most salient factor in sinking Carter. Then there was the secular increase in labor market sclerosis, which reached its peak around 1979. The implication of that was that you'd experience higher unemployment in an effort to re-stabilize prices.
=
Carter was given to dithering as well, as seen in his responses to various problems in foreign affairs. For all that he was an experienced executive, he couldn't seem to set priorities and got bogged down in minutiae. He also made an attempt to run the White House without a chief of staff (an attempt Jerry Ford had made as well), then put Hamilton Jordan in the job.
==
Still, you remember what counted as a scandal in 1979 and you see what's ignored today, you realize there has been a catastrophic decline in standards.Replies: @bomag, @Pixo, @George, @Dr. Doomngloom, @Ralph L, @JR Ewing
If there were a way to “upvote” posts on Unz, I’d max out all of my credit for this post alone.
Hell, I’m only 49 but I’m just barely old enough to remember Joe Biden being run out of the ’88 primaries for being plagiarism. At the time it was an enormous scandal and the network newscasts led with the latest uncovered evidence every night for a a couple of weeks until he was gone. (ie “Tonight, troubling new evidence has emerged about democrat candidate Joe Biden)
When Obama picked him for VP 20 years later, I figured it was a joke and surely the plagiarism stuff would flare back up and everyone would remember why he dropped out previously. Nope.
And now he’s president and nobody talks about any of that stuff. Any accusation about his honesty or integrity is just dismissed as partisan resentment.
Another example would be the Gary Hart / Donna Rice imbroglio four years earlier. Back then it was unquestionably unacceptable, nowadays someone would make the excuse that it was just between him and his wife (the strategy Clinton used in 1998) and the rest of us needed to butt out.
I bring up democrats because the MSM does most of the current day covering up and looking the other way on their behalf. Republicans are not treated as gingerly.
https://archives.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention... We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would... That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire... What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
But very little talk about that interview ever touches on Iran. The Iranian policy of the Carter administration fit in with the Afghan policy, in ways which Carter himself may not have understood. Carter pressured the Shah into making concessions to the Ayatollah Khomeini in ways which helped to trigger an Islamic revolution in Iran. At the time this seemed like a titanic defeat for US imperialism in the Middle East. But eventually Khomeini played an important role in rallying Muslim fighters to support the war in Afghanistan against the USSR. Not only that, but the sense that Islamic fundamentalism had beaten US imperialism in Iran helped to strengthen the credibility of appeals among Muslims to support the war in Afghanistan. If the Shah had remained in power, while Carter or Reagan tried to stir Muslims into fighting the USSR in Afghanistan, there would probably have been much less enthusiasm.
Brzezinski and other State Department strategists seemed to have worked out a plan which involved sacrificing the Shah and Carter as rooks in order to lure the Soviet queen into Afghanistan. Carter comes off like a dumb humanitarian, criticizing the Shah and pressuring him to make concessions to Khomeini, only to end up helping Khomeini take power and denounce the US as "the Great Satan." Then Reagan comes in and actually sells more arms to Khomeini, but it's no longer the act of the dumb humanitarian. It's now the strong cowboy giving aid for an Islamic jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan, which Khomeini supports. A lot of it seems politically contrived, with Brzezinski probably one of the masterminds behind it.Replies: @anonymouseperson, @Colin Wright, @James N. Kennett, @YetAnotherAnon, @Art Deco
More onanistic pursuits.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/conservative-con-man/Rothbard debunks and demythologizes this conservative con man's aura.Carter's worst crime may well have been helping to establish the Trilateral Commission.Replies: @Not Raul, @Reg Cæsar, @Post-Postmodernist
Three libertarians were discussing Rothbard at a function, an economist, a historian, and one from another discipline associated with the man. They all had high praise for the man– except in the particular field they were in. Conquest’s Law in action.
This exchange was recounted by one of the participants.
Poor Jimmy tried to be all things to all men, got outfoxed by a treasonous conspiracy the GOP hatched with Tehran, pretty much the same way Dick Nixon sabotaged Vietnamese peace talks to bolster his chances for the White House eight years before. Of course, none of this was known at the time, and now only tinfoil-hat crazies think these heretical thoughts of the two men who laid the foundation for today’s Full Spectrum Dominance police state. For me the highlight of the 1976 campaign was when Carter, expressing his love of Bob Dylan’s music, couldn’t answer a reporter’s question about which album was his favorite. As the Who sang a few years earlier: hey, hung up old Mister Normal, don’t try to gain my trust, ‘cause you ain’t gonna do it any of those ways, although you suppose you must…
That has no reality outside your imagination.
Like George Bush Senior, he was a man of principles that practiced what he preached. That is admirable, and rare in a politician.
George Bush the Elder had many virtues as a person and accomplishments outside the world of politics. He was never anything resembling a principled politician. For him, issues were fungible.
https://www.newser.com/article/61aa866442baa39f5ed5307bb766d642/memphis-police-say-1-dead-10-injured-in-overnight-shootings.htmlReplies: @Reg Cæsar
Not that far from Arkabutla, where the other side of Sailer’s Law was demonstrated last week. Graceland lies in-between.
I encourage everyone to read it.
A summary wouldn’t do it justice. Too much good stuff.Replies: @Bard of Bumperstickers, @QCIC
Thank you, too. Rothbard is usually like that: not easily excerpted, though here’s a short one:
“Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?” ― Murray N. Rothbard
Yet Trump, actually caricatures of Trump and paraphrases of his words, were in “the media” 24/7.
Open a web browser: Trump.
Turn on the TV: Trump.
Turn on the radio: Trump.
Of course, the only place I only saw Trump actually in action and heard his words taken in context was on OANN. He looked pretty busy IRL and he seemed to be quite up-to-date on the issues du jour IRL.
But you seem to be having a lot of fun attacking an effigy.
Gravitas
Hell, I'm only 49 but I'm just barely old enough to remember Joe Biden being run out of the '88 primaries for being plagiarism. At the time it was an enormous scandal and the network newscasts led with the latest uncovered evidence every night for a a couple of weeks until he was gone. (ie "Tonight, troubling new evidence has emerged about democrat candidate Joe Biden)
When Obama picked him for VP 20 years later, I figured it was a joke and surely the plagiarism stuff would flare back up and everyone would remember why he dropped out previously. Nope.
And now he's president and nobody talks about any of that stuff. Any accusation about his honesty or integrity is just dismissed as partisan resentment.
