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

Category: Jimmy Carter

  • Dionne; Why Obama is like Reagan

    I read with some measure of amusement this morning Washington Post’s EJ Dionne‘s column comparing Ronald Reagan’s critics to those of Barack Obama.

    Like Reagan’s enemies, Obama’s opponents concede that he gives a great speech. Indeed, both Obama and Reagan came to wide attention because of a single oration that offered hope in the midst of a losing campaign — Obama’s 2004 keynote to the Democratic National Convention and Reagan’s 1964 “A Time for Choosing” address delivered on behalf of Barry Goldwater. But surely speeches aren’t enough, are they?

    Yes, Obama gets his crowds swooning. So did Reagan. It’s laughable to hear conservatives talk darkly about a “cult of personality” around Obama.

    But, lisping Dionne ignores, in his comparison, the fact that Ronald Reagan actually had a record of leadership and reform as governor of California before he made his first run at the White House in 1976. What has Obama done? He’s been a legislator – he’s always been one of the voices in the crowd, he’s never led a thing.

    You can almost hear the Republican crowd shouting, “Yes, we can!” Reagan offered, well, change we could believe in.

    Still, Democrats kept telling themselves, right to November, that voters wouldn’t fall for any of this. Charisma, eloquence, idealism and hope were no match for experience, realism, prudence and predictability.

    Yeah, EJ, but the Republicans of 1980 didn’t chant “Yes, we can”, they didn’t swoon and collapse, they didn’t fall for language – they were seduced by a record of experience, wrapped in a language we could understand and backed by Reagan’s record of doing what he’d said he’d do. Reagan was the only President to ever run for office with a union card in his wallet, his stint as governor proved him to be a man of action, not merely words. All Obama has is words.

    The reason voters “fell” for Reagan’s talk in 1980 was because we’d already had four years of Jimmy Carter and his scolding us for being ate-up with the dumbass – we were ready for change. As an entire nation, we were tired of the inept Jimmy Carter who followed through on not one campaign promise of the 1976 campaign – right down his promise to not give away the Canal. Do you think America would have voted for Jimmy Carter if he’d told us the first thing he was going to do was give amnesty to draft dodgers? Obama is following in Carter’s footsteps, according to the Liberty Pundit;

    Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously, CTV News has learned.

    Dionne continues;

    Democrats in large numbers have reached the same conclusion that so many Republicans did in 1980: Now is the time to go for broke, to challenge not only the ruling party but also the governing ideas of the previous political era and the political coalition that allowed them to dominate public life.

    See, there’s your problem, EJ. This is why you are consistently wrong on every prediction and every observation you make about politics – Democrats aren’t Republicans. You’d be more right if compared Obama’s campaign and empty rhetoric to Jimmy Carter’s run in 1976. But being right would be a new experience for you, wouldn’t it, Dionne?

  • A World With Oil at $100

    OB-AW546_oil100_20080102152434.jpg

    From the Wall Street Journal

    At the Wall Street Journal this morning is a front page article that pronounces that oil reached $100/barrel yesterday. The article goes to illustrate how the financial markets have changed in the last ten years as oil’s price increased 10-fold;

    The surging price of oil, from just over $10 a barrel a decade ago to $100 yesterday, is altering the wealth and influence of nations and industries around the world.

    These power shifts will only widen if prices keep climbing, as many analysts predict. Costly oil already is forcing sweeping changes in the airline and auto sectors. It is intensifying the politics of climate change and adding urgency to the search both for fresh sources of crude and for oil alternatives once deemed fringe.
    [Go to graphic.]

    The long oil-price boom is posing wrenching challenges for the world’s poorest nations, while enriching and emboldening producers in the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela. Their increasing muscle has a flip side: a decline of U.S. clout in many parts of the world.

    Steep gasoline prices also threaten America’s long love affair with the automobile, while putting strains on many lower-income people outside big cities, who must spend an increasing share of their budgets just on fuel to get to work.

    No one can say for sure whether sky-high oil — part of a price boom in a wide range of commodities, from gold to wheat — is here to stay. But most in the industry agree that a 20-year stretch in which oil was consistently cheap is long gone. The global thirst for oil shows little sign of retreating, and large new discoveries are few. Some in the industry say prices could go far higher; others suspect that speculators — or an economic slump in the U.S. or China — could send prices falling in the near term.

