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Zas posted:Well yeah he's less of a war criminal than Nixon or Reagan, but it seems crazy to single him out for doing something positive for Latin America in particular given his record. He made the choice to arm right wing death squads to overthrow a popular leftist movement, knowing what the consequences would be. How much does it matter that he was less brutal and rhetorically chauvinistic about it than his immediate predecessor or successor? Because nuance is important. Again, there is a reason why Kissinger told the Argentine junta to speed up their torture and executions once Ford lost. As Chomsky said, Carter was the least brutal of all American presidents, even if he still would have been hanged in a Nuremberg style trial.
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Apr 14, 2018 06:29
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Here's my post about Chester Arthur. Chester Arthur was a bad man. He was slimy and corrupt and made lots of money stealing from the government. This culminated in him being nominated as vice president so he could do the bidding of his evil masters. Then the president got killed, he became president, and all of a sudden became a good man! He had some change of heart, probably a Christmas Carol situation with ghosts visiting him in the night, and he became a huge reformer. He got some major anti-corruption legislation through, didn't try to get reelected, everybody loved him and they still do, and he had wonderful facial hair. The end.
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Apr 14, 2018 18:50
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:My mom and others are still not sorry for voting for him even in '04. And they're otherwise liberal as hell. My mom believes Obama to be the greatest president of her life. But something something Bush had no choice. I'm having a hard time thinking of any possible definition of "liberal as hell" that could possibly involve being satisfied with a 2004 Bush vote in 2018. Like, at that point you've just sorta watered down the meaning to "likes Obama" or something. Also, while you briefly acknowledge that the Iraq War wasn't the first bad thing America has done, it's important to realize that America has pretty much always been bad (more often than not anyways). People sometimes point to Vietnam as some start of America doing bad things, but we also did a bunch of inexcusable poo poo before WW2 (that didn't even have the paper-thin justifaction of stuff like the Iraq or Vietnam wars). America not being a bad guy (like in WW2) is more the exception to the norm.
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Apr 15, 2018 05:24
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Here's my post about Chester Arthur. i mean Garfield was basically murdered because of the patron system anyway by a crazed syphilitic man who wanted to be a consul and then spent months in horrible agony as doctors poked around him until he died. i am sure Arthur saw alot of it. plus sphilic dude screamed "arthur is president" over and over again when he was tackled. so that could have lead to change too.
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Apr 15, 2018 05:30
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Ytlaya posted:I'm having a hard time thinking of any possible definition of "liberal as hell" that could possibly involve being satisfied with a 2004 Bush vote in 2018. Like, at that point you've just sorta watered down the meaning to "likes Obama" or something. I didn’t mean to imply that America was a certified Good Guy until Iraq, rather that Iraq was the catalyst for me as a child to start thinking more critically and learning about our other horrific adventures.
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Apr 15, 2018 20:26
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I think there's material for a whole thread about how America was founded on the ability of Congress, and Congress only, to make War, and how that ability has been tested by Presidents from the Quasi War of 1798 to the missile strikes of last week.
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Apr 16, 2018 04:05
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Alter Ego I want to thank you for your work and say I would joyfully ready an entire series of youdoing each 20th century president, not asking you to do that but I would read it. Your series George W. Bush is a great hate ready. God how hate that man. Unquestionable the greatest criminal of the current century and I mean that will out any irony or hyperbole. Edit: Bush is worse the Reagan. side_burned fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 00:10
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side_burned posted:Alter Ego I want to thank you for your work and say I would joyfully ready and entire series of your doing each 20th century president, not asking you to do that but I would read it. Your series George W. Bush is a great hate ready. God how hate that man. Unquestionable the greatest criminal of the current century and I mean that will out any irony or hyperbole. Thanks!  I think I'm going to do Carter next. On the whole, he was one of the nicest people to ever occupy the office and probably one of the most personally squeaky-clean too. I promise you'll get your Chet Arthur muttonchops primer after that.
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Apr 17, 2018 00:18
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Yeah, Alter Ego thanks for taking up my mantle and running with it. You're doing a great job with these write-ups.
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Apr 17, 2018 00:38
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I'd like to request someone do a writeup on John Tyler. I don't remember much of anything about him except for the trivia fact that he has (or at least recently had) still-living grandchildren, and for all the other presidents in the bottom 10 I could at least tell you something about why they're there without looking it up.
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Apr 17, 2018 01:57
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Rollersnake posted:I'd like to request someone do a writeup on John Tyler. I don't remember much of anything about him except for the trivia fact that he has (or at least recently had) still-living grandchildren, and for all the other presidents in the bottom 10 I could at least tell you something about why they're there without looking it up. Ah, His Accidency! Yeah, I think I might visit that time period again after Arthur. Yeah, the guy got kicked out of his own party in 1844, but we owe him a great deal--John Tyler set a precedent for how Vice Presidents should act when the President dies.
