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Category: Jimmy Carter

  • Piling on Jimmy Carter

    Everyone seems to be taking shots at Jimmy Carter today. By everyone, I mean the world of bloggers. Sister Toldja, Powerline and Crotchety Old Bastard get their licks in today. It’s probably because he’s an elitist SOB who has never gotten over his 1980 defeat. or it could be because he writes crap like this in the Washington Post;

    I am concerned that public discussion of my book “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid” has been diverted from the book’s basic proposals: that peace talks be resumed after six years of delay and that the tragic persecution of Palestinians be ended. Although most critics have not seriously disputed or even mentioned the facts and suggestions about these two issues, an apparently concerted campaign has been focused on the book’s title, combined with allegations that I am anti-Israel. This is not good for any of us who are committed to Israel’s status as a peaceful nation living in harmony with its neighbors.

    So, because no one is paying attention to what he’s saying in his book, we all deserve to die? Every time someone does pay attention to his book, they find lies and misrepresentations – lies and misrepresentations he refuses to defend in public. Of coourse the media calls it polarizing the discussion about the Middle East, but an intellectually honest person would call it propaganda.

    Carter calls the politics in Israel apartheid and refers to the Israeli occupation – two terms that are so rigid in their meaning, there’s no room for discussion. Carter has purposely used extreme terms to stifle debate. He only demands agreement;

    Abbas is wise in repeating to Secretary Rice that he rejects any “interim” boundaries for the Palestinian state. The step-by-step road-map formula promulgated almost three years ago for reaching a final agreement has proved to be a non-starter — and an excuse for not making any progress.

    So everyone should give in completely to the Palestinians? No “roadmap”? No concessions? And, jimmy, why don’t you tell us why the “step-by-step” formula doesn’t work? Maybe because the Palestinians are so steeped in their hatred of Israelis that they can’t help but kill Israelis no matter what the Israelis give the Palestinians.

    The premise of exchanging Arab territory for peace has been acceptable for several decades to a majority of Israelis but not to a minority of the more conservative leaders, who are unfortunately supported by most of the vocal American Jewish community.

    And what happened last year when the Israelis exchanged territory for peace? Did they get peace?

    See Carter playing fast and loose with the truth is not new. He promised in his “malaise speech” that he would build refineries and piplines which never materialized. He promised before the 1976 election that he would never surrender the Panama Canal Zone to Panamanians.

    I wrote a paper in college about the Torrijos-Carter Treaty and I had to read his “Keeping the Faith” memoirs and discovered a paragraph that explained why he figured the American people were for giving away the Canal. He explained that even though only 20% of Americans agreed we should give up that resource, 75% of Americans who “understood the issue” as he did agreed with him.

    That’s what Jimmy Carter thinks of the average American. That’s why he lost the 1980 election and why he continues to be the worst ex-President in history.

    UPDATE: According to Fox News Channel (by way of Little Green Footballs) I’m reading that Brandeis will allow Alan Dershowitz to rebut Carter after Carter’s lecture there next week.

  • The case for domestic oil drilling

    If anybody learned anything yesterday, it should have been that we need to expand our domestic oil production. Russia and the Belarus battling each other over gas lines,Hugo Chavez nationalizing the US-corporation-owned telecommunications and electricity industry in Venezuela (while Chavez stays insulated from serious backlash with massive petrodollars after nationalizing the oil industry last year) to cries of “Always towards victory, Comandante!” from his cabinet.

    Iran appears to be running short of oil according to Roger Stern in the International Tribune which doesn’t do anything for stability in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Without the US in the Gulf, Iran would be free to run rough shod over the emirates and then hold the world hostage to it’s lunatic President’s whims.

    A UPI story reports that the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta holds Nigerian oil production hostage to it’s demands that the industry be nationalized to “let profits benefit the people”. A chonology of the attacks on Nigerian oil by the rebels courtesy of Reuters.

    With vast reserves of oil in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico and off the West Coast, it seems to make common sense to get ahead of the impending worldwide energy disaster. But no one has accused Democrats of having too much common sense.

    Since we haven’t built an oil refinery since 1978, it’d probably be a good idea to build or expand a few of those as well. In his 1979 “malaise speech“, Democrat President Jimmy Carter promised us that

    We will protect our environment. But when this nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it. 