    First of all, this “America’s long love affair with the automobile” has long ago passed – back in the 80s when Americans were paying $15,000 for what they tried to convince themselves were luxury cars – but were nothing more than Toyota crap boxes they wouldn’t have twenty-bucks for ten years earlier. America’s love affair is with gadgets in their cars – that’s what car manufacturers are selling these days – watch a car commercial tonight. It’s all about selling voice-recognition MP3 players, DVD players, talking GPS do-hickeys, little buttons that do all of things you could do yourself much easier.

    In July 1979, Jimmy Carter promised that Democrats would;

    From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980’s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade — a saving of over 4 1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day.

    How did Carter promise this goal would be met?

    To make absolutely certain that nothing stands in the way of achieving these goals, 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 redtape, 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.

    So what have Democrats done since? Not one oil refinery has been built in the United States since 1977, not one new oil field has been developed. In fact, China and Cuba are exploring and drilling off of our Florida coast. Oil reserves in Alaska remain untouched, oil off the coast of California lies fallow.

    George Bush tried to develop oil fields in Alaska five years ago – that oil would be flowing towards our markets this instant, except that Democrats and weak kneed Republicans (many of whom are out of office today) blocked it to save some phantom caribou herds. When energy companies tried to build a wind farm off of Massachusetts’ coast, Jabba the Kennedy and John Kerry blocked the structures so as not to ruin the view from the mansions.

    In fact, the Democrats have blocked every meaningful measure to move us away from dependence on foreign energy – except their wasteful “investment” of taxpayer dollars into useless and unproductive “alternate energy” boondoggles. Of course there is no incentive to develop “alternate” sources as long as their stream of free cash into the projects from the government – so the “search” goes on. And Democrats’ promises and posturing continues as well.

    But this is an election year – things can change as long as people are willing to accept the truth about Democrats’ intentions.

    Jack M at Ace of Spades has the story on the guy who drove the price up – briefly.

  • Hillary; I control oil prices

    Proving that Democrats don’t understand market forces, Hillary announced that simply by her presence in the White House, oil prices will drop. “How?”, you might ask;(Daily News)

    “I predict to you, the oil-producing countries will drop the price of oil,” Clinton said, speaking at the Manchester YWCA. “They will once again assume, once the cost pressure is off, Americans and our political process will recede.”

    Clinton argued that former President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s actually started moving in the right direction toward energy independence, but his successor, Ronald Reagan, “dismantled” that work.

    Jimmy Carter, huh? Invoking the ghost of Jimmy Carter’s famous “Malaise Speech” probably isn’t a good idea for a Democrat candidate. (more…)

  • Carter: Me-too-ism; Roz could’ve been Prez

    Jimmy Carter is making that last turn to get his musty ass all the way around the bend. According to the Washington Examiner, he claims Rosalynn, his wife, could’ve run for President and won;

    Speaking at Washington’s Motion Picture Association of America before a screening of Jonathan Demme’s new Carter documentary entitled, “Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains,” Carter said that, if Rosalynn had “gone home from Georgia and run for Senate” (a la Hillary), she would have been a formidable candidate.

    But “she didn’t want to do that,” he added, without a trace of regret.

    I guess he doesn’t remember that America was just worn out from the first and only term we suffered through his spotty leadership. His Vice president, Walter Mondale, lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan in 1984 after Carter had lost in a landslide in 1980. We were tired of being a laughingstock cowered in the corner from every tin pot dictator who shook their fists and took our citizens hostage.

    I suppose Rosalynn was a nice woman, but Presidential material? Not on your life – she’d have been no leader, just like her husband was no leader.

    And as for the “documentary” of The Man from Plains – what human being has so much time on their hands they’ll take time out to sleep through the story of his life – again. I had the misfortune to use his memoirs “Keeping Faith” for a paper in college on the Carter-Torrijos Treaty. Not only was it the most factually inaccurate drivel I’d ever read, it was a giant snooze fest. I’m sure this documentary will be no better.

  • Carter or Cheney – who is more disasterous?

    That demented, half-witted old coot from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, the guy who ran for President in the South by declaring he would make America a system of “ethnically pure neighborhoods” in 1976 (yes, he did – no one remembers that line from the campaign do they?) has called Dick Cheney – our current Vice President – a diaster. I found this last night on Little Green Footballs;

    Former President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday denounced Vice President Dick Cheney as a “disaster” for the country and a “militant” who has had an excessive influence in setting foreign policy.

    I guess that Jimmy Carter forgets that by the time he left office, Cuba had over run the West Coast of Africa spreading war and death in their wake, Cuba was also funding guerrilla operations in El Salvador, Guatemala, Columbia, Panama and Peru. There were 10,000 Soviet combat troops 90 miles from the coast of Florida, Iranian students had seized our embassy and were holding hostages for 444 days – and the only response from Carter was an attempt to use the military he had let fall into disrepair which ended in deaths.

