This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Jimmy Carter

  • My experiences at Inauguration parades [Jonn]

    I got the idea for this post from one at Ace of Spades wherein Ace reminds us that President Bush’s limo was pelted with eggs at his first Inauguration. In 2001, my first ever Inauguration parade, my wife and I had flown in the night before from my son’s basic training graduation in San Antonio – a pretty wild trip seein’s how every single Texan was headed to DC on the same plane.

    There was so much animosity towards President Bush, Free Republic organized a “Support Bush” rally (can you imagine having to organize a “support Obama” rally?) on Inauguration day in front of the Supreme Court and there were only a hand full of supporters – which gave me the opportunity to chat with David Horowitz and Jesse Peterson.

    After that rally, we went down to stand near the Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue and wait the three hours for the parade. While we waited there, we were surrounded by hippies and sign-toting anarchists who made frequent trips to a nearby coffeeshop to get themselves caffeined up for the days events.

    Through the crowd, I saw a hippie climbing the flag pole at the Memorial to get the flag there. He finally got it down and a Black man nearby tried to get the flag away from the hippie. He was immediately knocked to ground and beaten by other hippies. An elderly woman tried to stop them, and she, too was knocked to the ground. Several of us tried to force our way through the crowd to stop the fight (and kick some hippie ass), but the little cowards fled, and despite the huge police presence, they escaped without being apprehended.

    In 2005, I went to the parade again. Attendence was up, but mostly because of the increased participation by the anti-war crowd who didn’t hesitate to shout and call names at everyone who didn’t have an anti-Bush  sign. I was pushed and shoved because I wouldn’t take a sign they tried to give me. Of course the little cowards danced away before they could get their complimentary black-eye. Those of us who tried to cheer for President Bush and the First Lady as they drove by the throngs lining the streets were forced to the background by the sign-wielding crowd.

    Can you imagine if any of those events had happened yesterday?

    Oh, by the way, today is the 32d Anniversary of Jimmy Carter’s blanket amnesty for draft dodgers.

  • Iran and Jimmy Carter open up second front against Israel [Jonn]

    The first thing I read this morning while perusing last night’s news on the Moronosphere BlogNetNews was a post at The Jawa Report about rockets striking Israel from Lebanon.

    The Washington Times confirms the attack from Lebanon;

    Lebanese militants fired barrages of rockets into northern Israel early Thursday, striking a nursing home and threatening to open a second front for the Jewish state as it pushed forward with its offensive in the Gaza Strip.

    Two people were injured, and the rockets on Israel’s north raised the specter of renewed hostilities with Hezbollah, just 2 years after Israel battled the guerrilla group to a 34-day stalemate. Hezbollah started the 2006 war as Israel was battling Palestinian militants in Gaza.

    A nursing home? Shouldn’t that piss of the international community? I mean, really. Well, in the Washington Post, Jimmy Carter is explaining how easily Israel could’ve avoided the whole Gaza thing;

    Hamas leaders also agreed to accept any peace agreement that might be negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who also heads the PLO, provided it was approved by a majority vote of Palestinians in a referendum or by an elected unity government.

    […]

    After about a month, the Egyptians and Hamas informed us that all military action by both sides and all rocket firing would stop on June 19, for a period of six months, and that humanitarian supplies would be restored to the normal level that had existed before Israel’s withdrawal in 2005 (about 700 trucks daily).

    […]

    And this fragile truce was partially broken on Nov. 4, when Israel launched an attack in Gaza to destroy a defensive tunnel being dug by Hamas inside the wall that encloses Gaza.

    A “defensive tunnel”? The tunnel was dug so Hamas could kidnap Israeli soldiers and that’s a defensive tunnel? Good old Jimmy Carter the world’s most famous anti-Semite. On the up-side, as long as he’s writing for the Post, he’s not building death-traps for Habitat for Humanity.

    In another article in the Post, the Red Cross accuses Israel of starving children;

    The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it had found at least 15 bodies and several children — emaciated but alive — in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for four days.