Another example would be the Gary Hart / Donna Rice imbroglio four years earlier. Back then it was unquestionably unacceptable, nowadays someone would make the excuse that it was just between him and his wife (the strategy Clinton used in 1998) and the rest of us needed to butt out.
I bring up democrats because the MSM does most of the current day covering up and looking the other way on their behalf. Republicans are not treated as gingerly.Replies: @Art Deco
I seem to remember what really sank him was the speech he gave appropriating Neil Kinnock’s family history as his own. John Sasso of the Dukakis assembled a split-screen video of Biden and Kinnock, and you could see Biden cribbing almost word-for-word from Kinnock. (Biden’s actual family history resembles Kinnock’s description of his own not at all).
Poor Jimmy tried to be all things to all men, got outfoxed by a treasonous conspiracy the GOP hatched with Tehran
That has no reality outside your imagination.
I don’t suppose the CIA trained the aggressive rabbit that attacked Carter?
Actually that was one Steve Sailer! See https://www.unz.com/isteve/ny-mag-the-man-who-invented-identity-politics-for-the-new-right/#comment-1855572
Scroll up on right of that post for the photographic evidence.
Jimmy Carter is wrongly credited ( or criticized) for the push to metrification ( metric conversion), but it was his predecessor Gerald Ford who signed the bill in 1975. Ronald Reagan killed it in 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act
Who knows if his evangelical denomination is fine with euthanasia?
Thanks for the reply.
I have a general sense the bureaucracy was open for criticism in the past. Truman: The Buck Stops Here, acknowledging bureaucratic dithering. I’ve heard Kennedy would personally call up some department head who wasn’t getting something done.
I don’t hear jokes today about such. I like the one from way back where the coroner was called to Chicago City Hall to pick up a body, but he couldn’t tell which was which until quitting time.
Clinton was the last: “the era of big gov’t is over.” Bush had 9/11 right away, and the answer was that we need even more and more intrusive government. Plus, government became entrenched as the parking place for emoting women and various under performing minorities, so it got the Narrative’s imprimatur as a thing not to be talked about.
I encourage everyone to read it.
A summary wouldn’t do it justice. Too much good stuff.Replies: @Bard of Bumperstickers, @QCIC
Presidents in my lifetime who are effectively actors (figureheads), with negligible policy ideas and no agency:
Ford
Carter
Reagan
Bush Jr
Obama
Biden
Presidents with agency:
Bush Sr.
Presidents with slight agency through political maneuvering and horse trading:
Johnson
Nixon
Clinton
Presidents who were acting to CREATE their agency
Trump
YMMV
You're completely wrong about Carter, Reagan, and Bush the Younger.Replies: @QCIC
Worst to Least Worst
1. Joe Biden
2.LBJ
3.George Bush Jr.
4.Barack Obama
5.Donald Trump
6.George Bush Sr
7. Jimmy Carter
8.Gerald Ford
9. Richard Nixon
10. Bill Clinton
11.Ronald ReaganCue: Georgia by Ray CharlesReplies: @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @Prester John
Generally agree with the list, though would rate Big George a tad higher than Carter. On the other hand, no single president could arrest the spiral. Life is far too complex.
1. Carter was the first Christian president. I had never heard of born-again Christianity before Carter run as a born-again Christian, but it became a big thing to be reborn in the ’80s. For a while I considered rebirth, but opted against it.
2. Carter was the first president to ever go on TV and say “Ah cannot lie to the American people”, still one of the wittiest one-liners of all time.
3. Carter was no friend of the US dollar, and interest rates reached 20%.
4. Carter was the first president to admit to committing adultery in his heart…many times, and commented that the wife of the president of Haiti was “slim …very slim”.
This is a very strange evaluation. Carter was a Southern Baptist with an evangelical sensibility, which was fairly novel. He wasn't the 1st Christian.Replies: @Jonathan Mason
World changing events like that don’t happen spontaneously, although there was a predisposition for something like that to happen eventually due to the weaknesses of the Soviet assistance. As for crediting it to Reagan, it was generally recognized that great credit was due to him along with Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul, with some due to Prime Minister Thatcher.
Cut and paste error. Didn't catch it til the deadline for edits was past.
…the Soviet system.
Cut and paste error. Didn’t catch it til the deadline for edits was past.
If the Dems distanced themselves from him, that just might have been because he was unpopular with the 98% of Americans who aren’t part of your Grand Jewish Conspiracy. Reagan won 44 freakin’ states in ’80.
After the Watergate coup, the Dems hoped to take charge for a generation. Instead, they got Carter who pretty much took the baton with his team in the lead, and lost them the race.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Carter_(politician)
Life well lived? A former Prez can still lead. And Carter did not even when he understood what was at stakeReplies: @Hibernian
The book was published in 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine:_Peace_Not_Apartheid
He was deemphasized but not banished in 2008:
https://observer.com/2008/08/at-the-2008-convention-carter-wanes-again/
The FBI had problems in its intramural culture (see the Ruby Ridge fiasco, where they sent a small army to arrest a man for missing a court date on a minor charge ginned up by an agent provacateur, ended up killing his 11 year old son and his pregnant wife, after which the Department of Justice ran interference for the trigger-happy asshat responsible when local prosecutors went after him). They seem to have gone completely off the rails after 2001 and are now more dangerous than the characters they’re supposed to be investigating.
Ford
Carter
Reagan
Bush Jr
Obama
Biden
Presidents with agency:
Bush Sr.
Presidents with slight agency through political maneuvering and horse trading:
Johnson
Nixon
Clinton
Presidents who were acting to CREATE their agency
Trump
YMMVReplies: @Art Deco
Presidents in my lifetime who are effectively actors (figureheads), with negligible policy ideas and no agency
You’re completely wrong about Carter, Reagan, and Bush the Younger.
Reagan was the best con ever and I understand why some people liked him.
I wish you were joking about Bush the younger.
But it doesn't matter, they are all out of the picture.
+++
Trump is the most interesting. Some good, some bad, what's the bottom line?Replies: @Art Deco
https://twitter.com/HumzaYousaf/status/1627084149071945730?t=xuHWPKBkzBiAjMHv4iak6w&s=19Replies: @anonymouseperson, @Anon
No true Scotsman.
1. Carter was the first Christian president. I had never heard of born-again Christianity before Carter run as a born-again Christian, but it became a big thing to be reborn in the ’80s. For a while I considered rebirth, but opted against it.
This is a very strange evaluation. Carter was a Southern Baptist with an evangelical sensibility, which was fairly novel. He wasn’t the 1st Christian.