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Apr 17, 2018 02:42
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It's that time again! Here he is, as promised. James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, 39th President of the United States Part 1: Jimmy Who?  “My name is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for President.” So began James Earl “Jimmy” Carter’s acceptance speech for the Democratic Presidential nomination at the 1976 convention. Carter was an oddball in Democratic politics—a devoutly religious man, he was a Georgia Democrat who was largely unknown before beginning his bid for the Presidency. After Bush, I needed a palate cleanser—and who better than the man from Plains? Carter’s Presidency, like LBJ’s, is thought of through different prisms depending on both political affiliation and what one values in a chief executive. On the one hand, he accomplished a fair amount domestically. He founded the Departments of Energy and Health and Human Services, pardoned the Vietnam-era draft resisters, passed the Emergency Natural Gas and Energy Security Acts through Congress, and established the Superfund program to clean up toxic waste sites. On the international stage, there were the Camp David Accords, signed by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat. For his efforts he was even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But Carter’s Presidency was snakebitten from the start. His odd combination of devout Baptist sensibilities and his stubbornness meant that he and the largely Democratic Congress were at loggerheads most of the time. The foreign affairs blunders were considerable in size—the boycott of the Olympics and the Iranian hostage crisis were the two that caused him the most grief. Add to that his refusal and inability to build Congressional coalitions and it is easy to see how Carter’s Presidency was, in larger scope, a good man repeatedly shooting himself in the foot. But, as always, we have to examine how we got here first. Growing Up Carter You know how our Presidents love to emphasize their humble beginnings? Harrison was born in a log cabin, Bush was just a simple country boy from Texas? Well, for Carter, it was true. Born October 1, 1924, his childhood home lacked both electricity AND indoor plumbing. His mother Lillian was his moral compass—she broke the strict segregation lines in place in 1920s Georgia to teach health care to poor African American women. After graduating at the top of his class from Plains High School Carter, he was enticed by his uncle to join the United States Navy. Carter’s uncle used to tell stories about the faraway lands he’d visited as a sailor, and to a poor boy from rural Georgia, you can imagine how some of these tales sounded. While in school at the Naval Academy, Carter met and fell in love with his sister Ruth’s best friend, Rosalynn Smith. They got married shortly after he graduated in 1946.  Awww, look at those two.  Important Note: Carter actually served as the senior officer on the USS Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine constructed by the United States military. I’m not a Navy man, but I’m guessing that serving on a submarine is itself a grueling tour of duty, let alone a nuclear sub when the eyes of the entire United States are upon you. The Georgia State Senate Let’s hop ahead a few years. In 1953, Carter’s father Earl had died of cancer and the family’s somewhat meager livelihood was in jeopardy. He resigned his commission in the Navy to go home and save the peanut farm. He was successful, but his time in the Navy had given Jimmy Carter a taste for a life that extended beyond the borders of Plains. His father had represented Georgia’s Sumter County before his death, when his district’s seat in the State Senate opened up, Carter decided that being a peanut farmer and a deacon at his local church was merely preamble to a career in politics.  That toothy grin of his would become a trademark of every political campaign he’d run. Carter’s family was subject to threats from the Quitman County Democratic boss, Joe Hurst, an avowed segregationist (Carter was himself anti-segregation and was running against the machine’s hand-picked choice for the seat). He ran ahead in almost every county in the district, but was 224 votes behind in Quitman and the initial tallies showed him losing the election by 139 votes. It is in this moment where Carter first showed some of that famous dogged determination that would define him for the rest of his political life. He hired two famous Atlanta lawyers, Griffin Bell and Charles Kirbo, to aid him in making sure that any election fraud was rooted out and exposed. He’d calculated correctly, needless to say. Boss Hurst had stuffed ballot boxes in Quitman County and ensured that dead people had been active participants. Remember all that poo poo Republicans constantly accuse Democrats of doing? Well, it all happened in Georgia’s Quitman County in October 1962. The three-man recount committee went scorched-earth in response. All of Quitman’s votes were thrown out, leaving Carter in the lead by 65 votes. Problem was, Carter didn’t get certified for weeks—not until the Saturday before the general election. He and his allies spent all of Sunday crossing out Homer Moore’s name (the man he’d beaten) and replacing it with his on the county ballots. You find me one other Democrat, at the local, state, or federal level, who you think would do this. Go on. I’ll wait. Carter was now a Georgia State Senator and instantly gained a reputation as one of the hardest workers in the State Legislature. He distinguished himself as a fighter for the district’s African-American population—something that was completely alien to his fellow Democrats at the time (remember, this is the Jim Crow-era Georgia). There are a couple of takeaways you should get from Carter’s time in the State Senate: that he was very anti-government waste, and that he was anti-segregation in a time when that wasn’t really a thing in Georgia’s Democratic Party. He was even reelected in 1964 against a segregationist opponent. Running For Governor  It’s important to know this: Carter got whooped badly in a 1966 bid for the Georgia governorship, a loss he attributed primarily to the lack of support among Georgia’s white, segregationist voting population. Sometime after his 1966 beating, Carter became a born-again Christian. It is speculated that his sister, Ruth, herself a very devout Baptist and a born-again herself, had a great deal to do with it. Carter’s official bios do not specify what life events led up to his decision, but Ruth said that he came to her at one point professing a feeling of emptiness, especially after the devastating loss he’d suffered in the gubernatorial race. She proscribed that which had helped her—dedicating her life to the Church. Carter followed her advice and rededicated himself to the service of the Baptist Church. Carter knew after the beating he took in 1966 that he’d try again in 1970, however. Governor Lester Maddox, the staunchly segregationist sitting chief executive, was retiring. His second campaign, though, was not one we’d be particularly proud of today. Much as Lyndon Johnson did in his campaigns for Senate, Carter decided to take the public’s temperature first. That meant not appearing before African-American groups and not appealing to them for votes (not directly anyway). It also meant seeking the endorsements of men who were avowed segregationists, including the outspoken governor of Alabama, George Wallace. Subtly appealing to class antagonisms, he criticized his opponent, Carl Sanders, for being a representative of the Atlanta “elite” and not adequately understanding the plight of rural voters. It was not, as he said later, a campaign he was proud of when he looked back on it. But I guess the results spoke for themselves. Carter beat Sanders and coasted to victory over his Republican opponent (in those days, Democratic primaries were more or less predictive of a general election due to voters being less-than-favorably disposed to Republicans in a pre-Southern Strategy South). Governor Jimmy Carter  As though he realized what he had sold out on during the election, though, Carter did an about-face almost immediately after being sworn-in as Georgia’s governor. During his inaugural address he proclaimed to a crowd of very confused white segregationists that segregation’s