    Emaciated? After four days? I think if anyone was emaciated, their starvation started long before the response by Israel. Well, Michelle Malkin writes that Joe the Plumber is enroute to Gaza, so maybe he can us the straight answer.

  • ZBiggy; Long-distance analysis

    Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, ZBiggy to those of us who suffered through his tenure as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, has decided that an injection of additional troops into Afghanistan puts the United States in danger of being like the Soviets in the 80s in a HuffPo interview. Keep in mind, Biggy has never set foot in Afghanistan and he admitted in 1998 that his policies in 1978 may have triggered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

    And it’s with a similar perspective that Brzezinski now doubts the that the answer to what ails Afghanistan is more troops. “I think we’re literally running the risk of unintentionally doing what the Russians did. And that, if it happens, would be a tragedy,” Brzezinski told the Huffington Post on Friday. “When we first went into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, we were actually welcomed by an overwhelming majority of Afghans. They did not see us as invaders, as they saw the Soviets.”

    However, Brzezinski noted that just as the Soviets were able to delude themselves that they had a loyal army of communist-sympathizers who would transform the country, the U.S.-led forces may now be making similar mistakes. He said that the conduct of military operations “with little regard for civilian casualties” may accelerate the negative trend in local public opinion regarding the West’s role. “It’s just beginning, but it’s significant,” Brzezinski said.

    This is the same guy whose reticence to support the Shah of Iran brought on the problems that come with the Islamic Republic these days. His reticence to support the Nicaraguan government brought on a communist regime there and fanned the flames of communist insurgencies in Central America. His weakness on basic national defense issues encouraged the Soviets to station a combat brigade in Cuba – ninety miles from our shores. And of course, because he was willing to half-way support the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, the Soviets invaded assured that the weak Carter crew would do nothing to prevent their centuries-old dream of securing warm water ports.

    Now, with an analysis based purely on reportage from left-wing sources apparently, he accuses us of attempting a Soviet-style occupation. He goes on with even more hyperbole about the coming of World War IV;

    “Well, if McCain is president and if his Secretary of State is Joe Lieberman and his Secretary of Defense is [Rudolph] Giuliani, we will be moving towards the World War IV that they have been both favoring and predicting,” he said, calling that an “appalling concept” (and adding that by their lights, the Cold War counted as World War III).

    Well, dumbass, if the Cold War was World War III, why didn’t you act like it was a world war? We faced a modern army in Europe with our own Korean War-era equipment, the military was woefully underfunded and underpaid and every threat was met with surrender and weakness. Acting as if those things never happened, ZBiggy drives on with his yammering;

    Asked who he would like to see in a potential Obama cabinet, Brzezinski said: “I think [Sen. Chuck] Hagel. I would like to see a bipartisan cabinet. I think we need one very badly — and we did well in the Cold War when we had one. I would say Hagel and [Sen. Dick] Lugar would be very good Republicans [for Obama].” He also cited Sen. Joe Biden as a potential Secretary of State, in which case it would also be possible to “keep [Secretary of Defense Bob] Gates in the job for a few months.”

    Any credibility this doofus ever had evaporated in December 1988 when the wall in Europe came down. And when did his “bipartisan cabinet” ever do “well”? Point to one damn thing, ZBiggy.

    And the ignorant HuffPo masses fall right in line begging for Chuck Hagel to be Obama’s VP and lauding the Taliban for ending the opium trade. Crackpots with crackpot views of the world.

  • Bush is no Jimmy Carter

    Politico writes that an AP reporter asked the President if he’d instruct Americans to drive less and conserve gasoline ala Jimmy Carter. The President responded that he would certainly not;

    “They’re smart enough to figure out whether they’re going to drive less or not. I mean, you know, it’s interesting what the price of gasoline has done,” Bush said at a news conference in the White House press room, “is it caused people to drive less. That’s why they want smaller cars: They want to conserve. But the consumer’s plenty bright. The marketplace works.”

    “You noticed my statement yesterday, I talked about good conservation and — you know, people can figure out whether they need to drive more or less,” he said. “They can balance their own checkbooks.”

    “It’s a little presumptuous on my part to dictate how consumers live their own lives,” the president added. “I’ve got faith in the American people.”