Depends on how you account the Iranian revolution and subsequent events.
Compare Carter in February of 1977
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/21/archives/carter-to-propose-defense-fund-cuts-as-signal-to-soviet-spending.html
with Carter in 1980:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/01/29/carter-is-converted-to-a-big-spender-on-defense-projects/6a04fed3-ca48-433e-a972-cca13bdf83a0/
They got to him, just as they get through to every president, Democrat or Republican.
I don't amuse myself with onanistic pursuits, and the body of Kennedy assassination literature is just such a thing. If it pleases you to waste your time with this, that's your business. History will remain what it was, which is not what you fancy it was.Replies: @Mr. Anon
You are not some unimpeachable source, you arrogant prig. You are a yammering idiot perched on a stool at a library reference desk. What you think or imagine may or may not have happened with regards to the Kennedy assassination or any of the other events of recent history is of no interest given that you think little and imagine not at all.
Commenter Art Deco is indeed a moron, although a highly educated one. He is a university librarian who resents the fact that, although stuffed with learning, he is an unimportant nobody and a failure. So he hangs out here, dispensing what he imagines to be wisdom, but which is in fact nothing more than stale conformism.
He did, however, preside over the deregulation of airlines and the abolishing of the Interstate Commerce Commission, both of which have saved people untold amounts of money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NYPWip7H2g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ui2CE--jb8Replies: @Jim Don Bob
Here is another video. The guy makes 3 points:
1) This was a photo op for GE, period.
2) The plane cost $750 million in 1960 dollars
3) It was already obsolete given improved AA missiles
That said, it was a beautiful plane.
Nope. Here is none other than some guy named Stephen Sailor, or something, explaining what happened:
https://vdare.com/posts/whatever-happened-to-the-federal-civil-service-exam
It's probably on YouTube - I haven't bothered to check. But it happened. I saw it personally several times.
To do this at a time when the American Automobile Industry was reeling from blows that the OPEC Arab Oil Embargo had imposed on us was frankly disgusting and unpatriotic.
I am aware that Eleanor Roosevelt did ads for margarine, encouraging people to use margarine instead of butter. I have always heard that that was due to the need for reducing dairy usage - maybe Korean war related, I'm not sure. But as FDR was and is such an icon of the Left, it's probably worth looking into to see if that's not just more leftist propaganda.Replies: @Art Deco
It’s vaguely amusing.
Still, that was a decade before Subaru established their plant in northwest Indiana. She could have waited.
Subaru has five plants, four close together at home in Gunma Prefecture, and the other in Lafayette. (They did make Crosstreks in Malaysia for a while.) Half of their North American sales are fulfilled by the Hoosiers.Replies: @houston 1992, @Ralph L
Keep inquiring there fella.Replies: @Bill
Sort of like _The Skeptical Inquirer_ contains neither skepticism nor inquiry. Sort of like “All Things Considered” considers very few things. “Finding yourself” involves leaving everything you know and are and sitting at the feet of some mountain yogi. etc.
Modernists have a fetish for naming things after their opposites.
You can bet they were very interested in learning how he did that.Replies: @prosa123, @OilcanFloyd
Another big Carter-era black eye for the Secret Service was when they cleared John Wayne Gacy to meet Rosalynn Carter at a political event. While his serial killings (which were in progress at the time) hadn’t yet come to light, he was a convicted sex criminal who had served time in prison.
The easy way to determine a politician’s fidelity to the Deep State is to look at how honored they are in death. For comparison purposes: John McCain got wall to wall coverage of two funerals and lay in state in the Capitol rotunda.
After the Watergate coup, the Dems hoped to take charge for a generation. Instead, they got Carter who pretty much took the baton with his team in the lead, and lost them the race.Replies: @Vito Klein
Nah, Carter won because Ford was seen as a creature of the swamp who didn’t deserve the office he was in. Reagan nearly ousted him in ’76. In 1980, Reagan out outsidered Carter.
You're completely wrong about Carter, Reagan, and Bush the Younger.Replies: @QCIC
Carter is in his own category since he was a Navy man, but it worked out about the same IMO.
Reagan was the best con ever and I understand why some people liked him.
I wish you were joking about Bush the younger.
But it doesn’t matter, they are all out of the picture.
+++
Trump is the most interesting. Some good, some bad, what’s the bottom line?
Nope. No occupant of the office since Eisenhower was more on the level.
Agree completely. People should have gone to jail for Ruby Ridge. Bill Barr was prominent among those defending the sniper Horiuchi who shot Randy Weaver’s wife in the head as she was standing inside holding her infant child.
I call it choosing France over staying in a hostile and badly run pseudo-socialist Arab dictatorship. Poverty and harassment over life in a relatively prosperous and secure nation of fellow Europeans? Oh, that’s a tough call…
Call it what you like. It wasn’t ‘expulsion.’
That picture really makes me not want to age. I wonder if the rest of the house is that tacky, or is that just a nook where they take pictures showing how normal they are?
Since you got to listen to those conversations, what do men who really do work for the Secret Service use for a pickup line?Replies: @OilcanFloyd
It was just 8 hours straight of locker room talk.
Years ago I saw him on the television news. It seems that he happened to be in Britain and had agreed to be interviewed live about some crisis or other. He proceeded to say that he didn’t know anything about it, because he was here for a convention on Dylan Thomas and was out of touch with events in Washington. Think it through.
He can only have attended the convention (and yes, inevitably guarded like a ton of gold) because he was genuinely a Dylan Thomas fan. Starting with Trump and working backwards, can you imagine any of the rest being a fan of anyone other than themselves? GWHB perhaps.
Yet why did he give the interview? A worldlier man would have pretended to have something to say. A really worldly man would have turned down the interview and let “sources” leak the story of Humble Jimmy. Instead, he humbly did his own humility signalling just like us ordinary folks. After peeling two layers of the onion, you just have to stop and accept that the onion has been sufficiently peeled.
He certainly had a good retirement.
It's vaguely amusing.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
In fairness to Susan, Charlesz is wrong. She is merely a “famous photographer”. Unlike later (or earlier) White House families, the Fords were not that much in the public eye. I’m willing to bet most of the viewers would not have recognized her. Subaru chose her, as they did the others in the ad, because of her surname, not her family.
Still, that was a decade before Subaru established their plant in northwest Indiana. She could have waited.
Subaru has five plants, four close together at home in Gunma Prefecture, and the other in Lafayette. (They did make Crosstreks in Malaysia for a while.) Half of their North American sales are fulfilled by the Hoosiers.