    At the beginning of his Administration, Carter walked the mile between the Capitol and the White House down Pennsylvania Avenue after his Inauguration as every President since Jefferson had done – but by the end of his Administration, his successor had to ride the mile in a bullet-proof limo with snipers and special police on every rooftops – as every President since has had to do. Carter made the world a dangerous place.

    Gateway Pundit reports that Carter at least finally admitted culpability in the Iran hostage situation yesterday;

    BLITZER: You know, you have been criticized for your handling of Iran when the Shah was in power, you know, in the late…

    CARTER: I have heard about that.

    BLITZER: In the late ’70s. Looking back all of these years, knowing what has happened, what, if anything, would you have done differently?

    CARTER: I would have had one more helicopter in our rescue mission, which would have brought all of the hostages out safe and free. And so I had to wait from April, around until five minutes after I was no longer president when all of the hostages did come home safe and free.

    Yeah, that would have done it – one more helicopter and he thinks he would have been re-elected. Sorry, Jimmy, but the Iran Crisis was just one symptom of the entire illness which was the Carter Administration.

    Well, Carter went on to claim that he “knows” the Bush Administration is torturing people (Breitbart);

    US President George W. Bush’s administration tortures detainees in defiance of international law, former US president Jimmy Carter charged Wednesday.

    “I don’t think it, I know it, certainly,” Carter told CNN television when asked if he believed the US administration allowed the use of torture.

    How? I’m pretty sure the Adminstration doesn’t brief your leaky ass, unless the torturees are telling you when you have them over for barbeque. More emotive drivel from the biggest dufus to ever walk the earth.

    Bloodthirsty Liberal calls Carter a “cheesed-off old geezer” and recounts his disgust with the GOP field of candidates. Carter made me a conservative less than two weeks after his Inauguration (shamefully, I admit I voted for him in my first presidential ballot), he should be slinking off into obscurity instead of reminding us what an idiot he’s always been.

    I’ve heard people complain that they’re ashamed to admit they’re Americans when they travel abroad because of the current President. Well, they don’t remember the crap Americans used have to take from the World over Carter. I’ve never been ashamed of being an American, but I got into a lot of bar room fist fights with Germans, Turks, French, Dutch, Danes and Spaniards who used Jimmy Carter as a way to put the country down (I was young, I don’t fight with fists anymore – I use a bat).

  • Junta cracks down on monks – again

     

    Photo from Kate

    According to CNN, the Myanmar junta is manufacturing evidence against the revered Buddist monks;

    Myanmar’s military leaders said weapons had been seized from Buddhist monasteries and announced dozens of new arrests Sunday, defying global outrage over its violent repression of protesters who sought an end to 45 years of dictatorship.

    Recent raids on monasteries turned up guns, knives and ammunition, though it was not yet clear to whom they belonged, according to The New Light of Myanmar, a mouthpiece of the junta. The government threatened to punish any monks that violate the law, stepping up pressure on clerics who led the protests.

    “Monks must adhere to the laws of God and the government,” the paper wrote. “If they violate those laws, action could be taken against them.”

    Security eased in the largest city of Yangon more than a week after soldiers and police opened fire on demonstrators. Some roadblocks were removed and visitors began trickling back to the heavily guarded Shwedagon and Sule pagodas, the starting and finishing points of protests that began in mid-August over a sharp fuel price increase.

    I can’t imagine where monks would get weapons – or what good they figured knives would do to help them against armed soldiers. Since the monks have traditionally only used civil disobediance and have shunned violence in their protests, it seems unlikely they were hording weapons.

    The UN in the meantime is still shuffling it’s feet towards any real action;

    Faced with mounting world outrage over violence in Myanmar, the UN Security Council was to meet Monday under pressure to quickly condemn the military regime for crushing pro-democracy protests.
     
    The 15-member body was to weigh a draft statement that would condemn “the violent repression of peaceful demonstrations” by Myanmar’s rulers, urge them to “cease repressive measures” and release detainees as well as all political prisoners, including opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

    The non-binding text, drafted by the United States, Britain and France, was submitted Friday to the full council after members heard a report from UN emissary Ibrahim Gambari on his recent mission to defuse the crisis.

    Of course, China and Russia are still blocking any UN action against the junta declaring that it’s strictly an internal matter. Probably because both have a poor record of human rights and don’t want to start a precedent of the UN supporting democracy movements.

