Writes Nicholas Kristof, in "Jimmy Carter Deserved Our Thanks and Respect, Not Our Sneers" (NYT). That's a free-access link, so you can see Kristof's argument for respecting and thanking President Carter. And let it represent all the many columns that are going up right now, expressing that sentiment. It is a time for eulogy.
Reading "the great national sinking feeling" made me think of Carter's "malaise" speech. I'm surprised it didn't come immediately to mind upon hearing of President Carter's death, but it did not. The cliché got worn out over the course of 45 years. Carter lived so long one grew tired of reacting to the name "Carter" with the one-word outburst: "Malaise!"
Or had your reaction to hearing Carter's name over the years been 2 words long? "Killer rabbit."
I see The Onion went there:
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Also a whackjob election denier:
"If fully investigated, it would show that Trump didn't actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election and he was put in office because the Russians interfered ...on his behalf." - Jimmy Carter
If you have nothing nice to say about the dead, don't say anything at all.
My comments about Jimmy Carter: ___________________________
Carden's article at The American Conservative on how Carter began the foreign policy mess in the Middle East presents a different side of the eulogy.
"He did the best he could" is a fitting epitaph.
He seemed like a decent man to me, who was naive about how the swamp in DC works. I did not agree with much of what he did during his admin, but I do think he got rolled by the DC corruption. Much like Trump did during his first term.
RIP President Carter.
He would frequent the hunting camp where my house is now, like he thought he was Scalia or something. There’s tons of pictures.
Terrible president, generally good human being. I think it was disgusting the way they ballot harvested his vote for Harris and then made up a bunch of stuff about it, just like I think it is disgusting the way they keep pushing Biden out there do to things he obviously can't do. Cut it out with the elder abuse!
He was human and bought in to the liberal ideas that people suffer because of market economies, rule of law and access to capital. His trailer wires were crossed. Happens to a lot of people…
I voted for Carter and against Reagan in 1980. Mainly on an anti-war stance. I’ve since learned to be a lot more skeptical of Carter and much more appreciative of Reagan. What Kristof calls “segregation” is white people fleeing to suburbia to escape black crime and keep their kids from being beat up by black gangs in school. Who wants to expose their family to the shit of black culture in Atlanta? I moved my family to Woodstock so that they could go to school without being beat up by blacks in Brooklyn. As I read the article I reminded myself that all news is fake news, and that Kristof is one of the worst perps of fake news.
Your statement contains a bit of a contradiction because he also signed into law much deregulation at the federal level - trucking, oil prices, airlines, railroads among others - though I supposed you could make the argument those were primarily legislative initiatives. He also appointed Volker to the Fed and took the initial steps to controlling inflation. Complicated legacy but I don't disagree that he did much harm.
We should be forever grateful to him for fulfilling his pledge to the NEA and signing into law the legislation creating the Department of Education, forever improving the quality of edication in the U.S.
Which wasn't much.
I believe Carter's defenders can be counted on to say the Pres didn't use the word "malaise." It was in Pat Caddell's draft, and we see Roger Mudd the anchor use it. It fis with the drift of the speech.
^ Got mugged by reality.
I haven’t heard anyone reflect on his interview with Playboy.. He “lusted in his heart” or something like that. Even at time, it sounded weird and it wasn’t courteous to his wife.
Oh the other hand, Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former President.
I was inclined to think neocon warmongers when I started, but he's got a point here.
'Reading "the great national sinking feeling" made me think of Carter's "malaise" speech. I'm surprised it didn't come immediately to mind upon hearing of President Carter's death, but it did not.'
You speak for yourself, Althouse. It was the first thing that popped into my head. Those were different days. Ted Kennedy was giving speeches praising deregulation. The Dems were shifting from New Deal devotees (Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale) to sons of the New South (Carter, Clinton, Gore). Everybody knew something had to change. Thank heaven for Ronald Reagan.
What it speaks to is your undeserved sense of entitled elitism. Carter wasn’t a bad President because he was from Georgia. He was a bad President because of his policy decisions. Yet the media critiqued his character and worse did so not by his actual character but their regional stereotype biases.
My memory of the time was that while the Media did make some fun of his rural, Fundamentalist roots, there was far more emphasis on his superior morality and how he and the Democrats were going to clean up Washington after the corruption of Nixon and the Republicans.