RIP, President Carter.
(Looking forward to Brandon's eulogy for Carter. It will be comedy gold.)Replies: @Carroll price
Jimmy Carter was far too decent a person to succeed at a job requiring the morals and instincts of a Mafia hit man.
For that, he should be honored and respected, not ridiculed and made fun-of by a howling mob of half-wits.
1. The sense to know who to listen to in regard to monetary policy
2. Satisfactory people skills in order to sell his programs and negotiate with people.
3. To be sufficiently steadfast to see a task through.
4. To get the right personnel in place, to get the paperflow right, and to avoid micromanaging.
Ronald Reagan had these skills, so had some worthwhile accomplishments.
I would have been proud to have called Carter my friend, but I was embarassed to call him my President.
Trump should have emulated him.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @Kylie, @Charles Erwin Wilson
I’ll bet you think that having more ballots counted than registered voters is NOT, repeat NOT, indicative of election fraud.
He required a number of things, none of which are peculiar to mafia hit men:
1. The sense to know who to listen to in regard to monetary policy
2. Satisfactory people skills in order to sell his programs and negotiate with people.
3. To be sufficiently steadfast to see a task through.
4. To get the right personnel in place, to get the paperflow right, and to avoid micromanaging.
Ronald Reagan had these skills, so had some worthwhile accomplishments.
Wow, if this isn’t the confab of addled-brain boomers all claiming “Jimma” was a good man; if so, then Kamala Harris is a font of wisdom, Barak Obama does not hate America, and Joe Biden is not the corrupt instrument of the communists that run China.
The cowardly Carter was bested by a swamp rat. Carter railed on the Secret Service for not protecting his magisterial personage from being accosted by a damned swimming rat.
Carter destroyed mid-sized farming and American international prestige. Carter sold the Panama Canal to ingratiate himself with Hispanics. Those Hispanics did not care one whit about Carter’s blunder. Carter presumed to put “human rights” at the top of his agenda but managed to undermine human rights for the Iranians, the victims of Soviet oppression, and even his peace deal was an illusion driven by Carter’s delusions of grandeur.
Carter was an instrument of the globalists. You boomer acolytes are not just wrong about Carter, you are wrong-headed. But hey, there is nothing new under the sun. And Jimma advanced the globalist agenda, and all of you Carter groupies, with your blinkered perspective, applaud Jimma as a good man. Your marijuana use did not just affect you back in the day, it still has dulled your senses and rendered your attempts a reason risible.
==
He did nothing of the kind. People leave farming because it's a difficult business to be in and they have other options.
Still, that was a decade before Subaru established their plant in northwest Indiana. She could have waited.
Subaru has five plants, four close together at home in Gunma Prefecture, and the other in Lafayette. (They did make Crosstreks in Malaysia for a while.) Half of their North American sales are fulfilled by the Hoosiers.Replies: @houston 1992, @Ralph L
where do they make the engines and the transmissions?
Subaru Of Indiana Automotive Expands Lafayette Facility, Adds Transmission Assembly
https://youtu.be/xW4SVoTd4EQDon't miss his 540°Replies: @Gore 2004, @propagandist hacker
white boy summer is coming.. are you ready?
Modernists have a fetish for naming things after their opposites.Replies: @Mr. Anon
Quite true. Well said. And isn’t that the truth about the ridiculously named “Skeptical Inquirer”.
Call it what you like. It wasn't 'expulsion.'Replies: @bomag
The FLN made it clear they were going to ethnic cleanse. You protest too much.
Judging by the the rate of emigration -- ten years? -- they were apparently pretty lackadaisical about the 'ethnic cleansing.'
Look: I'm not going to go to bat for the equity and humanity of the FLN. I'm certainly not going to stand up for their economic policies. But 'expulsion' simply appears to be the wrong word for what happened. It wasn't Palestine 1948. It looks more like the Polish Corridor, 1918-1925.
The past is what it was; not what your ideological preferences need it to be.Replies: @bomag
https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/conservative-con-man/Rothbard debunks and demythologizes this conservative con man's aura.Carter's worst crime may well have been helping to establish the Trilateral Commission.Replies: @Not Raul, @Reg Cæsar, @Post-Postmodernist
Relevant:
How Right Was Reagan?, Richard Gamble, The American Conservative, 2009
Selected excerpts:
==
It's also misleading to refer to Bacevich as a 'conservative'. The only sense in which he is is that he persuaded certain editors (John O'Sullivan, Richard John Neuhaus, Scott McConnell) to publish his work. You would be hard put to find in any of his public writings a defense of a position those editors claimed to value (with the qualified exception of his articles in The American Conservative arguing the military could accomplish nothing in any venue.) Note, he stopped submitting pieces to Richard John Neuhaus First Things and began placing them in Commonweal. There's a lesson in that.
We were promised miracle cures for every disease and syndrome and even re-grown limbs and teeth from stem cells. Literally nothing has improved and public health measures continue to plummet despite widespread administration of drugs, surgeries and rehab. This is not a failure of personal responsibility but a system.
If you're not aware of this then it doesn't surprise me, because you know nothing about the medical industry and have lived under a rock for the last 25 years, consuming nothing but right wing fake news. Add to that a learning disability compounded by defiant personality disorder.Replies: @Ron Mexico
” Add to that a learning disability compounded by defiant personality disorder.”
What is your prescription for that Dr. Anon?
LOL. I remember that. There are photos of them shaking hands. He was a local Dem political operative, BTW. Not sure which of the two-the killer pedo or the political hack/hick-I felt sorrier for.
Just think, if Gacy hadn’t been caught, he could have become Mayor of South Bend–they like ’em like that.
Regarding the Secret Service:
Q: How do we know that the U.S. government wasn’t involved in the JFK assassination?
A: He’s dead, isn’t he?
1) This was a photo op for GE, period.
2) The plane cost $750 million in 1960 dollars
3) It was already obsolete given improved AA missiles
That said, it was a beautiful plane.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDze-NIz3QsReplies: @Jim Don Bob
The surviving Valkyrie is on display at the USAF museum in Dayton, Ohio. The museum is free and well worth a day’s visit.
Is impressive what can be achieved with a slide rule.
But the explosion of greenhouse gases from more jets! How dare he!
Still, that was a decade before Subaru established their plant in northwest Indiana. She could have waited.
