A day or so ago the ex-president addressed an angry letter to fellow Georgian Zell Miller scolding the Democratic Senator for “unprecedented disloyalty” for his speech at the Republican Convention.
Well, I’m worse. I was once a Democrat and now I have no “loyalty” to any party whatsoever. In fact, I think loyalty to a political party in the strict sense is probably dangerous. It’s certainly limiting and anti-democratic (small d), blinding you to all sorts of possibilities, even to the truth. Sure, you should or could a support a political party while it reflects your ideas, but you should be just as ready to change when it doesn’t. Otherwise you’re a candidate for Animal Farm.
Indeed, having strong loyalty to our political parties is almost farcical because it is frequently impossible to determine what they stand for, deliberately so. And even when they have a (shifting) point of view, they hide it in order to garner votes from the innocent.
Now of course the “righteous” Mr. Carter knows this. He’s a politician, after all. And a successful one, no matter what some say. He was a governor and President. So what was the bee that got under Jimmy’s bonnet to that extreme degree, amplifying the considerable public outcry against his Georgia colleague of many years?
In reply, I am going to get more people angry by making an observation from personal experience. Whenever those I know well get particularly upset by my militant views on the War on Terror, even to the extent of losing control of their emotions and yelling at me, I know that deep down they are afraid I am right.
UPDATE: Here (via Instapundit) an immediate example of the shifting sands of our political parties and why we should think for ourselves.
Whenever those I know well get particularly upset by my militant views on the War on Terror, even to the extent of losing control of their emotions and yelling at me, I know that deep down they are afraid I am right.
Oh I think you are exactly right.
Roger – you should read this article by a writer from Esquire. This article is incredible and is a must read. It goes nicely with your topic – although it’s long.
http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Esquire/2004/08/01/505604?page=3
Jimmy Carter’s ‘Pacifism for Peace’ flies a blood-soaked dove.
Carter gets his PEACE while innocent children are shot in the back fleeing from evil terrorizing Fascist.
I will NEVER be loyal to Pacifists who care only for themselves, their words and actions are as meaningless today as they were when Iraqi children were being held in Saddam’s underground prison.
The Dove of Peace is bloodied by complacency and appeasement.
And, Carter has the bloodiest Dove of all.
There you go, making too much sense again! Blind loyalty to a failing platform of ignorance, blindness and revenge. I want to see a more civil Democratic party. Not because I may join, but because America needs civility, again…badly.
Considering the people Carter likes ó Noriega, Castro, Bobble-head Kim… I would wear his dislike as a badge of honor.
I always thought Carter had done one decent thing in his life when he found work as a day laborer building houses… although he did take jobs from all those poor illegal immigrants… but then he went on his 25-year “hug a tyrant” world tour and ruined it…
Jimmy Carter is in the running for the worst president of the 20th century. Anyone who doubts this should go back and read some editorials from 1979 about how the U.S. was “finished,” “weak,” “lacked willpower,” etc.
That this pathetic excuse for a leader, who should be holed up in a cabin writing another bad novel, saw fit to criticize Zell Miller after sitting next to Le Fraudulent Tubbo at the DNC tells you much about the state of the Democrat party today.
Carter was a well-meaning but utterly feckless buffoon as president. The idea that Kerry still thinks highly enough of him to let him speak at the convention should, IMHO, automatically disqualify him to be president.
As usual, a line from the The Simpsons sums it all up perfectly:
“Jimmy Carter? He’s history’s greatest monster!”
(Their Carter statue with the words “Malaise Forever” carved in the pedestal was a classic, too.)
I am still waiting to hear a coherent antiwar position. The current shreiking and hysteria by the Democrats leaves me scratching my head.
The Democrats should be worried about the thoroughly precedented disloyalty on the part of their voters…
Notthisgirl,
Thanks for posting that link–I read it with my head bobbing up and down in agreement.
I’ll go even further than the author of that piece. As a hawkish woman (“security mom”) who once (long ago) worked feverishly for such (thankfully) lost causes as the nuclear freeze, I’ve noticed something quite important in the past few weeks. Support for Kerry is especially weak among Republican/Independent leaning men who really want to vote AGAINST Bush. Their wives/girlfriends/coworkers tend to be reinforcing their hate Bush/vote Kerry mindset (they are the true believers). So what happens when a Hawkwoman like myself suggests that Kerry is not to be trusted with peace and security matters?