    The Sunday Times (h/t Aftermath News) is circulating rumors of mass cremations. I guess the junta needed even more Nazi imagery, I suppose;

    THE Burmese army has burnt an undetermined number of bodies at a crematorium sealed off by armed guards northeast of Rangoon over the past seven days, ensuring that the exact death toll in the recent pro-democracy protests will never be known.

    The secret cremations have been reported by local people who have seen olive green trucks covered with tarpaulins rumbling through the area at night and watched smoke rising continuously from the furnace chimneys.

    They say they have watched soldiers in steel helmets blocking off roads to the municipal crematorium and threatening people who poke their heads out of windows overlooking the roads after the 10pm curfew.

    Blue Crab Boulevard quotes from the Times Online that the junta has stormed UN offices and demanded their hard drives to hunt down dissidents. I wonder how the UN will react to this;

    Burma’s ruling junta is attempting to seize United Nations computers containing information on opposition activists in the latest stage of its brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations, The Times has learnt.

    UN staff were thrown into panic over the weekend after Burmese police and diplomats entered its offices in Rangoon and demanded hard drives from its computers.

    The discs contain information that could help the dictatorship to identify key members of the opposition movement, many of whom have gone underground. UN staff spent much of the weekend deleting information.

    What the junta really needs is Jimmy Carter to come over and certify that there are no mass deaths in Burma, like he’s just done for Darfur (h/t Gateway Pundit and Sweetness and Light);

    The United States is exaggerating when it described the Darfur conflict as “genocide,” former US president Jimmy Carter has said, warning that the use of the term was legally inaccurate and “unhelpful,” The Christian Science Monitor reported Friday.

    Talk about “unhelpful”, I think that’s the term we can use to describe Jimmy Carter for the last 41 years when we need a one-word adjective to understate his foreign policy dalliances.

    Spanish Pundit has a report on the protests against the junta in Asia and Europe. Kate at A Columbo-Americana’s Perspective has pictures of the protest yesterday in DC and  New York City. She also has a list of upcoming protests worldwide.

    There was also a protest in Hong Kong today for their own democracy – that’s fairly significant since, Hong Kong is in, ya know, China – one of the Security Council members blocking UN action in Burma. Oddly, the story has disappeared, so I stole the picture while I still could (found it again at WebIndia);

     

     The Bristol Blogger recommends a Nobel prize for the Monks – I’ll go along especially if it squeezes Al Gore out of the running.

  • Chavez takes over the school system

    Hat tip to Atlas Shrugs for alerting us that Chavez is doing to the school system what he did for television in Venezuela – and just like when he warned private communication companies, he’s warning private schools;

    Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened on Monday to close or take over any private school that refuses to submit to the oversight of his socialist government as it develops a new curriculum and textbooks.

    Not bizzare enough for you? How about this quote;

    “Society cannot allow the private sector to do whatever it wants,” said Chavez, speaking on the first day of classes.

    Beautiful, huh? AP reports;

    But one college-level syllabus obtained by The Associated Press shows some premedical students already have a recommended reading list including Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” and Fidel Castro’s speeches, alongside traditional subjects like biology and chemistry.

    The syllabus also includes quotations from Chavez and urges students to learn about slain revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Colombian rebel chief Manuel Marulanda, whose leftist guerrillas are considered a terrorist group by Colombia, the U.S. and European Union.

    So I guess the students’ education won’t focus on the three “r”s. Bloomberg writes;

    Teachers and academics may see the measure as an attempt to politicize the classroom, speeding up a brain drain that has been underway for years as educated, skilled workers move abroad to escape Chavez’s “Bolivarian” revolution, said Ercilia Vasquez, director of the school of education at the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello in Caracas.

    “This ideology is very strong,” she said in a phone interview. “We’re going through a process where a lot of people are looking for other alternatives outside the country. This could accelerate it.’”

    The AP story continues;

    Venezuelan officials defend the program at the Latin American Medical School — one in a handful of state-run colleges and universities that emphasize socialist ideology — as the new direction of Venezuelan higher education.

    “We must train socially minded people to help the community, and that’s why the revolution’s socialist program is being implemented,” said Zulay Campos, a member of a Bolivarian State Academic Commission that evaluates compliance with academic guidelines.

    “If they attack us because we’re indoctrinating, well yes, we’re doing it, because those capitalist ideas that our young people have — and that have done so much damage to our people — must be eliminated,” Campos said. 

