| Greedy,Greedy,Greedy |
04-24-2015 10:49 AM |
Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
(Post 495747)
You asked if Carter made any good decisions. He did.
We didn't do anything he recommended in that speech. We shit on his every suggestion.
We don't like advice. We like cheerleaders with credit cards, like Ronnie. In a twisted sense, our perpetual adolescence may protect us. But it also turns us into shitheads.
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In retrospect, Carter's reputation as President should continually improve in the nation's mind. As a young 'un at the time I was an active part of the Kennedy effort, and that was a huge mistake, a total fuck up.
Carter's governmental reorganizations and deregulations made it ok in the Democratic party to talk about a bunch of basic government management and budgetary issues in a sensible way and laid the groundwork for Clinton and Obama. He was vastly more successful at containing spending than Reagan was after him.
SALT II was a big deal; the Camp David accords are one of the few Middle Eastern peace processes that has resulted in a lasting solution to a part of the problem (the ongoing Peace between Egypt and Israel); the Vietnam amnesty was important to getting us to move on.
His biggest and most lasting screw up was Iran. The Shah was a deeply unfortunate and tragic inheritance going back to Truman and even Roosevelt, and Carter should have jettisoned support for him on day 1 and been part of a more orderly transition, but he had his eye elsewhere in the world and didn't realize the instability there. He also never got control of the recession that came out of the oil shock. And he wasn't the most politically adept guy, in part because he was fundamentally honest.
He may not be a Johnson or an Obama, or even a Clinton, but among the Presidents from Kennedy to Bush I, only Johnson stands clearly above him in retrospect since Nixon's very significant accomplishments get overshadowed by his absolutely epic fuck-ups. |