    Imagine that; a President that thinks we’re smart enough to figure what we can afford without him telling us. Compare that to Jimmy Carter in 1977;

    …the cornerstone of our policy, is to reduce the demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy. Conservation is the only way we can buy a barrel of oil for a few dollars. It costs about $13 to waste it.

    […]

    I cant tell you that these measures will be easy, nor will they be popular. But I think most of you realize that a policy which does not ask for changes or sacrifices would not be an effective policy.

    […]

    I am sure each of you will find something you don’t like about the specifics of our proposal. It will demand that we make sacrifices and changes in our lives. To some degree, the sacrifices will be painful — but so is any meaningful sacrifice. It will lead to some higher costs, and to some greater inconveniences for everyone.

    But the sacrifices will be gradual, realistic and necessary. Above all, they will be fair. No one will gain an unfair advantage through this plan. No one will be asked to bear an unfair burden. We will monitor the accuracy of data from the oil and natural gas companies, so that we will know their true production, supplies, reserves, and profits.

    The citizens who insist on driving large, unnecessarily powerful cars must expect to pay more for that luxury.

    We can be sure that all the special interest groups in the country will attack the part of this plan that affects them directly. They will say that sacrifice is fine, as long as other people do it, but that their sacrifice is unreasonable, or unfair, or harmful to the country.

    He sounds just like Barack Obama doesn’t he? In fact, if you look at Obama’s US Senate webpage, he says the same thing Carter said in this speech combined with blather from his 1979 “malaise speech”. Carter formed the Energy Department with the Secretary of Energy the new “Energy Czar”, Obama advances the idea of another Energy Czar;

    Senator Obama believes that America must commit to a new national energy policy focused on improvements in technology, investments in renewable fuels such as wind and solar power, and greater efforts in conservation, efficiency, and waste reduction. Shifting from our current investment and consumption practices to this new direction will be one of the great leadership challenges in the coming decade.

    With the Department of Energy telling us that U.S. demand for oil will jump 40% over the next 20 years and with countries like China and India adding millions of cars to their roads, the price of oil is approaching a breaking point.

    In addition to the high economic costs of our foreign oil dependence, the current consumption of fossil fuels has threatened the future health and well-being of not only our citizens, but our natural resources and air quality as well. Investments in cleaner and more efficient energy technologies must play a central role in mitigating these threats to our health and our environment.

    Recognizing the importance of energy security to national and economic security, Senator Obama has proposed the creation of a Director of National Energy Security in the Office of the President. This position, akin to the National Security Advisor, would oversee and coordinate all administration efforts on national energy security and policies.

    How is any of that “change”?

  • The new “malaise” speech

    In 1977, Jimmy Carter told us to get out of our energy problems, we needed to put on a cardigan and turn our heat in our houses down to 68 degrees. When that didn’t solve our problems, I remember he gave a speech in July 1979 (later to be dubbed the “Malaise Speech” by the media) when he blamed Americans for our slowed economy and our weak perception overseas.

    Carter rolled out the new Energy Department which was supposed to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, but Carter told us we needed to get off our asses, paste smiles on our faces and pull the country out the doldrums. The following year, America answered him at the polls and kicked him to the curb. Then with reduced taxes and a strong military, we pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps and launched the country into the 21st Century.

    Now, we’ve got the new Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, telling us essentially the same thing – we’re a bunch of losers and he’s ashamed of us. Remember when he called us “bitter”?

    “It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or anti-pathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

    Even in his apology he called us stupid;

    There has been a small “political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois, who are bitter,” Obama said Saturday morning at a town hall-style meeting at the university. “They are angry. They feel like they have been left behind. They feel like nobody is paying attention to what they’re going through.”

    “So I said, well you know, when you’re bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country.”

    Take the statement he made a few months ago;

    We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.

    Yeah, ya buncha lazy slobs. Who do you think you are to want a little comfort in your life and benefit from what our antecedents worked for and left us?

    Yesterday he was ashamed of us, too, because we aren’t multi-lingual;

    “Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English, because they will learn English, you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish,” he said. “We should have every child speaking more than one language.”