…are you sure that wasn’t Congress? Carter horse traded for windfall profits tax in the case if oil companies…
I watched a little of CNN's piece on his presidency last night, and they said a pollster had informed him he was doing poorly among white men, who found him too pious and sanctimonious. It was suggested he do the interview with Playboy, which subsequently blew up in his face. Carter won anyway, in an extremely close election, as his opponent was Gerald Ford, who had promised not to run.
https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2021/06/24/jimmy-carter-the-carter-center-and-bcci-aka-bank-of-crooks-criminals/
I came of age during the Carter years and had the distinct pleasure of casting my first election vote for Reagan.
I remember the long gas lines & high gas prices (relatively speaking), the inflation, the Carter "fire side chats" while he wore a sweater. I remember the funk the country was in and the "our best days are behind up" conversations.
I remember Skylab was allowed to fall. The hostages. America the "toothless tiger".
I also remember that Carter could NOT shut up once he was out of the WH. He constantly thought he has a right and duty to butt into the "current" administration and get involved in international "things". I believe he was one of the first former Presidents to do that and NOT follow the tradition of fading into the sunset so that the new administration can "do its thing".
Sorry, not sorry, building a few houses does NOT make up for the shit he kept stirring up. I am sure he felt like he was not given a fair shot and deserved a second term but the reality was that until Obama/Biden he was just about the worst President the country ever has to suffer under.
Maybe I'm weird, buy whenever I hear about Carter's killer rabbit, my mind goes straight to Monty Python.
One less Jew hater.
Three words: Carter’s Desert Classic.
When I think of Jimmy Carter I don’t think about the Malaise speech and I don’t think about the rabbit swimming towards his canoe. I think about my neighbors who ran a modest-sized real estate outfit and who sold no houses for almost the whole of Carter’s tern with mortgage rates at 16%. I think about auto loans at 17% or 18%. I think about getting a 10% raise and actually losing buying power. His policies hurt real people, people who had done absolutely nothing wrong.
The only thing he ever excelled at was selling a false image of himself as a good and honest man. He was a worthless piece of shit with no empathy for anyone but himself and his wife.
Oh, and I want to add that I do not read anything by Nicholas Kristof on the grounds that if he had half a brain it would be the first half he ever had.
The journalist who made up the killer rabbit story likely drew that from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Carter is "history's greatest monster".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUjylIGjoh4
Enough said.
We should only speak good of the dead. Well, he's dead. Good.
H/T Moms Mabley.
"Jimmy Carter Deserved Our Thanks and Respect, Not Our Sneers" (NYT)
You can tell how truly miserable a President Jimmy Carter was, just look at the writeups: They're treating him as if he was a Republican.
Feck Carter, Hammy Jordan and the rest of that bumpkin squad.
Complicity in the Gwangju Massacre is what comes to mind, when I think of Carter, but he distinguished himself as a decent and mostly inoffensive ex-President, once he was out of power. The role his weird 1994 visit to North Korea played in the Agreed Framework on providing North Korea nuclear power technology is a bit murky, but other than that, he mostly confined himself to supporting humanitarian work as far as I am aware. Which was praiseworthy.
The Peter Principle in action. Solid state senator, decent Governor of Georgia, utter failure as president. Not the first such story in the Oval Office, probably not the last.
I liked him till he quit on us. Post-White House, he set higher standards for his own countrymen than he did for their adversaries. RIP
My uncle graduated from Annapolis with Jimmy and didn’t speak kindly of him. It was another classmate, Stansfield Turner, who my uncle believed would have made a great President.
The smirking and sneering of the mean girls has only gotten worse.
Jimmy Carter as President was the absolute paradigm of The Peter Principle. He was, I guess, at least an adequate Governor of Georgia but he was a completely inept boob in the presidency - an office he would never have attained if it hadn't been for his Goody Two-Shoes persona in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.
After his incompetence, his sanctimony was the thing I most disliked about Carter.
I also hated him for years for how he destroyed the dreams and many years of hard work of the Olympic athletes in the 1980 Games. The boycott that he ordered was nothing other than the floundering about of an ineffectual putz against the Soviets' invasion of Afghanistan, and it accomplished nothing other than to arbitrarily ruin those exemplary young athletes.
Reminds me of the Biden puff piece from Tyler Pager. Knuckleheads trying to rewrite history with puff pieces. Not interested reading them at all.
Can we get gas today dad? No son, our license plate ends in an odd number, we can’t get gas until tomorrow (if there’s any left).
Whenever I think of Carter, I always remember this Doonesbury cartoon.
Stansfield Turner - That man did some damage. Also, his name would be a good band name.
The Democrat Party-Media's Saint Carter stage.