The response is not unlike what I imagine it must have been like for British deserters/conscientious objectors up to and including the First World War to receive a white feather from a woman–perhaps a lover, perhaps a complete stranger. “Here, you coward. You pathetic, snivelling wuss. Here’s what I think of you. Have a nice day.”
Now, I’m a historian, not a psychotherapist, but I get the feeling that Kerry’s anti-war stance (and it isn’t even the kind of red-blooded, vigorous anti-war stance of a Howard Dean–he managed to infuse pacifism with machismo!) coupled with his junior senator/junior husband relations to power lo these past 20 years have made it infinitely harder for guys to swallow his claims to leadership of the free world.
Now add to that the hundreds of dead children in Ossetia. No, it didn’t happen here, but we are all making the Putin/Bush connection in our deepest hearts. We want Putin to crush these bastards, just as we want Bush to crush al Qaeda. Not prosecute, crush.
If I were Kerry, I’d get out there and start talking about crushing our enemies, and helping the Russians and Israelis crush theirs. Because we all know they’re flowing from the same place.
If I were Bush, I’d get some strong, hawkish women front and center into my ads: mothers, wives of soldiers–women IN the services! Maybe they won’t sway women who support Kerry, but they could be the last straw for the men in their lives who deep down don’t trust the guy. A modern version of the White Feather.
Oh, and Roger, I totally agree with you about maintaining a certain distance from both major parties. I live in Illinois–you know, the newest “home state” to Alan Keyes? Well, needless to say I’ll not be casting a vote for him. It’ll be a very split ticket. But that’s actually good, because I’ll be telling the Republicans that they have to do a bit better in future. Like only running sane candidates for major statewide office. Splitting your ticket under such circumstances tells Washington who you want, but also the local party leaders what kind of party you’re willing to support. It’s more “loyal” to the long term health of the party than to the candidates of the moment. And that’s more important anyway.
A somewhat underappreciated reason not to belong to a political party, or attend political party functions, is the raw fact that most politicos are insufferable bores, prone to Inside Baseball references and obsessions, and guided by warped views about loyalty, ala Carter. There is a reason,after all, that the term “political” has negative connotations. Roger, after your week in NYC among the faithful, I assume you got a fairly strong whiff of that.
J. Carter, the ONLY president, so far, I voted for. The most honest man as president since Truman. The worst president in a hundred years. Worse than Hoover (though not worse in results).
Pacifistic morals — he should concentrate on Habitat and bemoan that the IMF and World Bank don’t keep track of, and count, how many houses are built in each poor country. [If ALL the World Bank aid/loans went into building private houses, and loaning money to poor folk to live there, the world would get a LOT better, a lot faster.]
But he suffers from Kerry’s Lie. He prefers Peace (and Genocide) over Fighting Evil.
And he smears Zell, but without facts…
The thing I like about the US system is the personal accountability of the politicians. People vote for a person, not for a party. If the person is a really bad representative, he cant “hide” behind a party, he will be voted out. He might get help from the party, but that wont help him if he’s really unpopular.
The european systems votes for parties. (with a few exceptions) This means that a really bad representative just has to be loyal and vote along party lines, and his seat is safe. This also places his loyalty to the party leaders, and not to the people.
It also concentrates the power at the top of each party, and “lower level” representatives are sometimes referred to as “voting cattle”. It’s common that parties has an internal vote first, and decide how everyone should vote in the parliament. This means that in reality it takes much less than 50% of the vote to get the majority.
It’s also practical for politicians, since it locks in the vote. Parties becomes solid entities, and it takes a lot for voters to switch to a total different point of view, and there’s really no choice in direction within a party. In all, it takes away the personal responsibility of politicians, they can just point to “the greater picture” to explain away an unpopular vote.
To me, it sounds as if this is where Carter is coming from. A representative should be loyal to the Party, and not have his own opinions, that’s not sanctioned. His loyalty should be first with the party, not with the people he represents. The Party decides what’s best for those people, and representatives should just tout the party line.
In a system like that, Zell Miller would simply be forgotten by the party in the future, and probably loose all chances for a nice “retirement job”.