    For comic effect, he added, “It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is ‘Merci beaucoup.’”

    What are we doing expecting people to learn our language when they live in our country? We can’t even speak the language of countries we may never visit. Who do we think we are? He’s embarrassed. Baldilocks wonders how many languages The Messiah speaks. I learned Spanish (to meet chicas) and German (to order beer and chow and to find the nearest toilet) so what’s wrong with the rest of you?

    When Obama spoke to the League of United Latin American Citizens, he didn’t mention the immigrants who can’t speak English like he did to the Americans previously. He told them that’s he’s going to protect them from the evil white folks;

    He won cheers for promising it would be a priority his first year in office and saying “it is time” to “finally bring undocumented immigrants out of the shadows.”

    I hope he can teach us all Spanish by then, since he’s not all that concerned about those shadow-dwelling illegals learning English.

    But I see a pattern developing, the same pattern of the Carter years. We all need to start living up to the Democrats’ expectations of us. We need to set aside all of our earned comforts and start working to make the Democrats proud of us…or at least not be embarrassed by our rube, uncultured behavior. Now, that’s change we can believe in.

    ADDED: For those of you who are keeping track (Allen Wood), I wrote this before Rush began his program with the same format.

  • Cohen: Reagan’s problem was his success

    The Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen tells us this morning that Ronald Reagan is to blame for our gas prices today. In a completely intellectually void piece, Cohen claims that all Reagan had was a smile;

    Those of you with keen memories may recall that the energy crisis is not new. In 1977, Jimmy Carter called it the “moral equivalent of war.” In the sort of speech a politician rarely delivers, he told a not-particularly-grateful nation that his energy program was going to hurt, but “a policy which does not ask for changes or sacrifices would not be an effective policy.” The core of his initiative was conservation. Carter had earlier asked us to lower our thermostats and wear sweaters. He wore one himself.

    Reagan, who succeeded Carter in the White House, wore only a smile. For him, there was no energy crisis. Whereas Carter had insisted that only the government could manage the energy crisis, Reagan, in his first inaugural, demanded that government get out of the way. Speaking of general economic conditions at the time, he said, “Government is not the solution to our problem.” He went on to call for America to return to greatness, to “reawaken this industrial giant,” and all sorts of swell things would happen. It was wonderful stuff.

    Except Cohen forgets that it was OPEC who had cut shipments during Carter’s years and they were afraid to do that during the Reagan years. Government didn’t “get out of the way”…we haven’t built a refinery since Carter’s years because of the Democrat Congress. And everytime a Republican, whether the President or in Congress, has made a move to improve our domestic production of energy, there’s always been a Democrat, as President or in Congress, to help us wean off of foreign oil – with promises of alternate energy sources that never seem to materialize.

    Of course, Cohen uses this vacuous point to declare conservatism dead. I think Cohen should hold off counting those chickens just yet.

  • Iran threatens oil in the Straits of Hormuz

    Yesterday, Iran threatened to disrupt Persian Gulf oil shipments through the narrow Straits of Hormuz in the event that the West attacked the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons development according to the AFP;

    The chief of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards warned that Iran would use its control of the Strait of Hormuz in response to an attack, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

    “It is natural that when a country is attacked it uses all of its capabilities against the enemy, and definitely our control of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz would be one of our actions,” General Mohammad Ali Jafari told the conservative daily Jam-e Jam.

    The strait is a vital conduit for energy supplies, with about 20%-25% of the world’s crude oil from Gulf oil producers passing through the waterway.

    Now, I’ve been staring at a map of the world and I fail to see how blocking the Straits of Hormuz would disrupt our oil flow from off of our coasts or Alaska. 76% of Americans say we should drill and refine our own fuel – can they be wrong?

    Did anyone tell the Islamic Republic that they would be violating our Carter Doctrine? Will Jimmy Carter make that point as forcefully as he did in his State of the Union Address in 1980;

    This situation demands careful thought, steady nerves, and resolute action, not only for this year but for many years to come. It demands collective efforts to meet this new threat to security in the Persian Gulf and in Southwest Asia. It demands the participation of all those who rely on oil from the Middle East and who are concerned with global peace and stability. And it demands consultation and close cooperation with countries in the area which might be threatened.