    So where are the Democrats when there is a Republican administration facing an energy crisis? Are they on the side of working Americans or are they on their own selfish, political side?

    But President Bush’s administration is lifting a ban on drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay and boosting royalty rates to offset OPEC’s impending production cuts. While in the interim, Democrats are planning to cut back tax breaks for oil company exploration and development. So who’s really doing the people’s business here?

    Captain Ed comments on Chavez at Captain’s Quarters

  • Learning the wrong lessons

    While perusing the usual newspapers this morning, I read about the war in Somalia with Ethiopia in the Washington Post. There’s so little in the news about this, it’s difficult to find anything sometimes.

    But the war is directly related to our own war against terror, since Islamofacists learned about our weak spot from Clinton’s hasty withdrawal from Somalia in 1993. Saddam Hussein made it mandatory for his military leaders to watch the film “Black Hawk Down” in the days preceding the US war against Hussein in 2003 to demonstrate how easy it is to destroy our public will to fight our enemies despite our battlefield victories.

    About half way down the WaPo story is a quote from some imbecile named John Prendergast, “a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group in Washington”. He’s quoted as saying;

    “Hasn’t anyone heard of Iraq? A military strategy of ‘countering terrorism’ never works and will likely blow up in their faces.”

    I wonder what this “senior analyst” would have us do? Apparently, well-illustrated by the situation in Somalia, leaving the terrorists alone doesn’t work. As illustrated by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton with Yassir Arafat, negotiations don’t work, either. So what’s the solution Junior Space Cadet John Prendergast?

    According to the latest Pentagon reports, specifically the DoD report to Congress last month, the Iraqis are moving towards stability, perhaps not as quickly as we’d like, but they’re going in the right direction. If we had removed Hussein and then left Iraq to it’s own devices (like we did in Panama in 1989 which already had a democraticly-elected government and a law-enforcement entity which were more loyal to the people than to Noriega), it would have become the new Somalia.

    In the Washington Times this morning, there’s an Associated Press story that claims that Iran is on the precipice of economic ruin, and if we only wait long enough, internal unrest will bring down the current regime. Unless, of course, the Iranian population believes the the US and Israel are the source of all of the evil in the world and commit themselves to destroying us in the interim. Which they already believe, by the way, Roger Stern, of Johns Hopkins. Bombing them before they get the nuclear bomb is a lot safer than a hungry, angry population with a nuclear bomb.

    So the “Peace At Any Cost” crowd have finally found their voices and the mainstream press is more than willing to broadcast their ill-conceived message. There are thousands of comparisions to Neville Chamberlain on the internet, so I’ll spare my readers the same lame paraphrases.

    The truth is; these aren’t pro-Peace voices. They’re anti-Bush, anti-Republican and anti-American voices. They’re the voices of the corrupt and morally bankrupt who put cheap politics above our welfare and safety. It would be more accurate to call them the “Democrat Majority at-any-cost” voices.

    In attempting to research this piece, I found thousands of articles that count the American and Coalition dead and wounded, but not a single chart depicting the other side’s losses One CBC article even made a point of mentioning that because the Pentagon doesn’t release enemy casualties, they don’t know what the number is – as if they’d believe the Pentagon number anyway. The Pentagon has provided them an excuse for being intellectually bankrupt.

  • Who’s afraid of Peace-loving nations?

    The Washington Times is running a story today about North Korean Dear Leader Kim Jong Il’s list of demands that must precede any negotiations aimed at his nuclear program. So who’s surprised? Il has seen how far anti-social behavior has taken the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, who also announced today that the world can’t stop him from developing nuclear weapons. This is what exchanging words with maniacal despots gets you. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lost ground yesterday in elections so he’s back to making his failures everybody else’s fault and flexing his muscles on the world stage.

    I still suspect that Il’s nuclear tests in October were more of the dirty bomb variety than an actual nuclear detonation in order to fool the world into thinking they’ve got the technology for nuclear weapons to accompany their missiles.

    All of these tinpot dictators are quite certain that they can pretty much get away with anything these days. They saw that by paying off Old Europe, Hussein escaped their ire, until the US and Britain, et al. decided to go it without the greedy corrupt Leftist governments of Russia, France and Germany.