I’ve had that experience — anger rising to shouting to apoplexy — several times… especially with old friends that, due to my long sojourn in New York City … really haven’t seen me since my Berkeley / San Francisco FSM VDC etc radical days of decades ago.
I’ve had a couple of “reunion” dinners utterly ruined because they all assumed I still shared their belief system and could not comprehend how I could change.
Result: apoplexy and rage. But you are correct, roger, it is fear but not just fear that you are right in the war on terror. Fear that the changes brought about in the society by the war will reverse of even destroy the happy little liberal world they have built — especially in California, Seattle, New York — over the their life times.
If thought old Peanuthead had some loyalty to the United States of America, I might be interested in his comment. But I think this more old CPUSA as told by Hillary Clinton this past spring: “You don’t have to fall in love. You just have to fall in line.”
OT: Now that Swift Boat 2004 is headed for the bottom of the Mekong River, the rats will be looking for life boats. First Mate William Jefferson Clinton has a note from his Doctor telling him to stay home with his feet up until after the election. Does Hillary, have to stay with him the whole eight weeks to nurse him back to health? Stay tuned.
I also have been met with what I can only describe as astonishment, followed by rage, from certain relatives and friends to whom I’ve dared to voice my new political persuasions. Until recently, I’d attributed the anger of the reaction to ABB syndrome–they consider me the enemy because they think I’m voting for the enemy.
But recently I have begun to think, as some of you point out, that they are afraid to hear what I have to say because it might upset their worldview. So they have to shut it out with a lot of bluster. It could be too dangerous to actually LISTEN. They might have to change their minds, and we all know what an upheaval THAT is–because we’ve gone through it ourselves.
Gerard:
Fear that the changes brought about in the society by the war will reverse of even destroy the happy little liberal world they have built…
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;”
And rave they do, but go they shall. One generation’s sacred truth is the next generation’s whoopee cushion.
Now that’s funny.
Tom, the difference between Hoover and Carter is that as a civilian Hoover actually was worth something (civil engineer who served with distinction at the Siege of Peking, helping with the fortifications of the Diplomatic Quarter which held until relieved). Carter’s record needs no recap.
My boss and I have just read “Negotiate This” by Herbert Cohen. The purpose was improve our negotiating skills. However, the most amazing parts of the book are, 1) a couple short chapters contrasting Reagan and Carter, and 2) the appendices which are memos written while Cohen was advising first the Carter and the Reagan adminstrations about terrorism. READ IT! He was saying in 1985 what bloggers are saying now, and what the media still doesn’t understand (especially as regards the media’s tacit role in the spread of global terrorism by publicizing and legitimizing the ‘root causes’ of criminal and pathological acts — and the way the U.S’s weak and slow responses to terrorist acts helped guarantee more and bigger future acts). The part about Carter’s handling of the hostage crisis is especially damning. The best line: Carter’s “uncertainty and impotence have given even ineptitude a bad name.” I was very young in ’76/’80. I rejoiced when Carter won and was saddened by his loss. I now see him as the worst president of our time, and if he’s angry at Zell then Zell must be doing something right.
mvalla:
There are more unfavorable comparisons between Hoover and Carter. Carter built houses (good) but Hoover saved a continent from starvation after WWI. Carter drove the US economy to its worst crisis since the Great Depression with his economic polices that were driving us toward a post WWI German inflationary meltdown. Hoover got the blame for an international depression that rightly belonged to the economic consequences of the badly flawed Versailles Treaty. A substantial portion of the blame for economic flaws can be laid at the feet of Woodrow Wilson, whose Carter-like Presidential personality makes him one of the worst men to occupy the office. However, Carter is an improvement over Wilson, who hated both African American and Jews, while Carter only the hates the Jews. Furthermore, even FDR admitted the problem with Hoover?s anti-depression policies were scale not intent. In reality neither program was effective in ending the depression. WWII solved that problem.
PS: Roger you have find some way of implementing a correction feature. I always see the final errors after I post it.
Jimmy Carter has pulled off the greatest con of the 20th Century.
People think of him as a nice man who’s wandered down some wrong paths, but always with the best of intentions.
In truth he’s one of the meanest pols around with a natural affinity for tyrants and thugs.
