Joy Reid Laments Voters Rejected ‘Carter’s Decency and Goodness’ for ‘Bluster’ of ‘Cowboy’ Reagan -

During a segment on Thursday’s The Last Word about Jimmy Carter’s cancer diagnosis, MSNBC national correspondent Joy Reid complained that voters rejected “Carter’s decency and goodness” in the 1980 presidential election in favor of the “bluster” possessed by “cowboy” Ronald Reagan.  

Reid’s pronouncement was prompted by comments from host Lawrence O’Donnell about how Americans have “bought into [a] Trumpian concept of winners and losers” where you’re “utterly worthless as soon as you lose an election in this country” with Carter having “certainly suffered that imagery since losing the presidential election.” 

Nodding in agreement, Reid declared that: 

I think it says profoundly about who we are as a people that Carter's decency and goodness was taken for weakness and had to be remedied with the sort of bluster of a Ronald Reagan and that the idea we needed a cowboy to replace what people viewed as a man who wasn't cowboy enough to be president, that he was too nice.

Reid added a brief anecdote about how her mother had said that perhaps Carter “was too good of a man to be the President of the United States and he was just too nice” which she then used to scold the U.S. electorate for not seeing what Democrats saw in Carter: “I think it’s a bit sad that we, as a country, take a cerebral, gentle, a kind man for a weak man because that's not necessarily the case.”

Earlier in the segment, contrasting clips of Donald Trump and Carter (from his 1977 inaugural address) were played that allowed O’Donnell to tie together the now cancer-stricken Carter and Trump: “It took 38 years to go from Jimmy Carter's inaugural address, marked by humility and decency, to a front runner for a presidential nomination who has no humility and virtually no decency.”

Those remarks teed up former Carter speechwriter and journalist Walter Shapiro to bash Trump as “promising the American people a government as good as the worst elements and a shallow as the worst with elements of the American people” compared to Carter since he “promised the American people a government as good as its people.”

The relevant portions of the transcript from MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on August 20 can be found below.

MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell

August 20, 2015

10:32 p.m. Eastern

THEN-PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER [on 01/20/77]: Your strength can compensate for my weakness and your wisdom can help to minimize my mistakes. 

DONALD TRUMP: I went to the Wharton School of Finance. You know, like really smart people go to the Wharton School of Finance, I will tell you.

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: It took 38 years to go from Jimmy Carter's inaugural address, marked by humility and decency, to a front runner for a presidential nomination who has no humility and virtually no decency. Watching Jimmy Carter's press conference today in which the former President dignified and humane as ever described his planned cancer treatment, journalist Walter Shapiro tweeted: “This is a moment to contrast the moment the grace of Jimmy Carter with the grotesque egotism of real estate developer to who thinks he is up for the job.” Joining us now is Walter Shapiro, fellow at the Brennan Center of Justice and a former speech writer for President Carter. Walter, please expand on that point. You have the floor. 

WALTER SHAPIRO: Well, first of all, Jimmy Carter when he ran in '76 promised the American people a government as good as its people. The way Donald Trump is running, he is promising the American people a government as good as the worst elements and a shallow as the worst with elements of the American people. I mean, the thing that gets me – forget his positions on immigration. The thing that got me is with Chuck Todd on Sunday when Trump was asked who are your military advisers and what he said is, oh, I just watch the Sunday shows. That's all I need. That, more than anything, is such a profound disrespect for the office and the whole Trump circus is more than anything scarily – he either sees the White House as a branding opportunity or he is totally oblivious to a job that Harry Truman decided as the sun, the moon and the stars all falling on you and I can't figure out which is worse. 

(....)

NATIONAL URBAN RADIO NETWORK’s APRIL RYAN: I mean, here you had someone who served in the military – there's no similarity at all. They are total opposites. You have Donald Trump, a man who's talking very negatively and I'm saying it in the best terms I can, about a war hero, John McCain and someone who served and believed in peace. He received a Nobel Peace Prize because he was trying to work out peace throughout the world, but tne thing also, that is blaring for me with Trump versus Jimmy Carter, you had Jimmy Carter who was someone who came from the south, Georgia, with steep still and racial problems in the '70s and he took the high road and he tried to stay away from that. He tried to build on integration, not segregation and here you have Donald Trump, talking about minorities the way he does. Particularly Mexicans, but one thing that really is blaring to me. What happened in Boston and how this homeless person was beaten up, urinated on and they are blaming it on Donald Trump. I will tell you this, Amos Brown, Dr. Amos Brown a board member of the national board of the NAACP said, you know, rhetoric like this is what started the situation in Charleston where that man went in and shot up nine people, shot them dead that that church. So, we have to be careful and you have Jimmy Carter who's a man of peace and this man who's not lily correct. We need some help in this time right now. 

