Jimmy Carter and Hamas

[Fenian_Bastard]

I never quite got over the Fail, it's true. I was thisclose to having the Tanner role.

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

 

[writing irish]

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.

 

[andyouare?]

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.

 

[The Big Ragu]

That's all you really have to hear to dismiss the rest of this word salad. A meaningless piece of rightist propaganda babble that has no historical, political, or cultural definition. It's tailormade for someone who knows nothing about Islam or Fascism.
Still waiting to hear what I got wrong about the hostages, by the way.

Well, you do know how to be dismissive. It's about all you do on here. So that was no surprise.

Hamas' charter calls for the destruction of Israel. Babble babble. It's leaders have decades of calling for Islamic jihad to wipe out Israel, to wipe out the Roman Catholic church (to wit, the speech made by the cleric and member of parliament last week that I linked to earlier in this thread) and to spread Islam throughout the world while wiping out Western civilization. Yet more babble from me, of course. I can cite hundreds of examples of their rhetoric that state these objectives. Babble once again. They not only talk to the talk, but worse, they lob missiles indiscriminately into Israel in an attempt to kill innocent people. They have kidnapped dozens of Israelis. Using Islamic jihad talk, they have gotten dozens of young dupes to blow themselves up in public places taking innocent Israeli citizens with them, and they, not hizbollah, actually committed the act that caused Israel to go batship two years ago and turn Lebanon into rubble--with a kidnapping.

I may not know much about Islam -- I actually don't. I do know what those sick Baskets have done in the name of the religion, though.

And I do know fascism. And by definition it is a movement that promotes a cult-like unity based on ethnic, cultural, racial or religious attributes. It is usually authoritarian in nature. What Hamas does is the textbook definition of a fascist organization--it uses batship religious doctrine to justify horrific acts.

I have no clue what hostages you are talking about. I didn't say you got anything wrong with regard to anything I remember. Please refresh my memory.

 

[cranberry]

Truthfully, Ragu, the morale of the country right now is lower than it ever was under Carter.

Spnited, don't doubt that is your reality. My sense is it isn't the reality of most people who lived through both times. I don't see unemployment rates anywhere near that high (although they may be coming), inflation spiraling so far out of control that people's paychecks were declining in value almost on a weekly basis, a sense that we will not stand up for ourselves if someone takes American citizens hostage, 11 to 16 percent mortgage interest rates that make home ownership an impossibility, American cities that have become urban blight zones (in fact, we have seen the opposite) in which riots are breaking out, an energy crisis, exacerbated by bad policy--price controls that created gas shortages that had cars snaked around blocks hoping to get a driblet of fuel before the pumps ran clean, consumer confidence numbers (which are actually flagging right now) that are anywhere near as low as they were in the late 1970s, stagflation (although I am placing a huge bet we are already seeing it and it will show itself to be a fact within the next year) and any presidential speeches that will go down in posterity as "Bush's Malaise Speech." Bush has been a horrible president. For a variety of reasons, many circumstantial, we have prospered as a country a great deal more than we did under Carter's presidency, which is remembered by many people as a low point for the country in the last half century. I'll disagree with you on that one.

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.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

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-clash 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.

 

[writing irish]

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.

Tu tambien, ?y_eres?

 

[The Big Ragu]

The same skewed sample from this board always there to give their version of history.

I was too young to have coined the terms "malaise" and "crisis of confidence." I just know they are the terms that have become synonomous with the period you think Americans were prospering in compared to today.

However much of a fork up Bush is, he has benefited from about two terms of straight economic growth, in which inflation was low, unemployment relatively low. Those foreclosures you are looking at today -- are a function of the fact that more people own homes! It was impossible for the typical American to own a home in the late 1970s, when interest rates were in the 11 to 16 percent range because the Fed was like a monkey dribbling a football trying to deal with inflation and unemployment rising at the same time. Another term, I didn't coin: "urban blight". It characterized our cities, as evidenced by Carter's famous trip to the South Bronx in 1977. Riots were breaking out in inner cities because things were so bleak.

http://www2.volstate.edu/geades/FinalDocs/1970s&beyond/malaise.htm

Yeah right. Things are worse today than they were when a President went on National TV and essentially begged people to commit hari kari--or was he begging them not to?.

 

[jgmacg]

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?

 

[dooley_womack1]

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.

 

[writing irish]

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 ship.

 

[spnited]

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 clash that could live comfortably, as opposed to the growing number of people living at or near poverty levels the Bush economy as spawned.