    Typical communist rhetoric – and it’s becoming too late to stop to stop Chavez. The left is so adoring, so emotional over the idea of an oil-rich communist empire that they forget the 100s of millions who’ve already been sacrificed at the altar of Marxism. Venezuela is beginning to look more and more like the Lord of the Flies. 

    From The Devil’s Excrement, a Venezuelan’s view of Chavez latest endeavor;

    But much like in Hitler’s Germany, Fidel’s Cuba or Franco’s Spain, Venezuela will now have official textbooks for all subjects, guaranteeing no impure ideas get through to the kids and all information gets the imprimatur from Bolivarian officials. I wonder if they will be signed by a Bishop or a General as a sign of approval or by the autocrat himself maybe.

    Because according to the autocrat, texts used to preach the theories of the Empire, whether the North-American or Spanish one (Did Chavez look up pre-1724 textbooks?), but then the ranting got better when Chavez truly and really said:

    “First, it was an ideologic education, the euro-centric vision, colonial, which taught us to admire the conquerors and then the cult to the animated characters of Superman, Mandrake or the Phantom, denying us the knowledge of Guicapuro, Negra Hipolita or Sucre”

    Jeez, I wonder where he heard about these, as I do not recall learning about any of these characters in school, but I do remember learning about Guicaipuro, Negra Hipolita and Sucre, and was always taught a very negative view of the Spanish conquerors which cost me quite a few expulsions from class when I lived in Spain.

    So where’s Jimmy Carter now that Venezuelans really need him? He’s busy bashing Jews and Israel on public access – apparently Chavez is off his radar now that Carter has insured Chavez’ employment for life. I’ve asked before – where are the human rights Democrats? Where are these so-called socially liberal conservatives?

    Well, they’re all for taking education out the hands of the public sector, too. They want to indoctrinate students into Marxism – more overtly than they can now. The left wants to shut down news sources that they think oppose them. They want the wide latitude that Chavez enjoys – he’s running their dream nation where the only choice is the choice they offer.

    But Chavez’ choices will be bathed in blood eventually.

  • Castro; Clinton/Obama endorsement

    According to Reuters and CNN, Tio Fidel is endorsing a Clinton/Obama ticket for next year;

    Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro is tipping Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to team up and win the U.S. presidential election.Clinton leads Obama in the race to be the Democratic nominee for the November 2008 election, and Castro said they would make a winning combination.

    I guess this will do wonders for them – just like the Osama bin Laden endorsement for Kerry/Edwards in 2004. I’m sure the left is positively giddy about this high-profile endorsement from the docile, harmless Castro.

    It seems he had some other nice to things about our other worthless Democrat Presidents;

    Castro said former President Bill Clinton was “really kind” when he bumped into him and the two men shook hands at a U.N. summit meeting in 2000. He also praised Clinton for sending elite police to “rescue” shipwrecked Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez from the home of his Miami relatives in 2000 to end an international custody battle.

    […]

    He said his favorite U.S. president since 1959 was Jimmy Carter, another Democrat, because he was not an “accomplice” to efforts to violently overthrow the Cuban government.

    See, anyone willing to forget that Castro is a bloodthirsty tyrant with hundreds of prisoners of conscience rotting in jail cells is just fine and dandy.

    Reuters also mentioned that Eisenhower cut off diplomatic relations with Cuba – but they neglect to mention why, I will. The first year after Castro toppled the Batista regime, in 1959, he sent a small ragtag force of his guerilla army to invade the Panama Canal Zone. The small force of about 50 was rounded up as they landed on the beach at Colon, Panama by the Panamanian National Guard under the cover American air power and naval batteries with no casualties and sent packing back to Cuba.

    The intent was to incite the Panamanians to drive the evil gringos from the Canal Zone. So it’s really no wonder that the President cut off relations, since the Cubans tried to invade US territory, is it? And you’d think it’s be worth mentioning.

    Reuters also neglected to mention that during the Carter years, the Soviets stationed 10,000 Soviet combat troops in Cuba in the event that Carter decided to react to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And Carter allowed Cuban troops to have their run of Africa (Rhodesia, Angola, South Africa, the Congo) and Central America (Columbia, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nigaragua) inciting armed conflict and terrorizing the populations where ever they could. 

    Is it any wonder he’d endorse a corrupt Presidential candidate with an half-witted idiot for a running mate?

    Stix Blogs wonders why the world’s thugs support Democrats whereas I don’t have to ask.

    Ace of Spades says that fugitive felons also support Clinton. big endorsement week for her, I guess.

    George Moneo at Babalu Blog has a memory like mine.