(....)

O’DONNELL: Joy, the Carter presidency is – in America, we are I think bought in to Trumpian concept of winners and losers and you are utterly worthless as soon as you lose an election in this country. Jimmy Carter has certainly suffered that imagery since losing the presidential election. 

JOY REID: Absolutely and I think it says profoundly about who we are as a people that Carter's decency and goodness was taken for weakness and had to be remedied with the sort of bluster of a Ronald Reagan and that the idea we needed a cowboy to replace what people viewed as a man who wasn't cowboy enough to be president, that he was too nice. I remember growing up one thing my mother said to me is maybe he was too good of a man to be the President of the United States and he was just too nice and I think it’s a bit sad that we, as a country, take a cerebral, gentle, a kind man for a weak man because that's not necessarily the case. 

O’DONNELL: Walter, How did it feel inside the administration as you were approaching that re-election. 

SHAPIRO: Well, I didn’t get all the way through the reelection because I did the smartest thing in the entire world. I believe the Gallup polls and I got out in '79 and went to a place called The Washington Post, but the truth is, I have been thinking a lot about the Carter years as – and part of it is the things he doesn't get credit for. Number one, bringing human rights into the entire vocabulary of foreign policy. Number two, basically being pressing it beyond belief about energy. You could read Carter energy speeches, including the misnamed malaise speech from '79 and it reads like a Thomas Friedman column today and thirdly of all, 36 years we have had enduring peace in the Middle East and Israel's continued existence is the bedrock there as it’s negotiated by Jimmy Carter, peace with Egypt.

Via: Newsbusters

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[VIDEO] Former President Jimmy Carter Has Liver Cancer Which Has Metastasized To Other Organs

Former President Jimmy Carter has cancer, and it has spread to other parts of his body, he announced Wednesday.

Carter, 90, had a “small mass” removed from his liver during surgery earlier this month. At the time, he received a prognosis for a full recovery.

But he said Wednesday in a brief statement that “recent liver surgery revealed that I have cancer that now is in other parts of my body.”

It was not clear where the cancer originated or where it had spread. Carter’s family, however, has a history of pancreatic cancer, which CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta said could be afflicting the former president. Carter lost his father, brother and two sisters to the disease. His mother had breast cancer, which later moved to her pancreas.

Via CNN

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We Are No Longer A Democracy

Recently, in an interview with Thom Hartmann, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said regarding 2010 Citizens United decision and the 2014 McCutcheon decision, “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president.”  Huffington Post goes on to explain that the decisions were rendered by “five Republican judges on the U.S. Supreme Court.”

According to liberal left commentators, experts, political minds, and the Huffington Post, the two rulings “enable unlimited secret money (including foreign money) now to pour into U.S. political and judicial campaigns.”

The Huff Post article then goes on to explain that in politics, there are only two choices.  Either, we are an aristocracy (oligarchy) where the richest citizen’s desires are reflected in governmental actions, or we are a democracy where the leaders represent the public at large.

Upon hearing such a thing being perpetrated by the liberal left Democrats, the political minds that reside right-of-center react, attacking what Carter, or Huff Post, had to say, without fully understanding that the premise is wrong in the first place.  While fighting on the liberal left’s terms, the “right-wingers” make fools of themselves trying defend plutocratic activities and damning what the Democrats consider to be the “will of the people.”

Via Canada Free Press

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[VIDEO] Jimmy Carter: America in 'Inevitable Decline,' Not Obama's Fault -

From the man who brought you malaise, now an even more depressingly negative view of America . . . On today's Morning Joe, Jimmy Carter declared that America is in "inevitable decline."   But no finger-pointing at President Obama, please: Carter declared that the decline is "not because of any defect or fault on the part of the President of the United States."   

