Jimmy Carter and Hamas

For real?
I didn't know there was thespianism in your background.

 

I'm exaggerating, but there's a kernel of truth in there. It's not like I was the next choice or anything. But I'm guessing I was among 50-100 finalists for the Tanner role. I was too young for the part, really. I think that did me in more so than my audition performance. Or so I tell myself.

 

I had you pegged as more of Timmy Lupus.

 

Morale in this country is at the low point of my lifetime right now. Not even close. In the late '70s people were just happy that Vietnam was over and that their kids weren't getting sent anywhere to be killed. So we snorted a lot of coke, smoked a lot of dope, danced way too much disco and wore too much polyester. People may have thought Carter was somewhat inept but, unlike current times, they didn't believe the country had been hijacked by an evil regime.

 

Anybody who thinks we "have prospered as a country" more in the past seven years than we did in the years 1976-1980 has a bar for "prospered" that's set about 200 feet below sea level. Mired in two off-the-books wars. Gas prices through the roof. Foreclosures by the bundle. The middle-class squeezed to within an inch of its life. The worst terrorist atack in history. The worst natural disaster in history. More people in poverty. More people uninsured. Tainted food. Bad water. And the country's standing in the world at an all time low.
Things sure are looking up.
I suspect a love of the crackpottery that is supply-side economics at work here. Tax cuts rock his world.
And lumping Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad etc. etc. as something called "Islamofascism," is an empty, useless formulation. By your definition, you could call the Shah an "Islamofacist," or Saddam, and I'm fairly sure that's not what you mean.
This whole thing started when you -- having defined your own politics long ago through a dislike of Jimmy Carter -- dismissed "getting them home alive" as the objective of the 1979 Iranian hostage criss. It was then demonstrated to you that Carter's approach worked better than Reagan's, and that Carter's "foreign policy" had little to do with the Iranian revolution or the taking of the hostages. These are the things that have slipped your mind.

 

Tu tambien, ?y_eres?

 

Two things, very quickly, then I have to go start dinner.

For The BR, while I was out just now on the bus, I read a piece in the new Harper's by Kevin Phillips. He's a journalist I trust, so I'm inclined to give his work a lot of credence. In an article entitled Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know, he sort of dismantles the process by which the government has changed the measurements of our economy over the last 40 years. It's unavailable online, and having no economics savvy, I'll urge you to read the piece rather than try to reconstruct it here.

The upshot, though, is this: that the ways we measure unemployment, inflation and consumer spending, among others, are now so corrupted and politically spun, that they've become useless.

Near the end of the article, he says that if we were using the metrics that were in place 25 years ago, our current rate of unemployment would be between 9 and 12 percent, and our inflation rate would be between 8 and 10 percent.

Having lived through the Carter administration as an adult, I'll never try to argue that he was anything but what most historians find him to be: an average to below-average president. But his economic stats don't seem so dire in light of the fact that the mechanisms by which all those things are measured have changed.

And my second point, more to the intent of the thread:

How did we get 5 pages into this without anyone mentioning that one of the reasons Osama gave for attacking us is the nature of our relationship with Israel?

 

Well, we could sure use someone now to do the plain speaking that Carter did, instead of patting us on the head and giving us more credit cards. Carter said what needed to be said about the state of the country at the time. Bush chooses to avoid manning up similarly.

 

Pretty much what I thought when reading that. Can't imagine many high-profile leaders these days- Democrats included- who would be that frank about problems. And calling upon people to sacrifice? 21st-century 'Merca doesn't want to hear that shit.

 

Since Ragu's overewritter, overblown posts bore me, I'll simply agree with Fenian and jg that those of us who actually lived through the Carter years as adults not toddlers (when you even a toddler then, Ragu?) know that as bad as things were, the country's morale was nowhere near as low as it is now.
Despite the soaring inflation and high interest rates, there actually was a viable middle class that could live comfortably, as opposed to the growing number of people living at or near poverty levels the Bush economy as spawned.