Subaru has five plants, four close together at home in Gunma Prefecture, and the other in Lafayette. (They did make Crosstreks in Malaysia for a while.) Half of their North American sales are fulfilled by the Hoosiers.Replies: @houston 1992, @Ralph L
I heard recently that GM owned 20% of Subaru at some point before bankruptcy, when I was a stockholder. Isuzu and Daewoo I knew about, and Ford & Mazda.
Subaru should have bought Saab. They weren't that different, and even share letters.
Reagan was the best con ever and I understand why some people liked him.
I wish you were joking about Bush the younger.
But it doesn't matter, they are all out of the picture.
+++
Trump is the most interesting. Some good, some bad, what's the bottom line?Replies: @Art Deco
Reagan was the best con ever and I understand why some people liked him.
Nope. No occupant of the office since Eisenhower was more on the level.
The cowardly Carter was bested by a swamp rat. Carter railed on the Secret Service for not protecting his magisterial personage from being accosted by a damned swimming rat.
Carter destroyed mid-sized farming and American international prestige. Carter sold the Panama Canal to ingratiate himself with Hispanics. Those Hispanics did not care one whit about Carter's blunder. Carter presumed to put "human rights" at the top of his agenda but managed to undermine human rights for the Iranians, the victims of Soviet oppression, and even his peace deal was an illusion driven by Carter's delusions of grandeur.
Carter was an instrument of the globalists. You boomer acolytes are not just wrong about Carter, you are wrong-headed. But hey, there is nothing new under the sun. And Jimma advanced the globalist agenda, and all of you Carter groupies, with your blinkered perspective, applaud Jimma as a good man. Your marijuana use did not just affect you back in the day, it still has dulled your senses and rendered your attempts a reason risible.Replies: @Art Deco
Carter destroyed mid-sized farming and American international prestige.
==
He did nothing of the kind. People leave farming because it’s a difficult business to be in and they have other options.
How Right Was Reagan?, Richard Gamble, The American Conservative, 2009Selected excerpts:Replies: @Art Deco
Bacevich is passably talented at pseudo authoritative discussions of things he doesn’t know much about. Have a gander at the data on the evolution of the ratio of federal debt to domestic product, and you’ll see why Reagan was very loath to agree to tax increases.
==
It’s also misleading to refer to Bacevich as a ‘conservative’. The only sense in which he is is that he persuaded certain editors (John O’Sullivan, Richard John Neuhaus, Scott McConnell) to publish his work. You would be hard put to find in any of his public writings a defense of a position those editors claimed to value (with the qualified exception of his articles in The American Conservative arguing the military could accomplish nothing in any venue.) Note, he stopped submitting pieces to Richard John Neuhaus First Things and began placing them in Commonweal. There’s a lesson in that.
Art Deco is a highly educated moron, a type that haunts academia. He sits atop a stool at the reference desk of a university library and seethes with resentment that all the World does not recognize and praise his erudition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmfsmasjVA?t=0m50sReplies: @Bill Jones, @Dmon, @Kolya Krassotkin, @AndrewR
Is it shameful to die in hospice? Let him and his family announce his health status and medical treatments as they wish.
So do something about it
Apparently they are made in-house. Transmissions were made only in Gunma, Japan, until recently:
Subaru Of Indiana Automotive Expands Lafayette Facility, Adds Transmission Assembly
Ford owns Volvo, and GM owned Saab. You can tell the difference! Funny how the only GM division not bailed out by its government was the one based in “socialist” Sweden.
Subaru should have bought Saab. They weren’t that different, and even share letters.
Carter was a decent man but a ridiculous President, and that he imagined he could lead the country shows how naïve he was.
I would have been proud to have called Carter my friend, but I was embarassed to call him my President.
By which time Jeffrey Sachs had finished the first round of looting Russia (and knocking 5 years off life expectancy.)
See 1988 Piece in The Nation“The Harvard Boys do Russia”.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russia/
We should be mourning the 900 dead in Jonestown thanks to Harvey Milk and Milk’s support from Carter. I met Carter several times and dined with his wife, who thought North Korea was fabulous. The Carter Center in Atlanta supports despots and domestic terrorists like Bernardine Dohrn. Having some familiarity with both of them, I think of them as Maoists.
Had he gotten a second term, the lower-middle-class in America would have hive collapsed decades earlier.
I was a lobbyist at the Georgia General Assembly for several years. Across the political spectrum, to a truly fascinating degree, I never met anyone who didn’t dislike him.
An egotistical, entirely self-centered man, I offer one fun anecdote, which also illustrates his pinched ego.
He holds a world record in the number of books he can sign in a minute.
Did they? When?
Judging by the the rate of emigration — ten years? — they were apparently pretty lackadaisical about the ‘ethnic cleansing.’
Look: I’m not going to go to bat for the equity and humanity of the FLN. I’m certainly not going to stand up for their economic policies. But ‘expulsion’ simply appears to be the wrong word for what happened. It wasn’t Palestine 1948. It looks more like the Polish Corridor, 1918-1925.
The past is what it was; not what your ideological preferences need it to be.
This is a very strange evaluation. Carter was a Southern Baptist with an evangelical sensibility, which was fairly novel. He wasn't the 1st Christian.Replies: @Jonathan Mason
They were pretty much all nominal Christians, but functional atheists or agnostics, but he was the first believer.
You don't know what you're talking about.
See 1988 Piece in The Nation"The Harvard Boys do Russia".
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russia/Replies: @Bill Jones
Fuckit SB 1998 piece.
You can bet they were very interested in learning how he did that.Replies: @prosa123, @OilcanFloyd
I remember reading about that. From what I could tell, at least on a commercial airliner, there were at least three layers of security: the men escorting the president, obvious agents in suits and earpieces sitting throughout the plane, and the ordinary dressed men who stood in the aisle talking near me for the whole flight. I’m sure there were others who were less obvious. I wonder which ones Robbins victimized?
The Valkyrie was my favorite plane as a kid.
Is impressive what can be achieved with a slide rule.
Had he gotten a second term, the lower-middle-class in America would have hive collapsed decades earlier.
I was a lobbyist at the Georgia General Assembly for several years. Across the political spectrum, to a truly fascinating degree, I never met anyone who didn't dislike him.
An egotistical, entirely self-centered man, I offer one fun anecdote, which also illustrates his pinched ego.
He holds a world record in the number of books he can sign in a minute.Replies: @OilcanFloyd, @Art Deco
I also have an anecdote, and JC struck me as a creep.
Any thoughts on Tommie Williams?
but functional atheists or agnostics
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Had he gotten a second term, the lower-middle-class in America would have hive collapsed decades earlier.