Whatever.
Always try to say something good about the dead.
He's dead. Good.
Skynet will become self-aware before the NYT does.
Northeasterners often had a funny feeling about Jimmy when he came on the scene. Was it because he was a "hick"? Maybe in the circles Kristof moved in, but for me it was suspicion that he was a conman pulling some kind of grift. I had the same feeling about Bill Clinton, and it was more accurate about Bill. Jimmy had some of the conman in him, but he believed what he was saying, and had the inflexibility of Hillary Clinton.
"Malaise" isn't any more of a cliche than anything else that presidents are remembered for. It's just not the message the media wants to put out now. There's plenty of other stuff to choose from: I'll never lie to you, lust in my heart, getting advice on military policy from his daughter Amy.
Often heard is the thought that though a bad president, Carter was a good man. Do we hear about how good a man a president was if he was competent and effective? That's something of a consolation prize.
It's easy to say that some people are bad or evil, but harder to say that someone is good. Carter was thin-skinned. He could be petty and spiteful. He seemed cold, distant, and brittle. Did that mean he couldn't have been a good person? Did that necessarily make him a bad person?
Carter is called an anti-Semite on some right-wing sites. The assumption seems to be that an Israeli leader (Begin then, Netanyahu now) is always right and any American president who doesn't go along with him is a Jew-hater. Maybe we need to look closer at the actual circumstances involved before judging.
The Liberal establishment hated for Jimmy Carter always struck me as weird, since he believed in everything they did. He wasn't as far-left as Ted Kennedy on social issues, but he was darn near. And while Carter ran as a populist, it was all campaign rhetoric.
Most of the South voted for him in 76, and voted against him in 80. Its Carter that pushed Southern whites out of the Democrat party, not Nixon in 68.
Could we save some time and money by stuffing Biden into the coffin, also? Would Biden even notice?
Carter had some good points. He wanted to get along with the Soviets, he brokered a peace between Sadat and Israel. In fact, maybe that's where some of the odd liberal establishment hatred for him comes from. Carter thought the USA should be an honest broker between the Arabs and Israel, while the Liberal Establishment wants to be Israel's wingman and toady.
In any case, as noted upthread, its his concurrence in the Volker policy of "Wringing Inflation" out of the economy by double digit interest rates that killed his re-election chances. 30 year mortgages hit 13.5 percent. The unemployment rate was 7.5 percent. You can't win with those numbers.
Like Ford, and even more like Biden, Carter didn't have control over the Deep State / Permanent Bureaucracy, so you got the worst possible economic policy mix, which is exactly the one we have now. When government workers claim that they could do a great job if they were just free of the "interference" of elected officials, remind them of what happens when they get their way: high inflation, widespread incompetence due to mis-matched incentives, military weakness, crime, and infrastructure collapse.
At least the '70s had excellent music and movies: in the Obama-Biden years even those are mostly crap.
Stansfield Turner's history of US intelligence agencies since the OSS. Burn Before Reading, gives great insight into the bureaucratic infighting that pervades US intelligence efforts.
He famously promised that he would give us a President as good as the American people. In my darkest moments, I suspect that he did.
The press didn't actively hate him the way they did Nixon, but he surely didn't get the same amount of slathering, slobbering love that was advanced towards Clinton and, especially, Obama......It was a low, dishonest decade, and all the Presidents were tainted with the miasma of that era, but Carter definitely enhanced the malaise. LBJ to Nixon to Carter. They were all pretty dispiriting. Ford was decent enough, but he was just a recess appointment.......I like Presidents who are faithful to their wives and go to Church on Sunday, but it's not a strict requirement for the job......Carter was certainly had higher morals than LBJ, Nixon, or Reagan, but he wasn't a successful President. Hoover was certainly a lot smarter than Coolidge or FDR, but he wasn't a successful President. Morality, high IQ, these things take second base to luck and charisma when it comes to being President.
"our failure of discernment" Actually, just about everyone who knew him correctly discerned what a nasty sanctimonious self-regarding little man he was.
Fuck off, Jim.
A 16.25% 30 year mortgage for the purchase of an OC townhome in ‘81 in our case. Carter was a disaster in so many areas. His poor performance was the clarion call that helped get Reagan elected.
I wish you were right.
Well-put. Watch Bill Clinton’s face very carefully at that funeral. There’s going to be some complicated ruefulness leaking through that bed made and slept in. He was the actual poor southerner who had to deal with Jimmah screwing up his efforts overseas, then go home to a wife who may as well have been Jimmah himself.