time in Georgia was ending. “No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice,” he said. It hit the Georgia State House like a thunderbolt. Yes, I realize that Carter’s statement carries with it the implication that being black is a burden, but for many black people in Georgia at the time, I’m sure they felt that their skin color put them at an inherent disadvantage in the arenas of education, employment, and justice, much as it still does today. We see countless incidents of black people making less money than their white counterparts and being treated more brutally by the justice system. Carter was one of the few white politicians in the South at the time who realized the inequality present in the system. His signature achievement? Making government more efficient. During his tenure, 65 budgeted and 200 non-budgeted agencies, boards, bureaus, and commissions were reorganized into 20 different line agencies, with the objective being to consolidate similar functions into a single jurisdictional body. Basically, they wanted to eliminate agencies that performed duplicate functions—Georgia’s bureaucracy was bloated for this reason primarily. Yeah. It reads like a verbal primer on watching paint dry, but remember it—because Carter would one day try something similar when he became President. One of his other pet projects was improving Georgia’s lovely, lovely educational system. The Adequate Program For Education in Georgia (seriously, I think the guy who thinks up the names was on sabbatical) provided money to reduce class sizes, support vocational education (so that kids could learn trades) and equalize the funding sent to each school district. Carter boosted Georgia’s commitment to preschool education and eventually got a statewide kindergarten program implemented. If you ever wonder why Georgia’s education system is superior to that of many other Southern states, Carter is the reason why. But he had a problem. In 1974 he’d be term-limited out, and he was still young (only 50 years old). Georgia’s state constitution was like Virginia’s is now—it only allowed the governor a single four-year term. Like every other American, though, Carter had watched the events unfolding in Washington as first Vice President Spiro Agnew and then President Richard Nixon were forced out of office, one for tax evasion and the other for the Watergate scandal. He thought that America was hungry for someone they could trust in the Oval Office. So what was an enterprising young former governor to do, you ask? Why, run for President of course. End of Part 1. In Part 2 we’ll discuss the election of 1976. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 03:22
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joepinetree posted:Because nuance is important. Again, there is a reason why Kissinger told the Argentine junta to speed up their torture and executions once Ford lost. As Chomsky said, Carter was the least brutal of all American presidents, even if he still would have been hanged in a Nuremberg style trial. A lot of the historiography about Carter's role in El Salvador wasn't as developed when Chomsky said that. Although he'd probably still say it today and it might even be true, though it's really a silly and mostly meaningless metric. The point is "But he is the only president in at least the last half century who actually did something for human rights in places like Latin America." is not a nuanced statement. It's whitewashing bullshit. Carter was a charlatan and a hypocrite, that's all the nuance you need.
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Apr 17, 2018 06:46
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So how did a georgian dirt farmer get into the Naval Academy? It's not like he became an enlisted scrub in the Navy like other poors. Or hell, even ROTC at some podunk university. Nah, dude got the real deal. Googleable history seems scant on this part of his life, though. Wikipedia states "he achieved admission".
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Apr 17, 2018 07:43
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Vahakyla posted:So how did a georgian dirt farmer get into the Naval Academy? It's not like he became an enlisted scrub in the Navy like other poors. Or hell, even ROTC at some podunk university. Nah, dude got the real deal. Googleable history seems scant on this part of his life, though. Wikipedia states "he achieved admission". his family wasn't that poor, they were dirt farmers but prosperous dirt farmers. carter transferred to the naval academy in 1943 from georgia tech, and i'd imagine at that time the navy would gladly accept any college boy as an officer candidate e: tech's nrotc site says he was a member http://nrotc.gatech.edu/history-of-the-nrotc-unit-at-georgia-tech/ boner confessor fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 08:15
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That was a good write-up on Carter's early life, I had no clue about how he ran as a stealth segregationist only to immediately do an about-face.Zas posted:The point is "But he is the only president in at least the last half century who actually did something for human rights in places like Latin America." is not a nuanced statement. It's whitewashing bullshit. 
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Apr 17, 2018 16:09
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Zas posted:A lot of the historiography about Carter's role in El Salvador wasn't as developed when Chomsky said that. Although he'd probably still say it today and it might even be true, though it's really a silly and mostly meaningless metric. How is it whitewashing bullshit when we have extensive documented evidence that the Brazilian dictatorship explicitly decided to start it's process of opening up, including with an amnesty to political targets, in large part because of Carter? Or that the Carter administration actually did try to pressure Argentina and Chile to curb human rights abuses? More than one thing can be true at the same time. Carter may have been poo poo in El Salvador (and therefore deserve the guillotine like every other American president) and be the only one who actually tried to curb human rights abuses in other Latin American dictatorships (which, once again, is an extensively documented fact that went beyond just mere platitudes in public settings).
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Apr 17, 2018 16:58
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I might do a short blurb on John Tyler if Alter Ego doesn't get to it first. One of my favorite pieces of trivia is that Julia Gardiner Tyler, who married Tyler in the final year of his presidency, tried to get people to call her the "Lovely Lady Presidentress." (It was possibly in imitation of Dolly Madison who picked up the nickname "Queen Mother" on the D.C. social circuit.) She also had an elaborate carriage pulled by eight white matching Arabian horses, had Italian greyhound dogs shipped from the consul in Naples, and introduced the tradition that "Hail to the Chief" play whenever the president appeared at an event. When she left the White House, she insisted that guests call her the "Mrs. Ex-Presidentress," but the name didn't stick.
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Apr 17, 2018 19:00
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That GWB writeup was really good, thanks for that Alter Ego. I was a kid through all of GWB’s tenure so I never really understood much of what was going on. The fact that the Supreme Court stole 2000 from court was something that I did not know. What a fucker he and Karl Rove were/are I think it’s interesting that a lot of people are shaped by who was President during their formative years. I was a teenager/into my early 20s during the Obama years (I, uh, did not react well to Trump’s election) so i feel in general I’m more positive and believe in the power of the people. The last year has showed me that we need to press hard to get what we want and that compromise for certain things is not an option. Just some thoughts on the power of the presidency as a social pillar of devlopment
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Apr 17, 2018 20:32
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QuoProQuid posted:I might do a short blurb on John Tyler if Alter Ego doesn't get to it first. Please do! Any contributions are welcome.