I was a lobbyist at the Georgia General Assembly for several years. Across the political spectrum, to a truly fascinating degree, I never met anyone who didn't dislike him.
An egotistical, entirely self-centered man, I offer one fun anecdote, which also illustrates his pinched ego.
He holds a world record in the number of books he can sign in a minute.Replies: @OilcanFloyd, @Art Deco
Not buying, sister.
Carter was a micro manager, who was unable or unwilling to delegate, the authority to manage, even the most trivial of tasks. Like the other engineer president, Hoover, the job simply swallowed him.
Much to his credit, unlike, like any of his successors Mr. Carter, didn't get super rich as an ex-president.
God Bless, Jimmy CarterReplies: @Art Deco, @Cato
In 1976 my friends were mostly evangelical fellow travelers. We were enthusiastic about the prospect of having a born-again president. Four years later, we all voted for Reagan. Now, I can’t remember why. Was he really that bad?
John McCain once insulted Jimmy Carter. This is how Carter slapped him down (48 sec video):
Jimmy Carter was/is a thoroughly decent man.
Bad monetary policy, dithering in foreign policy and serial embarrassments therein.
Just like his ties.
His failures as President centered on his being a good man , the kind rather easily played upon by the perennially sneaky and devious. The left wing of the Democrat Party, controlled fiscally and intellectually by Jews, wanted him rendered impotent, so they could claim the right to begin purging Middle American whites from Democrat positions off power, so they could redirect the party totally. Allied with them were the emerging Neocons. Those Jews whose foreign policy had 2 prongs (PRO-Israel and anti-Russia {even more than anti-USSR}) began migrating into the Republican Party in droves during the Carter years. And yes, many of them had strong family ties to the Trotsky wing of Bolshevism. So, anti-USSR hawks in the Republican Party got a boost, but one that was anything but conservative and, in fact, was influened significantly by a brand of Marxism that was even more brutal, even more anti-christian and anti-white Gentile, than was Stalinism.
Carter did not grasp those things, but then neither did Reagan, who actually was the bigger dupe in the process. The result was that each party got a hard kick toward the Left in key ways, with Jews emerging with near total control of national foreign policy and national 'racial' policy. It has been all downhill since.Replies: @Patrick McNally, @James Forrestal
Looks like one of the Hebraic “Hibernian” contingent feels compelled to shriek and gibber incoherently in response to your mention of this well-known association of “former” Trotskyites with neo”conservatism.”
From the “admission against interest” standpoint, here’s the Baalfather of neoconservatism himself, Irving Kristol, in his notorious 1995 screed Neo-Conservatism: “I regard myself lucky to have been a young Trotskyite and I have not one single bitter memory.”
And here’s Stephen Schwarz ranting in the pages of the Neocon Review itself, where he attempts to “refute” the neo-Trotskyite “canard”… by inveighing against those evil Stalinist revisionist wreckers, and declaring that “To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who alone, and pursued from country to country, and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot little house in Mexico City” and so forth.
Clearly the neocons have absolutely no connection (or loyalty) to their fellow tribesman Bronshtein…
Bill King quite rightly points out how silly it is when Right-wing kooks use such a statement to suggest that Kristol was "Trotskyist" in any sense:
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0304/0304neocontrotp1.htm
-----
While steeped in the world of hyper-intellectual debating at CCNY, Kristol was not an SWP or YPSL-FI member -- and much less a full blown Trotskyist ideologue, as is often implied by those seeking to exaggerate his Trotskyist credentials. Infamously, James P. Cannon, Irish-American leader of the Trotskyists, once admonished Kristol and his friend and fellow CCNYer Earl Raab for not joining the SWP. From Mexico, Trotsky himself cast a wary eye on the YPSL's and fellow travelers such as Kristol and Raab because of their "lack of experience" and, more damningly, for their "petty bourgeois" backgrounds. [10]
Despite Cannon's scoldings, Kristol never did join the "official" Trotskyists of the SWP, but rather the heretical offshoot led by Max Shachtman, the Workers' Party (WP), in 1940. More importantly, Kristol belonged to a small intra-party faction inside the WP known as the "Shermanites" which was led by future Sociologist Philip Selznick, and also included Lipset, Himmelfarb, and Diamond, i.e. the only other neoconservatives to have been associated with Trotskyism. What is key here, and what for the most part has been overlooked, is that the Shermanites considered not only Stalinism but Bolshevism, which in their context meant Trotskyism, to be "… bureaucratic, totalitarian, and undemocratic". [11] Decisive to Kristol and the others' rejection of Marxism and Trotskyism was Robert Michels' Political Parties, which was introduced to the group by Selznick. [12] This "premature" anti-communism was so anathema to Shachtman that after Kristol and the tiny band of Shermanites resigned from the Workers' Party in 1941, a mere one year after they had joined, they were then retroactively expelled. The journal that Kristol and the Shermanites briefly published after their expulsion from the Workers Party, Enquiry, far from providing "conventional Marxist fare" as has been claimed by one scholar, in fact consisted mainly of substantive critiques of Marxism, Leninism, and Trotskyism, all the more noteworthy for the youthfulness of those making them. [13]
-----
Trotsky was a courageous man of integrity, much more than a scoundrel like Solzhenitsyn. Trotsky was refused refugee status in the US by the Roosevelt administration because he had counseled his followers to treat the coming World War II as an inter-imperialist war which the proletarian classes were to turn against. The leaders of the Socialist Workers Party spent a year in prison over this, 1944-5. If Solzhenitsyn had had any integrity, he would have denounced the US war in Indochina; But instead he sought to position himself alongside of the incoming neocons with the Reagan administration by claiming that the US should have kept the war in Vietnam going. There's good reason for Trotsky to be respected as a man of integrity in his positions. But those positions were not at all similar to what neocons adopted.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Judging by the the rate of emigration -- ten years? -- they were apparently pretty lackadaisical about the 'ethnic cleansing.'
Look: I'm not going to go to bat for the equity and humanity of the FLN. I'm certainly not going to stand up for their economic policies. But 'expulsion' simply appears to be the wrong word for what happened. It wasn't Palestine 1948. It looks more like the Polish Corridor, 1918-1925.
The past is what it was; not what your ideological preferences need it to be.Replies: @bomag
Quibbling. There were pressures to push the French out. Ten years is short enough for these sorts of things.
Wikipedia used to have an interesting snippet throwing light on Oswald’s earlier work in intelligence – as Gary Powers’ radio contact, no less.