Jerry:
Carter drove the US economy to its worst crisis since the Great Depression with his economic polices that were driving us toward a post WWI German inflationary meltdown.
I’m going to call you on this one, Jerry. Carter appointed Paul Volcker, who raised interest rates and slew the inflationary dragon. Further, Carter didn’t complain about the high rate, which slowed the economy even more and undoubtedly hurt his reelection chances. Now, Reagan got unfairly tarred with the recession, but also recieved unearned credit for stopping inflation. So it goes. Maybe common history *is* bunk, to cop a phrase.
Oh, and Carter also deregulated the airlines, something I have also heard attributed to Reagan.
Carter seems to advocate the blind, “my-party-right-or-wrong” loyalty that cost the Dems so dearly in the Clinton years: by circling the wagons they saved him in the Senate from the ultimate disgrace that was his due; but the dishonor he associated with that party resonated on past his presidency, costing them control of the White House, Congress, and a majority of governorships and state legislatures.
In the end, the only people to benefit from such “loyalty” were … Bill & Hill. And the Republicans.
And as far as fear & loathing among the left goes, it’s an avoidance mechanism. Honest self-examination is not one of their strengths. It’s like the example of a lefty woman I know, who desperately needs counseling but won’t go, her rationale being, “But what if I find out that I really AM a bad person?”
In her world, it’s preferable to live the fantasy than to face reality. It’s also the reason why so many lefties never seem to mature emotionally or intellectually past early adolescence: after all, maturity comes through absorbing and learning from the painful lessons of life, and taking responsibility for ourselves (another weak point of the left).
Chuck:
Nice try but Volcker was not Carterís first Fed Chairman. Wall Street forced Volcker on Carter. His Chairman, whose name I can no longer remember, was placed in the position on the advice of his chairman of economic advisers James Tobin. Tobin believed that we were on the verge of another great depression and told Carter that since we are in Keynes’ famous liquidity trap the Fed could just go out a print the money. You see, Keynesians believed that rising wages and prices cause rising wages and prices. It had nothing to do with the money supply. Tobin was wrong and Clinton was wrong. Volcker, who is a Chicago type economist, believed, along with Wall Street, that inflation is the product of overly robust monetary expansion. Volcker did not raise interest rates; he restricted the growth rate in the money supply. Interest rate rose because money became scarcer. It was an effect, not a cause.
The Volcker appointment was akin to JP Morgan saving the economy in 1892-93 then be an act of intelligent policy on the part of Carter. Carter had no choice other then to obey the wishes of Wall Street. Any other action would have resulted a collapse of confidence and a World Wide depression.
However, nice try at redeeming the peanut President.
Two quick points:
It was funny listening to the aftereffects of Miller’s speech and the sputtering by the media about how he went over the top in a few places. Of course he did. But I don’t remember hearing any of that sputtering after speeches in Boston. “The only thing we have to fear is 4 more years of George W Bush”? Teddy is allowed to pass Go and collect $200 for saying it.
Carter’s comments bother on several levels, but the one that bothers me the most is his attack on Miller’s loyalty. It just goes to show that Carter didn’t really bother to listen to Miller’s speech. If your main concern in this election is loyalty over national security… or as Miller put it “the safety of my family”… you and your party have no business being anywhere near the White House or Congress.
oops..my congenital Clinton hating led to a subliminal substituion of Clinton for Carter.
We all know that Carter deregualted the airlines.
Passivism. The most cynical choice of all. If you declare yourself to be a passivist you must know that if everyone in the country would follow your lead, you would soon lose your freedom and possibly your life. Passivists must realize that the only way they have that option is because there are “hard young men” (George Orwell’s phrase) who are willing to defend their right to their passivism while they lounge in comfort and bask in the adoration of their feather-headed sycophants. Carter and the rest of them are beneath contempt.
Capt’n:
Orwell also called pacifists objectively fascist because if the world remains passive, Hitler would win.
Martin Luther answered the question of Christian pacifism by asking should we leave the enforcement of the domestic and international peace to the Turk? His answer was no. Christians have a obligation to protect not themselves (turn of the cheek) but their neighbors. We protect ourselves by protecting each other.
Pacifism is the free rider on the common defense.