Cue the Cole Porter: it's just one of those things. Carter was on to promote his latest book, looking back on his 90 years of life.   Carter's grim prognosis notwithstanding, decline is not inevitable.  It is due to weak leaders like Carter and Obama who fail to stand up for America and defend the principles that made it great.  -

WILLIE GEIST: I know this is a big question with a long answer, but, drawing on your 90 years, how is the United States doing right now? Where are we?

JIMMY CARTER: Well, we're in an inevitable relative decline in world-wide influence. Not because of any fault of ours, but it's, as I said, inevitable. I think that the combination of China and India and Brazil and South Africa and others as they increase in economic and cultural influence will replace a lot of the power and pre-eminence that the United States has enjoyed in the past. So we're having, whether we like it or not, to accommodate that necessity of realizing other people are going to be as powerful and influencing as we are in some aspects of life. Not militarily, we'll stay preeminent there for a long time. But I think economically, China will soon, you know, succeed the United States as the #1 economic power in the world. I think influence in politics is also shifting inside the United Nations and in the ability of the United States to use its influence to change situations that we don't like around the world. That's commonly what it is. It's not because of any defect or fault on the part of the President of the United States. It's just happening as an historical, evolutionary, unavoidable circumstance.

Via: Newsbusters

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The Presidential Skill Set

What you want in a leader won’t show up on the résumé.

Former Texas governor Rick Perry is gearing up for another presidential run and recently fired a shot across the bow of some of his competitors. In an interview with The Weekly Standard, Perry said that while he had “great respect” for senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul, they were not ready to be president:

I’ve had more than one individual say, “You know what, if you want to be the president of the United States, you ought to go back to your home state and be the governor and get that executive experience before you go lead this country.”

Perry’s record as governor of the Lone Star State is impressive. During his tenure, Texas was an economic dynamo while the rest of the country lagged behind. Republican voters will no doubt give him a careful look this time around.

Regardless, his suggestion is wrong. There is no correlation between presidential greatness and professional background.

Presidents are almost always governors, senators, or generals. We have seen good and bad versions of each. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were both governors; the former had an intuitive feel for the demands of the office, while the latter was out of his depth from day one. Similarly, Lyndon Johnson was a former senator who was incredibly effective at getting Congress to do what he wanted, while John F. Kennedy’s domestic program mostly stalled. George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower demonstrated a keen understanding of the political process, while Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor were capricious and imperial. Ulysses S. Grant was arguably the single geatest military commander this country has ever known, yet he was an inartful president.

Moreover, the country has had several polymath presidents who turned out to be disappointments. John Adams, James Monroe, Herbert Hoover, and George H. W. Bush had done a bit of everything by the time they became president. And yet none is in the top tier. Few men have been as qualified for the job as Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign because of Watergate. On the other hand, nobody has ever been elected president with as slender a résumé as Abraham Lincoln’s; nevertheless, he is widely regarded as America’s finest leader.

Political scientists have tried to explain such incongruity, but few explanations are satisfying. In the 1970s, James David Barber offered a psychological account of presidential greatness, but his approach was too reductionist and has been abandoned. More recently, Stephen Skowronek has argued that a president’s position in the broader political cycle is crucial. Yet like most analyses built on the concept of “political realignments,” this analysis falls prey to the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Presidential greatness is such a mystery because, while it depends on some predictable factors like the size of a congressional majority, a necessary ingredient is prudence. This ineffable quality enables a leader to make the best determination in light of the practical constraints he faces. Edmund Burke wrote:

Nothing universal can be ration­ally affirmed on any moral, or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the stand­ard of them all. ­Metaphysics cannot live without ­definition; but prudence is cautious how she defines. 

Prudence is the essential virtue of presidential greatness. It is the bridge that connects the unlimited expectations we have of the president to the slender formal powers we have granted him. 

Via: The Weekly Standard

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The Costs of a $15 Minimum Wage

In the 1970s, when oil prices jumped, most liberals embraced a simple solution: price controls. It should be illegal, they thought, to sell oil or gasoline for more than a certain amount. Americans should be able to drive without being fleeced by oil companies and foreign governments.

The impulse was understandable. Gasoline is an essential commodity for most people. When the cost rises, it imposes a heavy burden on consumers, most of whom have few transportation options.

In 1971, in an attempt to tame inflation, Republican President Richard Nixon imposed controls on almost all prices. By 1974, he had lifted most of them. But those on gas remained. Under Democratic President Jimmy Carter, they led to widespread shortages and long lines at service stations -- and didn't keep prices from rising. But the controls lasted until his successor, Ronald Reagan, lifted them in 1981.