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Apr 17, 2018 21:57
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Alter Ego posted:Please do! Any contributions are welcome. Agreed, anyone who has something to contribute can post, just please make it an effortpost if you want me to put it in the OP
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Apr 17, 2018 22:01
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Carlosologist posted:I think it’s interesting that a lot of people are shaped by who was President during their formative years. I was a teenager/into my early 20s during the Obama years (I, uh, did not react well to Trump’s election) so i feel in general I’m more positive and believe in the power of the people. The last year has showed me that we need to press hard to get what we want and that compromise for certain things is not an option. Just some thoughts on the power of the presidency as a social pillar of devlopment Any leftward shift among the youth is likely mostly due to the poor material conditions most young people will be facing post-HS or college, rather than some weird osmosis of Obama's pseudo-left politics. If anything, the Obama years demonstrated a failure of mainstream Democratic Party ideology, resulting in many people looking for options outside of that limited scope (thus the tremendous popularity of Bernie Sanders with younger Americans, which was particularly noteworthy given he had little support from the media/party and isn't terribly charismatic himself, which indicates that it's his ideas that resonated the most with many people). Of course, the other side of this coin is people going the alt-right route, and one interesting thing I've noticed is that a subset of people who were teens during the Obama years seem to have become right-wing (or anti-"SJW" or whatever) as a rebellious thing in the same way teens from my generation sometimes rebelled against the sort of fundamentalist Christian perspective represented by Republicans under Bush by becoming atheist and/or liberal.
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Apr 18, 2018 08:01
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Ytlaya posted:Any leftward shift among the youth is likely mostly due to the poor material conditions most young people will be facing post-HS or college, rather than some weird osmosis of Obama's pseudo-left politics. If anything, the Obama years demonstrated a failure of mainstream Democratic Party ideology, resulting in many people looking for options outside of that limited scope (thus the tremendous popularity of Bernie Sanders with younger Americans, which was particularly noteworthy given he had little support from the media/party and isn't terribly charismatic himself, which indicates that it's his ideas that resonated the most with many people). At this point there is quite a lot of crossover between alt-right and militant atheist.
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Apr 18, 2018 15:44
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I'd be interested in a Ulysses S. Grant effortpost, if anyone's taking requests.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:38
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:At this point there is quite a lot of crossover between alt-right and militant atheist. Not a surprise given how militant atheists are usually huge assholes anyway. ninjahedgehog posted:I'd be interested in a Ulysses S. Grant effortpost, if anyone's taking requests. Agreed!
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Apr 18, 2018 22:55
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Part 2: The Presidential Election of 1976 (Or: Hi, I’m Jerry Ford. I Like Movies.) When we last left Jimmy Carter, he was the black sheep Democratic governor of a Southern state where segregation had been law for a century. With the party realignment taking place, Democrats were leaving behind their racist past, allowing Republicans to gobble up the voters they lost. Carter overhauled Georgia’s government, erased tons of unnecessary bureaucracy, and built up Georgia’s educational system to make it the pride of the South. But, like I said, he had a problem. Georgia’s state Constitution allowed for only a single four-year term as governor. After stepping down in 1975 Carter was still young (only 50) and a man adrift. However, after witnessing the events that took place in Washington in 1974, Carter shrewdly calculated that Americans were desperate for a person in the Presidency that they could trust. Nixon’s administration had been such a potent cocktail of lies and poisonous backstabbing that it was fast souring Americans on politics in general. The Water Is Not, In Fact, Fine; Do Not Come In Nixon’s replacement was supposed to fix all that.  Gerald Ford was a Congressman from Michigan who had been elevated to the Vice Presidency after Spiro Agnew had stepped down due to a charge of tax evasion. His resume was actually fairly extensive (he’d been a member of the House of Representatives for 25 years, and he was on the Warren Commission after Kennedy was killed), but it was his affable, inoffensive manner that got him as far as it did. After Agnew stepped down, Nixon was facing a heavily Democratic House and Senate, and Ford was chosen as the least offensive replacement candidate for his new Vice President. When Nixon resigned in 1974, Ford made history as the only President who ever occupied the office without winning a national election. His easy smile and transparent method of doing business was, for many Americans, a breath of fresh air. He once said of Nixon, “Any man who needs a list to keep track of his enemies has too many enemies.” But he hosed up almost immediately. Anyone wanna guess how? https://www.washingtonpost.com/vide...m=.493c3c57e572 Yes. One month into his term, at a point when Americans were at their most vulnerable and an enormous majority of us wanted to see Richard Nixon pay for his crimes, Gerald Ford issued him a full pardon. It opened the loving floodgates. Ford’s decision instantly garnered a 53% disapproval rating in a Gallup poll conducted shortly afterwards, and his press secretary, Jerald terHorst, resigned in protest. Americans howled with outrage, as it appeared that Ford had placed Nixon above the law and above consequence for his actions. Though he appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to explain his reasoning, to most of us today it seems no less specious. Ford argued the following: quote:I was absolutely convinced then as I am now that if we had had this series in indictment, a trial, a conviction, and anything else that transpired after this that the attention of the President, the Congress and the American people would have been diverted from the problems that we have to solve. And that was the principle reason for my granting of the pardon. Let me put it this way: if you weren’t satisfied with the Justice Department’s reasoning in not going after the heads of the big banks that caused the 2008 crash, then this is going to sound like some real happy horseshit to you. This made Ford instantly vulnerable, and there was a certain up-and-coming challenger on his right flank who was making a lot of noise about being President too.  Yep, it’s time for this motherfucker! Despite being President and despite winning primaries in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Florida, Ford couldn’t force Ronald Reagan out of what would eventually become a hotly-contested battle for the nomination. Reagan won contests in North Carolina, Texas, Indiana, and California, as well as much of the old Confederacy. Ford won in Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, however, and he was able to finally edge Reagan out on the first ballot at the August RNC. Where were we? Oh, yeah. Jimmy Carter. Carter had taken great care to introduce himself to national Democrats well before running in his first primary. He’d fundraised and campaigned for Democratic candidates in 1974 and 1975, and he used the new Democratic primary rules to his advantage, filing delegate slates in 30 of the 31 primaries. He wasn’t without opponents, however, all of whom had greater name recognition than he did.  Sen. Morris Udall (D-AZ) laid claim to what was then the old-guard liberal wing of the party. His son Mark Udall served in the Senate from Colorado until 2014, and his nephew, Tom Udall, serves as the senior Democratic Senator from New Mexico now.  Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) was, perhaps, the Joe Lieberman (absent the backstabbing quisling nature) of his time--good on domestic issues and insanely hawkish on foreign policy. However, his support for American actions in Vietnam hurt him with the left.  What a difference a few years makes. After being shot in the spine and paralyzed from the waist down in 1972, Alabama governor George Wallace announced that he was running a fourth time for the Presidency. Despite his protestations, however, his health became a major factor--and he only won one contest before dropping out and endorsing Carter. Carter knew his opponents would carefully pick and choose where to allocate their resources, so his team elected to run everywhere--knowing that the rules would give him a proportional allocation of delegates even if he didn’t win the race. If this strategy sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same one Barack Obama used against Hillary Clinton in 2008--run a 50-state operation and grab shares of delegates in every state. The plan worked. He won Iowa’s caucus and New Hampshire’s primary, giving him instant street cred and name recognition. He ousted George Wallace in the South, beating him in every Southern state except Alabama, Wallace’s home turf. He beat Morris Udall in Illinois and Wisconsin, and he managed to bump off both Udall and Jackson in the Pennsylvania primary, effectively ending their campaigns. The Peanut Farmer vs. The Guy Who Fell Down The Steps Of Air Force One Shut up, OK? I was trying to think of a good title and couldn’t. The Democrats nominated Carter at their convention in New York City in July 1976. Approving a platform that was in line with Carter’s center-left views, they knew that in order to keep the left with them they’d need a number two that was trusted by the old guard. They came up with this guy:  Walter Mondale had entered the United States Senate after Hubert Humphrey’s elevation to the Vice Presidency in 1964. He was a veteran of hundreds of political battles and a known and trusted friend to the Democratic establishment. He was chosen to serve as a tether between Carter, the outsider, and the establishment that was having some trouble trusting him. When the race began in early August, Carter was nearly invincible. He had a 30-point lead on Ford in both the Gallup and Harris polls, but he was rather pessimistic. He predicted, correctly, that a lead this strong would not hold. Ford didn’t do a great deal of active campaigning during the race. He let his Vice Presidential choice, Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS), do much of the barnstorming and speechifying early on, planning to blitz the country himself in the final weeks. Weird thing was, the strategy worked. Carter’s campaign started to make mistakes. Carter tried to act like a traditional Democrat rather than using the strategies that had gotten him the nomination, advocating federal initiatives to curb unemployment and revive the economy. It went over like a lead balloon, allowing Ford to castigate him as a flip-flopper (sound familiar?) and giving voters the impression that he’d sell out his principles if he thought it’d help him win. One of the most eye-opening moments for Democratic voters was Carter’s interview with Playboy magazine, an attempt by the campaign to shed the staid, fuddy-duddy image Carter’s devout Southern Baptist roots had given him. It resulted in this unfortunate quote:  We read it now and don’t understand why it caused such a stir. How shocking, a red-blooded, straight American man has checked out other women’s bodies. In 1976, however, it gave the pearl-clutchers plenty of reasons to clutch their pearls. However, anyone who remembers anything about the 1976 election remembers it for one thing: the second debate. In it, Gerald Ford was asked a question about Soviet hegemony over the Eastern bloc in Europe. His answer was...unorthodox. https://youtu.be/PfyL4uQVJLw It was befuddling to say the least. The Soviets had installed Communist governments in every Eastern European country. When moderator Max Frankel interceded to give Ford a chance to explain himself, Ford instead doubled down on his response. It cost him dearly. Ford already suffered doubts about his intellectual capacity and his place on the Republican spectrum (liberal Republicans thought him too conservative and vice versa). Carter’s message was clear: I will never lie to you. We know that it worked.  For the first time since 1960 the South had gone (with the exception of Virginia), as a bloc, back to the Democrats. The entire West with the exception of Hawaii had gone for Ford, but it wasn’t enough. Returning to his home in Plains, Carter told supporters that he was sorry it had been as close as it was, due to “the candidate [not being] good enough as a campaigner”. Then he promised them he’d make it up to them as President. End of Part 2. Part 3 will cover the Carter White House years. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 23:45
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You forgot that God-Emperor Jerry Brown ran in 76 as well. 
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Apr 19, 2018 02:52
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i love that gerald ford gaffe. one of those rare times a candidate or president accidentally says something true and gets raked over the coals for it.
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Apr 19, 2018 03:00
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There was also a moment in one of the Carter vs. Ford debates when the sound stopped working and both guys just stood there for several awkward minutes. Edit: Apparently it lasted 27 minutes. Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 03:38
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Echo Chamber posted:There was also a moment in one of the Carter vs. Ford debates when the sound stopped working and both guys just stood there for several awkward minutes. 1976's election had its budget cut 
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Apr 19, 2018 05:01
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I had never seen Carter’s electoral map before. Crazy that the deep south practically carried the OG liberal boogeyman president.
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Apr 19, 2018 19:35
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I had never seen Carter’s electoral map before. Crazy that the deep south practically carried the OG liberal boogeyman president. Carter's win showed the Republicans that southern evangelicals were a bloc worth capturing. They created the Moral Majority and other groups to whip them into line.
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Apr 19, 2018 19:39
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Deteriorata posted:Carter's win showed the Republicans that southern evangelicals were a bloc worth capturing. They created the Moral Majority and other groups to whip them into line. Is that the airplane II moral majority or a different one?
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Apr 19, 2018 19:42
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Azhais posted:Is that the airplane II moral majority or a different one? I'm not sure just what you're referring to, but given that Airplane II was made in 1982 it has to be the same one.
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Apr 19, 2018 19:53
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Part 3 is in progress. I'm about halfway through writing it, and it's gonna be pretty long. Some of the highlights: The Bert Lance incident The commencement speech at Notre Dame The Camp David Accords The "malaise" speech" The hostage crisis Billy Beer
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Apr 21, 2018 05:16
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R. Guyovich posted:i love that gerald ford gaffe. one of those rare times a candidate or president accidentally says something true and gets raked over the coals for it. What were the circumstances that lead to this moment? Why did he say it? Was it true? And why did it hurt his election chances?
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Apr 21, 2018 06:25
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AgentF posted:Was it true? I'm not a historian but I believe the Soviet Union had some level of influence over Eastern Europe, outside of a couple countries.