Jerry,
And just how did Vocker control the money supply? He began by raising the discount rate. The politics of the period *is* interesting, link , but the fact is that Carter *did* appoint Volcker. I also recall Carter as perhaps the last fiscal conservative. As a friend of mine put it, “I voted against a tax and spend Liberal and got a borrow and spend Republican.” I think this is a fair comment. Whatever Carter’s failings, and they were manifold, let’s give credit where credit is due.
PS, I’m trying to think of something Reagan deregulated, can you help me out?
I used to think that Carter was a very nice man who was totally incompetent to handle the job, and who was locked into a world view so divorced from reality that his attempts to do good all did bad, but he couldnít see the damage he did because of his obsessive belief in his own McGovernite ideology.
I have changed my mind in the last month because of his certifying the election in Venezuela. I have come to the reluctant conclusion that he is a truly evil man who is fanatically driven by a deep commitment to a radical leftist ideology, and his purpose in life is the destruction of capitalism and America. His cute little uncle-Jimmy act is just a remarkable faÁade that he has perfected to hide his fiercely anti-American beliefs, views, and actions. He is not an incompetent bufoon at all, but a brilliant strategist who has fallen short, so far, in the destruction of the American-capitalist system of prosperity and freedom.
He needs to be ridiculed and stopped at every turn.
Chuck:
During my time at Grad School in the late 1970′s and early 80′s the economics department, the physics department and the college of engineering had periodic joint seminars. We spent a lot of time doing economics as a form of control theory. (If you haven’t caught it before I am a Mechanical Engineer) One of the problems we looked at was controlling the money supply. You see, traditional the Federal Reserve used the tried to use interest rates as a way gauging “tightness and looseness” of money. The problem was that this produced a pro-cyclical effect rather then a counter-cyclical effect. Milton Friedman, in his “Monetary History of the United States”, documented this fact quite extensively. What typically happens is that the Fed observes that interest rates rise/fall above/below some desired level and change reserves to compensate. That sounds logical but it isn’t. The problem is that changes in interest rates only reflect changes in economic activity with a lag. The Fed is reacting to yesterday’s news. What happened in the 70′s was that inflationary expectations made it profitable to borrow money at the current rate because the rate was always below the expect change in prices. Since the Fed was always behind the current inflation rate people kept borrowing money and the Fed provided the reserves. The Fed doesn’t control interest rates, other then their own discount rate; they control reserves that constitute the monetary base. To say that Volcker raised the discount rate means nothing. He raised the discount rate and then starved the banking system by not supply enough reserves to meet the demand. Raising the discount rate is meaningless if you are still willing supply adequate reserves. This is what the Fed was doing before Volcker. They simply validated the existing rate of inflation just as Tobin advised Carter to do. Remember, the another Great Depression was on the way and since we were in a liquidity trap supply reserves would not effect prices To repeat, Volcker did not just raised an interest rate. He stopped increasing the monetary base.
Your other point about well he appointed Volcker is silly. By appointing him Carter surrendered his control of economic policy to Wall Street just as Cleveland surrender control of the financial system to JP Morgan in 1892. At that point both Carter and Cleveland were out of the loop on the economy.
Roger:
When did the Islamo- Fascists get the idea that you could do anything to the United states and not suffer enormous blowback. When President Carter let Iran kidnap our people in Tehran and watched as impotently groveled for their release. Since that moment the thugs have been upping the ante until they reached their heights of bravado with 9-11. President Carter is so proud of the fact that he brought all the kidnapped victims home alive but his craven knucling under to the Iranian Mullahs was the seed that gave growth to the terrorists belief that the US is a paper tiger and you can do anything to this country and get away with it. He was not the only President to show a lack of morale courage but he was the first, If I had member of my family in that initial group of hostages I wwould probably feel greatfull to Jimah but the scores of victims since then can thank Carter for giving the Arab Persian terror network the belief that no act of terror, even something like Beslan, will not prove to be an overall plus in the long run. Thank you President Carter.
Jerry’s got the better of the argument on this score Chuck. Volcker was a hard break from the Keynesian policies of the previous 40+ years. But Carter wasn’t thrilled with the choice, IIRC.