Hillary is Carter’s truest legacy, in so many ways.
I agree, Big Mike, but I don’t think he had much empathy for her, either. He threw her under the Playboy Magazine bus while she was out there hobnobbing with John Wayne Gacy, Jim Jones, and later Kim Il-Jong to get him elected — first to the White House, then to the White House that existed only in his mind.
Volcker wasn't Carter's first choice for the Fed. Carter gets some credit for appointing Volcker, but also blame for appointing G. William Miller before that and letting inflation rise and the dollar fall.
Depends on what you call “morals.” The Christian hierarchy of sins is a curious thing.
Egypt-Israel was good. Much deregulation (even though he just signed bills) was good (especially kicking off craft beer). Other than that. . . .if anyone should have been hit with the Logan Act, it was him.
The 1980 election was very close in the South. It was closer in Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, and South Carolina than in the Northern states, though that was because the independent candidate, John Anderson, took a chunk out of the Democrat vote in Northern states. Close to half of the voters in the Deep South still backed Jimmy. 1984 saw a massive drop in the Democratic vote in the South. Carter didn't push Southerners out; Reagan pulled them in.
Democrats didn't have the unity in the 70s than they've had since. They still thought of themselves as the majority party and felt that they could bicker among themselves. Reagan frightened them into thinking that the country might not be behind them, so they closed ranks and tightened discipline. Eventually they were able to win even without Middle America.
Carter's rather perfectionist view was that true marital fidelity consisted in refraining from desiring women other than your wife, and possibly even from noticing that they were desirable. It was not enough just to keep your hands off 'em. I feel a certain wistful admiration. Although it's rather frightening that a man trained in nuclear engineering could be so completely divorced from practical reality.
Remember how he gave his deal of approval to shady elections in dodgy countries? He probably would have approved of the recent unpleasantness in Venezuela.
He was a sanctimonious clown who never hesitated to give cover to the world's worst. Remember his cooing over "Chairman" Arafat? Maureen Dowd wrote a hilarious column in those days about an interview in which Carter waxed eloquent about the charms of various dictators' wives.
Jimmy Carter was a Deplorable. He grew up in the middle of nowhere, in a house with no plumbing, electricity, or insulation. His politics were far closer to Donald Trump’s than, say, Ronald Reagan’s. How hilarious to see all the Establishment Republican hot takes here on the event of his passing.
Remember his respect and admiration for Yasir Arafat? Carter was either naive or evil.
Trump's politics are a lot like Dick Gephardt's.
"Carter is called an anti-Semite on some right-wing sites. The assumption seems to be that an Israeli leader (Begin then, Netanyahu now) is always right and any American president who doesn't go along with him is a Jew-hater. Maybe we need to look closer at the actual circumstances involved before judging."
It has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing with a particular Israeli leader. As one of many examples, Carter wrote a book called Peace Not Apartheid, thereby promoting that slur against Israel. He called the wall Israel put up to keep terrorists from entering the country a "wall of imprisonment." See New Neo's post on this for references. He also twice (the second after being roundly criticized by both Christians and Jews) taught a Sunday school class in which he depicted Jews as Christ killers.
I'll go with this take:
https://archive.is/0ZEt9#selection-643.0-643.74
Back when he gave this speech, they were filling up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the first time and about to pass 100,000 bbls - and they didn't top it out until 2010, at over 725,000 bbls.
The journalist who made up the killer rabbit story...
OK. I'll bite. How was it 'made up?'
Carter said that his book title referred to the situation on the West Bank and not to conditions in Israel itself. His statement that some Jewish leaders wanted Jesus executed wasn't quite the same as calling Jews as such or all Jews Christ killers. I'm not sure what Carter's attitude to Jews as Jews was, but much of the disagreement between Carter and Israel leaders relates to real issues and not just bigoted antipathy on his part.
Esquire, sometime in 1976... and article by Larry L. King* titled "We ain't trash no more" about the south voting for Carter: "He may a sumbitch, but he's our sumbitch."
*Not the TV host, the "Best Little Whorehouse" writer.
It was still a needlessly (and probably intentionally) inflammatory title, and "apartheid" no more applies to the West Bank than it does to Israel, except for the fact that Jews and Christians have very limited ability to live there without risking their lives.
As for the Sunday school classes, see this and decide if teaching (presumably children) that way is so innocuous.
Let others discuss the history of his administration. For me, there is only one thing to remember about Carter's time as President. The Killer Rabbit Attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident
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