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Apr 21, 2018 14:31
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AgentF posted:What were the circumstances that lead to this moment? Why did he say it? Was it true? And why did it hurt his election chances? No, not really, no. We're talking about the days when the Iron Curtain was still very much a thing, and most of Eastern Europe was still dominated by Soviet puppet governments. What Ford meant to say in that moment is a bit different. You can sort of see it in his follow-up--he meant to imply that if given the chance the people of those subjugated nations would not vote in a pro-Soviet government, so that while the Soviets did occupy their countries, they did not have the hearts and minds of the inhabitants. It's a little convoluted but he should have done a better job explaining himself.
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Apr 21, 2018 14:36
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Duodecimal posted:I'm not a historian but I believe the Soviet Union had some level of influence over Eastern Europe, outside of a couple countries. No you see they all just decided to be communist and besides did you know that the US also did imperialism. Stalin increased literacy! The USSR had a decent standard of living for about two decades. There now guyovich doesn't need to come back. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 21, 2018 15:46
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Part 3: The Carter White House (Or: Too Many Peanuts And Not Enough Nougat) When we last left Jimmy Carter, he’d won a close election against the sitting President, Gerald Ford, running as someone who would be brutally, unfailingly honest with the American people.  That image was from the day of Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, when he shocked the massive crowd that had come to see him and rather vexed the Secret Service when he, new First Lady Rosalynn Carter, and their 9-year-old daughter Amy exited the Presidential limo and walked the mile down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. Carter wanted to signal a break from tradition and use the event as the first of what he hoped would be many to show how different he was from his predecessors. And it was, guys. It so was. Problem was, not all those deviations were positive. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights and lowlights of the Carter years. Burying Vietnam Six Feet Under Carter wanted to get things started on a high note, and he didn’t want to screw around with a Congress that was already looking askance at him before he’d even put his pencils in a jar. He also knew that America was still smarting from Vietnam. During Ford’s tenure, America’s failure (that’s right, I loving said failure) in Southeast Asia had become absolute. North Vietnam had swarmed into South Vietnam and unified the country under one banner. The Americans in the Saigon embassy were evacuated by helicopter from the roof.  We all know that Vietnam was also the last time the draft was in effect, and many young men had either burned their draft cards, fled to Canada, or refused to report, in effect making them criminals. So Carter decided to flip the table. He pardoned them all with the stroke of a pen, in keeping with a campaign promise he had made. Some Vietnam veterans were indignant at this, as it seemed to them as though Carter was rewarding those who had fled the fight when they had sacrificed so much. The left didn’t think it went far enough, as it failed to include deserters, civilian protesters, or those who had been dishonorably discharged. It was an extremely noble gesture and (at least in my opinion) the right thing to do, yet it still managed to piss off a not-insignificant portion of the country and it deepened the mistrust that the Democratic establishment had for him. The Bert Lance Affair  One of the things Carter promised the American people as he campaigned around the country was this one, ironclad cornerstone of his candidacy: I will never lie to you. This matters because the guy in the picture above was the first indication that that might not be strictly true. Bert Lance had been Carter’s confidant since his first run for the Georgia governorship, and he was now the head of the Office of Management and Budget. He’s also, interestingly enough, the guy who popularized the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. He and Carter were so close, reportedly, that they actually prayed together every morning (yes, I realize that for the vast majority of men in the Oval Office this would be retch-inducing, but understand that Jimmy Carter really was this devout). Six months into his tenure, however, Lance began to run into some legal trouble. The press and Congress got wind of mismanagement and corruption at Georgia’s Calhoun First National Bank during Lance’s tenure as chairman of the Board of Directors. Some prick named William Safire even wrote an article that won him a Pulitzer Prize. You can read it if you want. I won’t quote it here because I hate William Safire. He is the intellectual fig leaf of conservatism. The takeaway was that Carter knew about Lance’s troubles and hired him on in the administration anyway--something Republicans were delighted to string him up for in the media. Lance immediately resigned his position to avoid the hint of impropriety, but the damage was done. (Incidentally, he was acquitted of any wrongdoing in 1980.) The Notre Dame Commencement Speech https://youtu.be/eTo0q2H-XuI Apologies for the quality of the video; it was 1977. What do you want from me, huh?  I included this because it was, like many commencement speeches, utilized by Jimmy Carter to deliver what became a landmark policy address. After decades of promoting American hegemony abroad with Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Jimmy Carter declared a radical shift in United States foreign policy. quote:Last week, I spoke in California about the domestic agenda for our Nation: to provide more efficiently for the needs of our people, to demonstrate-against the dark faith of our times--that our Government can be both competent and more humane. This isn’t edited. An American President committed the United States to shift its focus to providing a more humane, more compassionate foreign policy. It was in keeping with who Carter was as a person (and it would define his post-Presidency), but it again pissed off Republicans and some hawkish Democrats who thought we would project weakness abroad to totalitarian regimes. The Coal Strike  This one you might only remember if you lived through it. I didn’t, so my research took some time. In 1977, the United Mine Workers of America’s contract, negotiated in 1974, was coming to a close. This contract had ostensibly negotiated solid collective bargaining agreements, but the problem was that even after the miners went back to work, “wildcat strikes”, or strikes carried out by union workers without union leadership’s knowledge or authorization, were becoming increasingly common. The UMWA’s President, Arnold Miller, argued that the best way to stop them was to give local unions the right to strike, thus stopping mine operators from creating the conditions that led to strikes for fear of losing business. The mine owners flatly refused. They knew Miller had little leverage--power utilities and iron and steel producers had a 3-4 month backup supply of bituminous coal, more than enough to weather a strike. The UMWA now only controlled half of the coal mines in the nation, down from 67% in 1974, and Miller had fired many of his supporters in the three years between 1974 and 1977, making the organization unable to handle the needs of the