For unknown reasons, this sentence is no longer present in the current version of the Wikipedia entry.
Oswald’s role was apparently mentioned in a book Powers later co-wrote, Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident. Powers himself died in 1977 when the traffic helicopter he was flying over LA crashed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Francis_Gary_Powers&oldid=39164675
From the "admission against interest" standpoint, here's the Baalfather of neoconservatism himself, Irving Kristol, in his notorious 1995 screed Neo-Conservatism: “I regard myself lucky to have been a young Trotskyite and I have not one single bitter memory.”
And here's Stephen Schwarz ranting in the pages of the Neocon Review itself, where he attempts to "refute" the neo-Trotskyite "canard"... by inveighing against those evil Stalinist revisionist wreckers, and declaring that "To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who alone, and pursued from country to country, and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot little house in Mexico City" and so forth.
Clearly the neocons have absolutely no connection (or loyalty) to their fellow tribesman Bronshtein...Replies: @Patrick McNally
> here’s the Baalfather of neoconservatism himself, Irving Kristol, in his notorious 1995 screed Neo-Conservatism
Bill King quite rightly points out how silly it is when Right-wing kooks use such a statement to suggest that Kristol was “Trotskyist” in any sense:
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0304/0304neocontrotp1.htm
—–
While steeped in the world of hyper-intellectual debating at CCNY, Kristol was not an SWP or YPSL-FI member — and much less a full blown Trotskyist ideologue, as is often implied by those seeking to exaggerate his Trotskyist credentials. Infamously, James P. Cannon, Irish-American leader of the Trotskyists, once admonished Kristol and his friend and fellow CCNYer Earl Raab for not joining the SWP. From Mexico, Trotsky himself cast a wary eye on the YPSL’s and fellow travelers such as Kristol and Raab because of their “lack of experience” and, more damningly, for their “petty bourgeois” backgrounds. [10]
Despite Cannon’s scoldings, Kristol never did join the “official” Trotskyists of the SWP, but rather the heretical offshoot led by Max Shachtman, the Workers’ Party (WP), in 1940. More importantly, Kristol belonged to a small intra-party faction inside the WP known as the “Shermanites” which was led by future Sociologist Philip Selznick, and also included Lipset, Himmelfarb, and Diamond, i.e. the only other neoconservatives to have been associated with Trotskyism. What is key here, and what for the most part has been overlooked, is that the Shermanites considered not only Stalinism but Bolshevism, which in their context meant Trotskyism, to be “… bureaucratic, totalitarian, and undemocratic”. [11] Decisive to Kristol and the others’ rejection of Marxism and Trotskyism was Robert Michels’ Political Parties, which was introduced to the group by Selznick. [12] This “premature” anti-communism was so anathema to Shachtman that after Kristol and the tiny band of Shermanites resigned from the Workers’ Party in 1941, a mere one year after they had joined, they were then retroactively expelled. The journal that Kristol and the Shermanites briefly published after their expulsion from the Workers Party, Enquiry, far from providing “conventional Marxist fare” as has been claimed by one scholar, in fact consisted mainly of substantive critiques of Marxism, Leninism, and Trotskyism, all the more noteworthy for the youthfulness of those making them. [13]
—–
Trotsky was a courageous man of integrity, much more than a scoundrel like Solzhenitsyn. Trotsky was refused refugee status in the US by the Roosevelt administration because he had counseled his followers to treat the coming World War II as an inter-imperialist war which the proletarian classes were to turn against. The leaders of the Socialist Workers Party spent a year in prison over this, 1944-5. If Solzhenitsyn had had any integrity, he would have denounced the US war in Indochina; But instead he sought to position himself alongside of the incoming neocons with the Reagan administration by claiming that the US should have kept the war in Vietnam going. There’s good reason for Trotsky to be respected as a man of integrity in his positions. But those positions were not at all similar to what neocons adopted.
You mean the one that kept fumbling the football in the desert when he tried to rescue the US “hostages” (prisoners) in Iran? Sad.
Jimmy Carter seemed like such a good, moral man post-presidency, when he personally and his foundation helped to defuse wars and criticize the US when it interfered.
Then why did he give reign to that racist Russophobe, Zbigniew Brzezinski? (Who, among other things, helped create Al Qaeda?) Why did he approve unleashing the CIA on Nicaragua?
Bill King quite rightly points out how silly it is when Right-wing kooks use such a statement to suggest that Kristol was "Trotskyist" in any sense:
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0304/0304neocontrotp1.htm
-----
While steeped in the world of hyper-intellectual debating at CCNY, Kristol was not an SWP or YPSL-FI member -- and much less a full blown Trotskyist ideologue, as is often implied by those seeking to exaggerate his Trotskyist credentials. Infamously, James P. Cannon, Irish-American leader of the Trotskyists, once admonished Kristol and his friend and fellow CCNYer Earl Raab for not joining the SWP. From Mexico, Trotsky himself cast a wary eye on the YPSL's and fellow travelers such as Kristol and Raab because of their "lack of experience" and, more damningly, for their "petty bourgeois" backgrounds. [10]
Despite Cannon's scoldings, Kristol never did join the "official" Trotskyists of the SWP, but rather the heretical offshoot led by Max Shachtman, the Workers' Party (WP), in 1940. More importantly, Kristol belonged to a small intra-party faction inside the WP known as the "Shermanites" which was led by future Sociologist Philip Selznick, and also included Lipset, Himmelfarb, and Diamond, i.e. the only other neoconservatives to have been associated with Trotskyism. What is key here, and what for the most part has been overlooked, is that the Shermanites considered not only Stalinism but Bolshevism, which in their context meant Trotskyism, to be "… bureaucratic, totalitarian, and undemocratic". [11] Decisive to Kristol and the others' rejection of Marxism and Trotskyism was Robert Michels' Political Parties, which was introduced to the group by Selznick. [12] This "premature" anti-communism was so anathema to Shachtman that after Kristol and the tiny band of Shermanites resigned from the Workers' Party in 1941, a mere one year after they had joined, they were then retroactively expelled. The journal that Kristol and the Shermanites briefly published after their expulsion from the Workers Party, Enquiry, far from providing "conventional Marxist fare" as has been claimed by one scholar, in fact consisted mainly of substantive critiques of Marxism, Leninism, and Trotskyism, all the more noteworthy for the youthfulness of those making them. [13]
-----
Trotsky was a courageous man of integrity, much more than a scoundrel like Solzhenitsyn. Trotsky was refused refugee status in the US by the Roosevelt administration because he had counseled his followers to treat the coming World War II as an inter-imperialist war which the proletarian classes were to turn against. The leaders of the Socialist Workers Party spent a year in prison over this, 1944-5. If Solzhenitsyn had had any integrity, he would have denounced the US war in Indochina; But instead he sought to position himself alongside of the incoming neocons with the Reagan administration by claiming that the US should have kept the war in Vietnam going. There's good reason for Trotsky to be respected as a man of integrity in his positions. But those positions were not at all similar to what neocons adopted.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Trotsky was a murderous Commie, and an ice axe to the head was not enough punishment for him. Solzhenitsyn was a good man. You’ve got it all wrong – those for the Vietnam war were not Neocons. There were none back then..