    Meeting this challenge will take national will, diplomatic and political wisdom, economic sacrifice, and, of course, military capability. We must call on the best that is in us to preserve the security of this crucial region.

    Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

    Probably not – after all, he promised in his “malaise speech” (July 1979) to build refineries and pipelines when we needed them and we haven’t built a refinery since 1977.

  • The failed policies of the past

    Barack Obama is fond of comparing John McCain’s policies to those of President Bush labeling them the “failed policies of the past”, but actually, Obama’s policies are failed policies of a more distant past.

    With gas over $4/gallon, Obama says we should continue to depend on some as yet undiscovered miracle to save us…the same thing Democrats have been saying for nearly forty years. of course, they claim the reason that there’s no new source of energy is because the government hasn’t thrown enough taxpayer dollars at the problem yet.

    I remember too well the failed policies of the past – when we were straining under OPEC embargoes in the early 70s, Democrats stood against the building a pipeline in Alaska to transport our own oil to port. That’s why Jimmy Carter promised in 1979 that he’d build refineries and pipelines…two years later, the Democrat Congress forbade more drilling in the Guld of Mexico when a Republican was president.

    Jimmy Carter never built a refinery, by the way, none have been built in this country since 1977. There are two sites currently approved for refineries, one in New Mexico and another in South Dakota – but they’ll spend years in court battling Luddite environmentalists before a spade of dirt is turned.

    Carter founded the Energy Department in hopes it would slash through the red tape and respond to our domestic energy needs, but it’s just another whale beached in dowtown DC. Obama clings to the same delusions that Democrats have clung to for years.

    AFP/Beitbart quotes Obama yesterday;

    “Much like his gas tax gimmick that would leave consumers with pennies in savings, opening our coastlines to offshore drilling would take at least a decade to produce any oil at all, and the effect on gasoline prices would be negligible at best since America only has three percent of the world’s oil.

    “It’s another example of short-term political posturing from Washington, not the long-term leadership we need to solve our dependence on oil.”

    Obama is pushing for a “windfall tax” on oil companies’ record profits and for federal investment of 150 billion dollars over 10 years in renewable and green energies.

    First of all, those are OUR pennies, Senator – why can’t we have them? You’re not doing anything useful with them. Secondly, how long is it going to take to invent a new energy source, get it and the vehicles that’ll use it to market? The Democrats have been promising us that for forty years and there’s nothing on the horizon. Oh, and how is a windfall profit tax helping? Are you going to redistribute that money to the people, since we’re the ones from whom oil companies are profiting? Or are you just going to cram in your pockets and then tell us how you know how to spend it better than us?

    The Wall Street Journal writes today that Obama and the Democrats sound a little silly at $4/gallon gas;

    Anticarbon Democrats are on the defensive for once. Their default position – doing nothing – doesn’t have the best resonance amid $4 gas. They’ve been reduced to arguing that more exploration would merely make a difference over the long term. The GOP plan, in other words, is too pragmatic.

    Democrats also claim that land already leased is “sitting idle,” and should be used before any new exploration begins. As put by Maurice Hinchey, a senior member of the House Resources Committee, Big Oil is “trying to take control of as much land now during the oil-friendly Bush Administration years, but are holding off on drilling until the price of oil soars to $200 or $300 a barrel so they can make even greater profits.”

    Conspiracy theories aside, it is true that only 0.46% of the Outer Continental Shelf is producing oil (though only 2.3% is under lease). But because of the exploration ban, oil companies go in more or less blind, not knowing the extent of the available resources. Millions of acres lack oil or gas, which is why it’s called “exploration.” Federal law stipulates that an oil company must sink a producing well within 10 years or lose the lease; it often takes nearly a decade to navigate the geography, not to mention the long process of environmental and regulatory review. Or coping with multiple lawsuits from the green lobby.

    Yes, this campaign is about the failed policies of the past – the failed policies of the seventies and eighties as foisted on the American public by Democrats.