strikers. Nevertheless, on December 6, 1977, the miners went on strike when their contract expired. And much like all strikes, this one wasn’t bloodless, either. A coal auger was blown up at a mine near Saint Charles, Georgia, a coal train was stopped and delayed in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and on December 13, state police in riot gear tear-gassed about 400 coal miners in Daviess County, Kentucky, who had thrown rocks and bottles at passing coal trucks. Four weeks into the strike, five union miners were indicted on federal charges for conspiracy in the dynamiting of a section of the Norfolk and Western Railway on which non-union coal was being carried. Motherfucker. All that’s missing is the Pinkertons. Indiana and Virginia declared states of emergency and deployed the National Guard to protect coal convoys, and on March 6, Jimmy Carter did something unimaginable: he used the Taft-Hartley Act to break the strike, declaring their actions illegal under the jurisdictional strikes clause of the law. A federal district court issued an injunction that ordered the miners back to work. Before we start declaring him a heretic and advocating death by guillotine, however, you should know that Carter did little to enforce the decree. He asked the court to make the injunction permanent, but his administration had made little effort to reopen the mines, and the court sensed the lack of urgency. They declined. The strike did eventually end. UMWA workers realized that wildcat strikes reduced productivity, which in turn reduced employer contributions to pension and health funds (this sounds really loving sick, doesn’t it?). They also thought that continued striking would hurt their ability to organize out West, so they and the owners agreed on new dispute resolution procedures that, they hoped, would decrease the number of wildcat strikes. They also received a 37% wage hike, guaranteed payment of health and retirement benefits by employers even if the union’s pension funds were depleted, and health care deductibles of $275 per year per family and $50 per year per family for prescription drugs. Not ideal, but compromise usually leaves everyone mad. The Camp David Accords  Yup, we’ve reached it: the “when you think of Carter, you think of X” moment. For Jimmy Carter it’s the Camp David Accords. A quick background on why we’re here: after the second World War, Great Britain’s Palestine was partitioned into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an independent Jerusalem. The mandate ended on May 15, 1948, and after the first Arab-Israeli war was over, the Arab state (Palestine) was not re-established. So Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip and Jordan took the West Bank, which included the eastern half of Jerusalem. In the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel took those territories back, and also occupied the Golan Heights--a patch of Syrian land on Israel’s northern border. Carter had his work cut out for him by 1977. He wanted Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, Arab recognition of and peace with Israel, and a solution to resettling the Palestinian refugees displaced by the Six-Day War. He’d met early on with Middle Eastern leaders, and he was encouraged by the progress made--he found both Anwar Sadat, the President of Egypt, and the newly-elected Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, to be willing to sit at the bargaining table. Sadat had even visited Israel in November 1977 and spoken before the Israeli Knesset. So Carter decided to invite them to Camp David to talk. Bear in mind that the cynicism that usually surrounds Middle East peace plans didn’t really exist yet because the United States hadn’t really put a lot of effort into it before. The summit began on September 5, 1978 and lasted 13 days. It wasn’t easy. Begin was pessimistic from the off that anything could get done, and Sadat got so frustrated at one point that he threatened to take his delegation and leave after 3 days. At the last minute, however, Begin agreed on a key provision that he and Sadat had disagreed on--he agreed to allow the Knesset to decide the fate of the Israeli settlements in the Sinai Peninsula, which Sadat wanted Israel to abandon. The eventual outcome, called the “Framework For Peace in the Middle East”, consisted of three main parts: 1) a process for Palestinian self government in the West Bank and Gaza 2) the framework for the conclusion of a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt 3) similar frameworks for peace treaties between Israel and its Arab neighbors The Knesset eventually agreed that a Palestinian governing body would replace Israeli political and military forces in the occupied territories, and Sadat and Begin signed the treaty in a public ceremony in 1979. It was Carter’s biggest foreign policy coup and by far one of the most consequential events to come out of his Presidency. The ‘Malaise’ Speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IlRVy7oZ58 Before we go forward I have to say that this speech gets more flack from Presidential historians than I think it deserves. It was absolutely warranted, because Americans had never had a President tell them what they needed to hear rather than what they wanted to hear. In July of 1979 Jimmy Carter went before the American people to give what most people thought would be a speech on the energy crisis--gas had jumped in price ever since Iran had become a hostile regime and OPEC had drastically increased the price of a barrel of Middle East oil. It highlighted our energy dependence on the region. However, the speech he was given was...less than inspiring. It read like a boring laundry list of conservation proposals and practically put Carter to sleep when he read it. During a trip to Camp David Carter’s chief pollster, Pat Caddell, told him that Americans were suffering from a “crisis of confidence” after the events of the 1960s and early 1970s--implying that we had perhaps lost our way as a nation. Carter decided to give a speech instead that addressed this instead. He went before the American people on July 15, 1979 and said this: quote:I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy... I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might. Powerful words. In a word, we’d screwed up. We’d allowed American status as one of the only superpowers on Earth to go to our head and we had allowed overconsumption--mainly of natural resources--to get us to where we were now. And he was right, goddamnit, and at first the American people agreed with him. The speech initially gained a 75% approval response and Carter’s approval rating rose by double digits. Americans didn’t mind Carter questioning their values. Thing was, however, he didn’t capitalize on the situation. Just two days later Carter proved that he wasn’t immune to the confusion and disarray that seemed to be infecting America like a virus--he fired his entire Cabinet. It hampered the government’s ability to successfully connect the energy crisis with good civic re-engagement initiatives, making his words meaningless. Republicans pounced. Carter was accused of telling Americans to “eat your peas” and “denigrating American values”. It paved the way for a certain loving loving loving SHITFUCKING rear end in a top hat DICKKNOB ASSFUCKING SHITLORD-- Ahem. It paved the way for this man in 1980 to run as “The Happy Warrior”:  We know what happened next.  