The Russian Civil War was brutal on all sides, but no serious biographer can dispute the fact that to the very end Trotsky showed highly disciplined integrity in the way that he made his arguments. All of his followers in the West were instructed to treat wars between the Allies and the Third Reich as an inter-imperialist war. Trotskyists like James Patrick Cannon were prosecuted under the Smith Act in November 1941 before Pearl Harbor because the government saw that they had already stated their position that the working classes should be turned against imperialist war. In the last year of his life, Trotsky was offered refuge in Palestine where he could have been protected by Zionists. he expressed a courteous thanks and turned the offer down. Not many individuals in world history would have the integrity to do this.Replies: @Hibernian
Neocons rallied around Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson who had always been a hawkish Democrat, supporting the Vietnam War. Neoconservatives were never opposed to the latter war. The most one can say is that Irving Kristol argued in a very “realist” sort of way that the US should not hold any high expectations of developing civil liberties in Vietnam but should simply aim to remove Vietnam from being a contested Cold War border zone. He regarded both South Korea and South Vietnam as states which were not likely to produce any kind of liberal society (which is actually very different from arguments made by his son Bill Kristol for the Bush invasion of Iraq). Instead, Irving Kristol envisioned the US enforcing a status quo in Vietnam without too many liberal pretensions.
The Russian Civil War was brutal on all sides, but no serious biographer can dispute the fact that to the very end Trotsky showed highly disciplined integrity in the way that he made his arguments. All of his followers in the West were instructed to treat wars between the Allies and the Third Reich as an inter-imperialist war. Trotskyists like James Patrick Cannon were prosecuted under the Smith Act in November 1941 before Pearl Harbor because the government saw that they had already stated their position that the working classes should be turned against imperialist war. In the last year of his life, Trotsky was offered refuge in Palestine where he could have been protected by Zionists. he expressed a courteous thanks and turned the offer down. Not many individuals in world history would have the integrity to do this.
And at least the start of the (partial) deregulation of railroads, in the wake of the Penn Central disaster. The ICC wasn’t abolished, but replaced, by the Surface Transportation Board.
The Russian Civil War was brutal on all sides, but no serious biographer can dispute the fact that to the very end Trotsky showed highly disciplined integrity in the way that he made his arguments. All of his followers in the West were instructed to treat wars between the Allies and the Third Reich as an inter-imperialist war. Trotskyists like James Patrick Cannon were prosecuted under the Smith Act in November 1941 before Pearl Harbor because the government saw that they had already stated their position that the working classes should be turned against imperialist war. In the last year of his life, Trotsky was offered refuge in Palestine where he could have been protected by Zionists. he expressed a courteous thanks and turned the offer down. Not many individuals in world history would have the integrity to do this.Replies: @Hibernian
A butcher with integrity. He was a more radical revolutionary than Stalin, but his followers tended to be a little more moderate.
As for Stalin being more or less radical, the thing is rather that Stalin used these political fronts as a means of political maneuver. When Stalin launched the 5-year plan he adopted a much more radical approach than Trotsky had ever advocated. Since the end of the Russian Civil War, Trotsky had argued that a "price-scissors" was emerging which meant that the urban industries were not producing enough useful goods for the agricultural sector. Since food is vital, there was an enforced restraint against raising food prices. But with urban industry underperforming, the agrarian sector wasn't really getting much else. Trotsky argued that the 5-year plan would need to fix this so that new machinery for agriculture could be used to reduce the amount of labor employed in farming and eventually make possible the collectivization of agriculture.
Stalin instead opted to insist upon immediate agricultural collectivization even as the industrialization plans were just being launched. That was at least in part an attempt by Stalin to politically outsmart Trotsky by acting more Leftist than Trotsky had been. There were some real problems in agriculture with the way that the peasant takeover of large estates in 1918-21 had resulted in a lot of small plots and this meant less large-scale production. But Trotsky had always argued that the 5-year plan would need to develop the capacity for producing farming machinery before there could be a rational shift to large-scale agriculture. Stalin's insistence on immediate collectivization was a way of making sure that no one could accuse him of copying Trotsky's plans for industrialization through a 5-year plan. It would have been better if Trotsky's more restrained plan had been followed.
The fact that the Socialist Workers Party denounced Roosevelt’s war as imperialist had nothing to do with being more or less moderate than Trotsky. This was the position which he had counseled to adopt when he was alive.
As for Stalin being more or less radical, the thing is rather that Stalin used these political fronts as a means of political maneuver. When Stalin launched the 5-year plan he adopted a much more radical approach than Trotsky had ever advocated. Since the end of the Russian Civil War, Trotsky had argued that a “price-scissors” was emerging which meant that the urban industries were not producing enough useful goods for the agricultural sector. Since food is vital, there was an enforced restraint against raising food prices. But with urban industry underperforming, the agrarian sector wasn’t really getting much else. Trotsky argued that the 5-year plan would need to fix this so that new machinery for agriculture could be used to reduce the amount of labor employed in farming and eventually make possible the collectivization of agriculture.
Stalin instead opted to insist upon immediate agricultural collectivization even as the industrialization plans were just being launched. That was at least in part an attempt by Stalin to politically outsmart Trotsky by acting more Leftist than Trotsky had been. There were some real problems in agriculture with the way that the peasant takeover of large estates in 1918-21 had resulted in a lot of small plots and this meant less large-scale production. But Trotsky had always argued that the 5-year plan would need to develop the capacity for producing farming machinery before there could be a rational shift to large-scale agriculture. Stalin’s insistence on immediate collectivization was a way of making sure that no one could accuse him of copying Trotsky’s plans for industrialization through a 5-year plan. It would have been better if Trotsky’s more restrained plan had been followed.