President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

It was mostly sheer luck Reagan didn't kill us all in a nuclear war, particularly in the Able Archer incident in November 83.

 

I thought Ted Cruz wanted to be President?

 

There are times I wonder if Eric Trump really is as stupid as many people joke that he is or if he's just one of those people in the world who just looks stupid. This certainly points toward the former.

I seem to remember reading that Tom Jackson basically said "Him or me" after that incident, which might have been why that happened.

From a WaPo article on the incident: “When I heard that Mark publicly gave Rush that vote of confidence, that was the thing that sent me over the edge,” Jackson said in “These Guys Have All the Fun,” the 2011 ESPN oral history compiled by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. “They — ‘they’ being ESPN hierarchy — had come out and said Rush had given them what they wanted; they knew he was going to be controversial. I was very angry; I probably said a few things to Mark and the others that I shouldn’t have said, although, as I look back on it, I certainly don’t mind that I said them. I know one of the things that I said was that they had made a huge mistake in putting him on the air with us. I said, ‘You put this guy twenty feet from us to do what he did and now we all have to answer for it.’ ”

Jackson let it be known that he no longer would share a set with Limbaugh. Later that night, ESPN announced it was parting ways with Limbaugh.

I think Carter's main flaw as President was actually very similar to Obama's: Because of his lack of foreign policy experience, he assumed good faith far more often than an American president probably should. Moral imperatives are good for aligning your decision making, but you can't expect bad actors to respond to them and change their ways. The difference was Obama had a more favorable set of circumstances, less competition and better help. Also, Carter was notorious for granularity (it is said that scheduling for the White House tennis court went through his desk), when the Presidency as an office tends to demand an overarching theme or program. Carter never had it, and in fact he rarely had the full support of liberals in his own party.

The Olympic boycott was a bad idea, full stop. Carter seemed to think that he could shame the Soviets into leaving Afghanistan, or at the very least he had a moral imperative not to be perceived as supporting them. The thing is it's hard to shame someone who has 1,000 nuclear weapons. I've already seen multiple reports attempting to demand Western democracies boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing because of the remarkably shitty way Beijing treats the Uighurs. That would be similarly unsuccessful, mostly because the Chinese government has proven repeatedly that it does not hold itself to the same moral standards as Western democracies. Is that shitty? Yes. But if you think a boycott is going to make them do something about it, you're just cutting off your nose to spite your face. I realize it is a bit gauche to quote the West Wing, but when Albie Duncan, the ancient assistant Secretary of State played by the late Hal Holbrook said, "The president knows Chinese political prisoners are gonna be sewing soccer balls with their teeth whether we sell 'em cheeseburgers or not, so let's sell 'em cheeseburgers," well that's kind of how it is.

That said, I think sometimes the tide just turns against you, and I think the late 1970s was just a shitty time to be running the show. In a period between May 1979 and May 1981, the incumbent Presidents or Prime Ministers of the US, the UK, Canada and France all lost elections (Pierre Trudeau won his job back nine months later). I think sometimes ideas have a shelf life, and big-government social democracy had its run from roughly the early 1950s to the late 1970s. Demographics probably had a lot to do with that, as selfish baby boomers started developing nuclear families.

That said, having a rock-ribbed moral compass tends to make for a shitty president and a very good man, and that's essentially what we got with Jimmy Carter.

 

Jonathan Alter just put out one, haven't read it yet. Received good reviews. Douglas Brinkley did one on Carter's post-presidency (up til 1998) which was solid.

Kai Bird is supposedly working on a full-scale bio of Carter too.

 

Speaking of which, more information about that incident came out yesterday:

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/aa83/2021-02-17/able-archer-war-scare-potentially-disastrous

 

Of Cancun

 

Quintana Coup

 

Carter wins re-election if Operation Eagle Claw had been successful. Having said that, Vance and Brzezinski were about as incompetent as two railroad hoboes, and the whole thing was so poorly executed that it reinforced the idea that Carter was in over his head.

It wasn't that Carter wasn't right for the job. He was portrayed as a Georgia peanut farmer and the Eastern elite played right into that stereotypical slow-talking Southern boy schtick.

He wound up surrounded by people who couldn't organize a one-float parade. And he had perhaps the worst luck of any President in history: malaise, joblessness, a feeling of hopelessness, stagflation, oil crisis No. 2, Iran, Afghanistan, not to mention disco. And whatever decisions his advisors suggested turned out to be the least successful in every damn case, especially disco.

 

And the only president in U.S. history to serve at least a full term without a SCOTUS vacancy.

 

What's it like to be a contrarian asshat who is clearly either lying about leaning left or has some serious issues with self-hatred?

 

I remember driving into South Georgia and seeing billboards from peanut farmers apologizing for Carter

 

Maybe this is why the National Guard still has troops in DC

As QAnon predicts Trump reinstatement on March 4, D.C. police prepare for threats