The Iranian Hostage Crisis  After the overthrow of Muhammad Mossadegh in 1953, the United States-backed coup had installed a member of Iran’s royal family as the man in charge: Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. We liked the shah mainly because he was pro-West, anti-Communist, and secular--the holy trinity for hitting America’s G-spot in those days. In return for tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid he gave nearly 80% of Iran’s oil reserves to America and Britain. By the 1970s, most Iranians had had enough. I should have mentioned that the Shah was an rear end in a top hat--a brutal dictator whose secret police tortured and killed thousands, and he allowed the economy to tank while spending Iran’s money on American-made weapons. In protest they turned to this man:  Eeegh. If that picture didn’t send a shiver up your spine, I’m not sure what to tell you. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a radical Muslim cleric who had started a revolutionary Islamist movement in Iran--he promised Iranians greater autonomy and a break from the past. Needless to say, the revolution was successful. The Shah fled in July 1979, his government was disbanded and the Ayatollah put a militant Islamist government in its place. Carter didn’t do anything to defend the Shah--he was aware of Iran’s awful human rights record and the United States didn’t want to stir the pot in the Middle East. However, he did allow the Shah to enter the United States in October of 1979 to treat his malignant lymphoma. His decision was not political, but it was the spark that lit the fire nonetheless. On November 4, 1979, a group of pro-Ayatollah students smashed through the gates of the American embassy in Tehran. They seized 66 hostages, most of whom were diplomats and embassy employees. 13 of them were released after only a short period of time; most of these were African-Americans and women who, the Ayatollah said, were “already subject to the oppression of American society”. The man threw shade pretty effectively, I have to hand it to him. By mid-1980, in the heat of the Presidential campaign, 52 hostages remained in Iran, and the Ayatollah was not swayed by any diplomatic maneuvers the Carter administration tried. The hostages were repeatedly degraded and humiliated--marched before jeering crowds and cameras, disallowed from speaking or reading, and they were seldom allowed to change clothes. To add to Carter’s humiliation, in April of 1980, a military operation codenamed Eagle Claw that tried to rescue the hostages failed when a desert sandstorm caused several of the helicopters to malfunction. One crashed into a transport plane on takeoff and 8 American soldiers were killed. It made Carter look weak and ineffective, and Republicans had a field day. There were even rumors that Carter’s opponent, California governor Ronald Reagan, allowed his staff to secretly negotiate postponing the release of the hostages until after Carter was out of office (personally, I believe this was 100% true. Reagan and his people were underhanded shitbags). On January 21, 1981, just hours after Reagan was inaugurated, the hostages were released. Carter had worked right up until the hours before inauguration to get them released, but it was that MISERABLE ASSFUCKING loving FUCKSTICK gently caress-- Ahem. It was Reagan who ended up taking credit. gently caress Ronald Reagan and gently caress anyone who thinks he was the one who got the hostages released beyond having his people sabotage the negotiations. The Election of 1980 Carter wasn’t looking particularly robust headed into the 1980 elections. His relationship with Congress was in tatters, despite it being dominated by Democrats. Iran still had 52 Americans held hostage. His boycott of the 1980 Olympics had produced backlash from advertisers and broadcasters like NBC, especially after he threatened to revoke the passports of any American athletes who competed under an unaffiliated flag. And his loving opponent took full advantage.  Yes, he’s back. Apparently they didn’t drive the stake deep enough in 1976 and the old cancerous boil on humanity's rear end had returned for another go. Thing is, Reagan wasn’t the only opponent Carter had to contend with in 1980. The old guard Democrats had had enough of that weirdo Jimmy Carter and decided to nominate their own candidate:  Yes! The third of the Kennedy brothers had won his older brother Jack’s seat in the Senate and had held it ever since 1962 (when he was old enough to assume it). Kennedy would eventually go on to be reelected eight (!) more times. The party saw this as a chance to reclaim its identity from Democrats like Carter. Kennedy himself didn’t particularly like Carter--the two had clashed early on, and Kennedy decided to challenge Carter after calculating (correctly) that the administration’s foreign policy blunders and economic woes had made Carter weak. Kennedy actually outpolled Carter at the start, but the campaign began to lose steam after questions about Chappaquiddick--an incident from a decade earlier where Kennedy’s car had careened off a bridge and a young woman had drowned--began to plague him. He had also not kicked off his campaign on the right foot: in an interview with CBS’ Roger Mudd before the announcement, Kennedy had been asked why he wanted to run for President. If you’ve ever seen this episode of “The West Wing”, his answer might sound familiar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5TkhNWPspM It was incoherent, rambling, and unsure--exactly the opposite of what everyone expected from Kennedy at a moment that should have been a defining one for his campaign. His campaign won only 12 primaries, but Kennedy refused to drop out--and the 1980 Democratic convention became perhaps the nastiest since 1968. There are some names y’all might know who worked for Kennedy that year: Harold Ickes (ran the convention floor for New York) Joe Trippi (managed the Texas and Utah delegations) Bob Shrum (would eventually run Gore 2000) Not sure if it’s a coincidence or not that all these men would go on to manage losing campaigns. Kennedy did eventually drop his bid for the nomination but the damage to Carter and the Democratic Party was too severe. Political infighting, along with economic instability, the hostage crisis, and the public perception of Carter as weak and feckless allowed Reagan to gallop to victory.  Ugh. We were now headed for 12 years of Republican rule, although we didn’t know it yet. I hope you have enjoyed reading this. Carter was a good man beset by a great deal of trouble, and his post-Presidency actions far outclassed the things he did while in office. And yes, muttonchop fans--Chester Arthur is my next target. Post-Script: Billy Beer Every family has ‘em--the ne’er do well sibling who seems to exist to cause trouble. For Jimmy Carter that was his younger brother Billy.  William Alton “Billy” Carter was sorta the family’s black sheep. He’d dropped out of Emory University before serving in the Marine Corps for four years, then returned to Plains to help Jimmy run the peanut farm. But we’re here to talk about something very, very special. In 1977 Billy Carter endorsed a beer made by the Falls City Brewing Company. Wishing to establish a brand as a beer-swilling Southern good ol’ boy and trading on his brother’s name, Carter decided to name it after himself. Billy Beer was born.  If you can’t read that inscription at the bottom, it says “I had this beer brewed up just for me. I think it’s the best I ever tasted. And I’ve tasted a lot. I think you’ll like it too.” Yes, this might be one of the greatest things ever produced by a Presidential sibling. If you still lust in your heart for a can of Billy Beer, it can be found on eBay for as little as 30 bucks a six-pack: https://www.ebay.com/i/142719551444?chn=ps Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Apr 22, 2018 |
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Apr 21, 2018 16:16
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