    Last summer’s war between the Israelis and Hezzbollah in Lebanon only reinforced Iran, Korea, and Venezuela’s view that the peace-loving nations of the world will do nothing, no matter what they do. Check Chavez’ speech at the UN, the riots in France, the cartoon riots, Jimmy Carter’s ransom payments to North Korea in 1994. What do fear-mongers fear?

    Opposing strength. When the US removed Hussein from Kuwait, all of the Arab nations, even Arafat, fell into line. When the US removed Hussein from power, even Qaddafi trembled at the thought of US troops at his palace gate.

    North Korea and Iran need to be dealt fierce and violent blows immediately – either by our proxies in those regions, or failing that, ourselves. Direct strikes against their nuclear programs.

    Maybe with a South Korean as Secretary general of the UN that’s more possible now than it was last week.

    UPDATE: The US is talking separately with North Korea over financial matters relating to their Macau banking endeavors to launder their WMD sales and to pass counterfeit $100 bills according to the Wall Street Journal today. Leveraging that seizure of assets might cause North Korea to backpedal temporarily from their demands, but it certainly won’t be a permanent fix to dealing with a nation whose government is engaged in petty crimes as foreign policy.

  • How to disengage in the Middle East

    Russia is tapping into it’s vast reserves of oil buried under the Arctic tundra in Siberia. Cuba has hired an Indian oil company to begin supplying it’s meager petrol needs from reserves in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile we’re still enforcing the decades old Carter Doctrine demanding the free-flow of oil from the Persian Gulf states while we own some vast reserves of our own buried beneath our own Arctic tundra and off our own shores in the Gulf of Mexico.

    While the third world is winning the race to energy self-sufficiency, we’re mired in empty platitudes from the Democrat Party about “saving the earth” and “alternate fuels”, despite the fact that in 1979, Jimmy Carter, in his now famous “Malaise Speech“ promised that

    I will urge Congress to create an energy mobilization board which, like the War Production Board in World War II, will have the responsibility and authority to cut through the red tape, the delays, and the endless roadblocks to completing key energy projects. 

    We will protect our environment. But when this nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.

    But the Luddite environmentalists stand in the way of our self sufficience, with the Democrats in tow. That’s not all that surprising, really. What is surprising is that the Democrats are turning their backs on the poor and the unions. The less wealthy Americans are stuck paying higher energy costs like some kind of tax hike. The unions want the added jobs created by exploration and development of energy reserves and the increased manufacturing production that would result in cheaper domestic energy.

    The Democrats are happiest when we’re miserable – that would mean the perception that government (ie. the Democrats) would save us (most of Jimmy Carter’s Malaise Speech was the announcement of new government programs and agencies). They don’t particularly care that we would be able to ignore the petty bickering and power struggles in the Middle East (like we ignore the same from non-oil countries in Africa), nor would Chavez’ words have much weight if we developed our own oil and gas sources and we weren’t so dependent on the whims of country who aren’t afraid to exploit their oil and gas reserves.

    So even though we hold the key to our own energy dependence, we are also our own worse enemy.

     

  • Jimmy Carter plans his funeral

    I guess Jimmuh was on CSPAN today and discussed his preferences for how he wanted to be planted when his time comes. Personally, I hope there is a viewing in the rotunda scheduled for him when he expires (whenever he goes, it won’t be soon enough). I, for one plan to go. No Democrat has done more for the Conservative movement than Jimmy Carter.

    He demonstrated to the world how ineffectual government really is and how, when the chips are really down, nothing is better to cure this country’s ills than the American People themselves.

    With the Soviet Union marching across Afghanistan towards warm water ports, thousands of Cuban soldiers marching across Africa and thousands of Cuban refugees paddling across the Caribbean, Communist guerillas marching up the Central American peninsula, Soviet combat brigades stationed in Cuba – 90 miles from our coastline, OPEC holding American energy needs hostage, Islamofacists holding real  Americans hostage, the top marginal tax rate at 70%, inflation creeping towards double-digits, unemployment reaching double-digits nothing was more comical than our President, wearing a cardigan telling us to turn down the thermostat, put on a sweater and stop complaining – the epitome of useless Federal government.

