Re: LV graciously refuses Jim's bet

DGDevin wrote:
olddog wrote:

I gotta' disagree. I remember the Iranian Hostage Crisis and the OPEC
oil embargo. Carter was a victim of the growing international
Anti-American sentiment. On many issues he was right on the money:
i.e. alternative fuels, consume less. Exactly what we're being told
to do now. We didn't want to hear it back then.

One of Carter's big mistakes was not to campaign against Ronald
Raygun but I admired his conviction. Sometimes I think the man was
just too proud to be put through another campaign that was stacked
against him. Ted Kennedy wasn't much help either.

olddog

Carter was pretty bad. He was apparently a micro-manager who couldn't let people do their jobs without him getting in the way. He came across as vacillating and uncertain, the opposite of what a leader is supposed to be.

Carter inherited a mess. There's a reason the Dems ran a dark
horse that year... it all goes back to assassinations breaking
the lines of succession in the Democrat party.

He was also a Southern Strategy candidate....

It didn't help that he needed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to school him into realizing that the Kremlin really is run by a bunch of brutal bastards just like the right was always saying.

Afghanistan was a boon for Neocon propagandists. It spawned two
significant propaganda coups - the "Charlie's War" story and the
"Russian supermen" myth. And action movies.... lots of action
movies...

At the end of the movie "Charlie's War".... ".... and then we &*^%ed
up the endgame." True. Afghanistan became... well, we all know
now, don't we?

One cat who was an adviser to Reagan claimed that the Russkies had super-stealth weaponry. How do we know that? Because we can't see it.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", so to speak. It's
a damned *fairy tale*.

Both intel services vigorously objected to this characterization (and
were later proven right) but it was Useful as a stick in appropriations
committees to get funding. (See "The Power of Nightmares" for a
simplified if effective telling of the story. You can download
a .iso and burn yer own DVD of it.... )


Of course he also helped trigger that invasion by sending aid to anti-communist factions in Afghanistan who toppled the pro-Soviet govt., how did he think they would react to that? Many of his policies were admirable, like pushing human rights even in countries with regimes friendly to the U.S., and Camp David remains his crowning achievement.

He completely missed the Islamist/Qutbist* thing, though. His presidency
helped to reinforce the illiberal aspirations of Neocons, because
they were able to claim his failures systemic in Liberalism, rather
than simple malpractice.

*I happen to have an aunt who was stationed in Tripoli when this
got weird in Egypt, so she was able to explain it to me.

But overall he seemed to drift from one crisis to another, he was always reacting to something he hadn't forseen. He isn't in Bush's league when it comes to being a bad President, but he sure wasn't a good one.



Bush has been much better, IMO. Carter just couldn't see what was up at
all, and we chose poorly in that a lot was up.

Bush's just a lightning rod for
everybody's free-floating anxiety. If you watch all the pertinent
"Frontline" docs, the number and depth of his mistakes weren't
that great. If those docs are spun, we have no sources at all. I don't
think they are...

All the Neocon cruft was just electoral, and didn't hit
policy *that* hard. A Condoleeza Rice figue is always there to
correct things... Our Dark Lord Cheney, however....

All IMO, course - don't expect things to get Wonderful post-Bush.

--
Les Cargill

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