Otherwise, here is some information about the CAB and deregulation which was started by Carter but came to completion under Reagan. From the web (link
):
“By the mid-1970s, the FAA had achieved a semi-automated air traffic control system using both radar and computer technology. This system required enhancement to keep pace with air traffic growth, however, especially after the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 phased out the CAB’s economic regulation of the airlines.” (my emphasis added)
I think that’s why Reagan gets credit for what Carter started. Oh, and the fact Reagan stopped the air traffic controller strike, which gave confidence to the market that the federal government would not be pushed around.
Consider this:
Footnotes: In light of the death of Ronald Reagan, commentator George Will had the following thoughts on the president’s handling of the PATCO situation.
“(Now), more than two astonishing decades on, it…is reasonable to conclude that Reagan’s fracas with the controllers had huge economic consequences, domestic and foreign. It altered basic attitudes about relations between business and labor in ways that quickly redounded to the benefit of the nation, and not least the benefit of American workers. It produced a cultural shift, a new sense of what can be appropriate in business management: layoffs can be justifiable even when a company is profitable, if the layoffs will improve productivity and profitability….
“If I were Bush, I’d get some strong, hawkish women front and center into my ads: mothers, wives of soldiers–women IN the services!”
I may have said this in another thread already. I know 4-5 couples (older, with kids off to college) where the wife is the Bush-voting hawk and the husband is the dove, or at least the “I’m for the war on terror but Bush is waging it wrong” type. I don’t know any the reverse. This is in liberal Jewish Democratic NYC circles.
Another one full of himself, via Lucianne:
Actor and filmmaker Robert Redford played videotapes of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate “over and over” to coach former President Jimmy Carter before his debates with former President Gerald Ford. “I was probably president because of Bob Redford,” said Carter, who confided that before the debate leading to his 1976 election he “didn’t know what in the world I was going to do.”
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/09/08/tem_people08redford.html
Carter could not have been half as ashamed of Zell Miller as I was of Carter when he made Michael Moore his guest at the DNC. Moore hates America, excuses terrorists, and makes unfounded and outrageous accusations against a sitting president in time of war. This behavior is irresponsible and simply reinforces the notion that Democrats are not up to the job of running the country in dangerous times.
Their partisanship means more to them then the American people do and that will cost them. I think Miller was trying to save his party, not defame it.
Roger:
Michael Moore on the subject of UN members sending troops to help us free Iraq-
…..”I oppose the UN or anyone else risking the lives of their citizens to extract us from our debacle. I’m sorry but the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and sadly, that majority must now sacrafice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe, just maybe, God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end”….
And Jimmy is mad at Zell. He let that poster boy for “Super Size Me” sit in the presidents box and gave him a place of honour sitting next to a former President after he called for the letting of American Soldiers Blood and Jimmy has the balls to be upset at Sen. Miller? Now womder Zell was so pissed to see this former President of our country sit next to someone who wants the blood of Americans sons and daughters to flow in retribution for our sins.
There was a documentary on Airforce One on PBS a while back, and they covered the part where President Reagan graciously lent the plane to Carter to go greet the released Tehran hostages. They showed a picture of Carter in a fatal, unguarded moment on the plane… what a nasty, bitter little man…
I think Carter’s statement confirms Miller’s thesis that the Democrats have placed party above country.
Kerry’s people are truly clueless, or at least they’ve forgotten the lessons learned and applied by Clinton in 1992.
They don’t realize that Kerry’s only hope of winning requires him to do a sister souljah on Mikey. Clinton knew that no Dem could gain the White House without making a sincere, highly visible gesture of renunciation of his party’s Free Mumia wackos and win back a reputation for sanity and decency. Imagine the effect on the 1992 race if the Democratic Convention had made a guest of honor out of Snoop what-his-name or some other cop-basher.
What were these people thinking when they raised up Mikey and gave him pride of place next to Jimmah? Has Rove inserted bots into their neurotransmitters?
Perhaps Kerry’s still terrified that the Deaniacs will stay home. This is foolish. These people won’t vote for Nader. They’ve got nowhere to go.
More evidence of Kerry’s unfitness to command: he lacks even basic political acuity. What the f*** has happened to the party of Truman and JFK?
Check out this AP story, to see just how blatant its politicking for Kerry has become. And this is a wire service!
Here’s the link…. maybe…..