    Every Conservative should show up for Jimmy’s funeral. Who knows what could’ve happened if he had been the least bit electable in 1980. Thank you, Jimmy Carter. Hell, I’ll even give his eulogy.

  • Chavez; the Left’s darling

    Aside from the fact that Jimmy Carter certified his recall election in 2003, the Left has been in love with Hugo Chavez, former brother paratrooper and current Venezuelan President. On every discussion forum where I’ve participated in the last six years, The resident Leftists have gone out of their way to defend this populist-cum-Leftist-cum-communist applauding the way he “bravely” stands up to the US (when was the last time the US attempted to assasinate a foreign leader who wasn’t a threat to our national security?), the way he “bravely” seizes foreign assets and nationalizes them (like his mentor Fidel Castro did in Cuba-bankrupting a previously profitable economy).

    Hugo (pronounced oo-go in Spanish) has offered oil to the US poor through his now-nationalized oil company (Citgo) while his own people live in abject poverty – hundreds of thousands in lean-to huts on the edge of high-rise projects in urban areas.

    Well, now Hugo has threatened to shut down non-state media outlets in Venezuela and yesterday, on the eve of his election, shutdown US-based Telemundo’s election coverage. Doesn’t sound very liberal (in classical sense of the word) does it? Telemundo, though based in the US is far from US friendly (I watch their nightly news at least three time every week just to keep my language skills current), in fact I’d call them pro-Chavez given the coverage I’ve seen there.

    So what’s Chavez worried about. Nothing, really. He’s just demonstrating that he has a firm grasp of the people’s throats in Venezuela. He’s using the US as his boogeyman to scare people into believing that he’s the only thing that stands between them and US occupation – in the Noriega mold.

    The real danger in Chavez’ personnae is that he’s funding loyal Leftists and communists in neighboring countries with his oil profits. So the supposed “populist”, is funneling money that could go to help his own people into a buffer zone of South and Central American fiefdoms withholden to Chavez. In our own backyard.

     This threatens the security of the entire region. We are still dependent on the Panama canal to move our goods to market and keep our Navy supplied to some extent. They just voted to widen the Canal this last year which will increase our traffic there. We still depend on Latin American oil (the chance that we’ll develop our own resources in the next five years is pretty grim given the current make-up of Congress).

    And now he’s claimed victory in yesterday’s election – and in typical style has claimed it was a blow to President Bush, a point reiterated unsurprisingly by Iran. I wonder if he’s planning to get the chair at the DNC next year.

  • Talk with Iran?

    The “bipartisan” task force on Iraq is weighing direct talks with Iran and Syria. My question is “Why?” Iran and Syria have both denied their involvement in supporting the bloodbath in Iraq, despite mounds of evidence to the contrary. How much did talking with Iran do for Jimmy Carter for more than 444 days? The Reagan Administration talked with Iran and ended up encouraging them to kidnap more Americans to exchange for more TOW missiles.

    The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has repeatedly proven that he’s not even lucid enough to accept the Holocaust let alone acccept the fact that Israel and the United States have a right to exist in their present form and act in their own self-interest. The Syrian president Bashar Assad didn’t even want the job and it’s fairly clear that he’s being manipulated by the Iranians, weak little dork that he is.

    So why are we wasting time talking about talking with these two pimples on the ass of Humanity? What will it accomplish? Aside from placating the Democrats who seem to have all of the answers to questions no one asked.

    Retired Admiral James Lyons lays out a rational, workable plan in the Washington Times today;

    Therefore, our first order of business must be to stabilize Iraq — by force of our arms, not the unproven Iraqis. This will require an immediate influx of three to five brigades to bring the sectarian violence under control and, more important, to eradicate the rogue militias, the death squads, and the Mahdi Army. Trusted Iraq forces can play a constructive role, but we must understand they will not be the decisive factor.
        Further, we should use our air dominance to close the Iranian and Syrian borders. For its part, the Iraqis, led by Mr. Talibani, must obtain guarantees from both Iran and Syria that they will withdraw their support for the insurgency and cooperate in closing their borders.

    Despite Chuck Hagel’s defeatist cut and run policy, there still is a chance to defeat the dark forces in Iraq, and in no part of any rational plan should hand-wringing and cowardice be mentioned as in Hagel-cum-Murtha.