Liberals learned an unforgettable lesson: Price controls on gasoline don't work. In recent decades, when gas prices have soared, Democrats have shown no desire to repeat the lesson.

But they embrace a similar approach for another problem: low pay for many workers. Chicago decided last year to boost the minimum wage to $13 an hour by the middle of 2019. Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles have gone even higher, raising the floor to $15 an hour in the next few years, and other cities may follow suit. It's a price control on labor.

Their intentions are good. Full-time employment at the current federal minimum of $7.25 an hour provides an income of just $14,500 a year. For an adult supporting one child, that's well below the poverty line of $15,930.

The problem is that a higher legal minimum wage is at odds with the prevailing supply of and demand for labor. If you set the minimum too high, you will get a shortage of jobs. Forbidding employers from paying $9 or $12 an hour means that many of their workers won't get $13 or $15 an hour. They will get zero per hour, because those jobs will disappear.

Via: Real Clear Politics

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A New Obama Doctrine? With his presidency in a tailspin, Carter radically changed course. Will Obama do the same?

By the beginning of 1980, Jimmy Carter was in big trouble. Almost everything he had said or done in foreign policy over the prior three years had failed — and he was running for reelection.

Carter had come into office in 1977 promising a new American stance abroad predicated on human rights. He bragged of an end to our supposedly inordinate fear of Soviet-inspired Communism. He entertained the hope of not losing a single American soldier in combat during his tenure. And he rejected the realpolitik of the Nixon-Kissinger years.

The State Department would end the excessive influence of the bellicose National Security Council. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance would put a kinder, gentler face on American diplomacy. We championed Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe over more moderate black reformers. We broke with the Shah of Iran, who fled his country in January 1979. We for a while praised the Ayatollah Khomeini and sought ways to reach out to him. Carter’s U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, called Khomeini “some kind of saint.” Young met secretly with PLO representatives in Kuwait. In an interview, he falsely alleged of his own country that “We still have hundreds of people that I would categorize as political prisoners in our prisons.”

The same formula was used in Nicaragua, as we welcomed the end of the despised Somoza regime and looked to Marxist rebels to provide long-delayed social justice for the region. Carter spurned South Korea, as if North Korean threats were not all that serious, or perhaps were even understandable, given U.S. Cold War machinations. Carter wanted to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea as a way of easing tensions on the 38th Parallel. He was clearly uncomfortable with Israel. He often distanced himself from Europe.

For a while, there was calm. Stunned potential aggressors only eyed one another to see who might be the first to test this strange new break with nearly four decades of bipartisan American foreign policy. But then, in late 1979, things started going downhill fast — as if the gamblers thought it was time to cash in their chips for fear that Carter might not win another four years in office.

Via: NRO

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The ATM Ate Healthcare.gov

I don’t need to belabor this point, but I think it is a point worth making.

Last year, Barack Obama blamed ATM’s for unemployment. In fact, Barack Obama is pretty sure that the rise of technology has caused unemployment, not his policies.

If he believes that, you’d think he’d hire a bunch of unemployed people to answer phones all day and process Obamacare manually instead of largely relying on Healthcare.gov and technology.

Surely the mass of unemployed in this country would be more efficient with pens, pads, and even mimeograph machines than a site that does not even work. Yes, he has hired some to answer phones, but he did not really put our money where his mouth is in this endeavor.

Good grief people! We can put men on the moon and send spacecraft from the 70′s into interstellar space, but in Barack Obama’s America we can’t even build a freaking website. For Pete’s sake, we put more people on the moon than signed up for Obamacare in Delaware, Kansas, and Alaska combined.

Barack Obama is now Jimmy Carter for that part of America who actually thought the real Jimmy Carter didn’t suck. Yes people, how you’re seeing President 404 Error is precisely how the rest of us saw Jimmy Carter.

Welcome to Barry O’s America.

Via: Red State

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Obama: The Most Dangerous of Morons

There have been bad presidents -- see Jimmy Carter.  Yet has there ever been a president as staggeringly incompetent as Barack Obama?  Really, can there be any other explanation for his performance as president than the man is, well...a moron?

Let's face it, we all know them.  They are the people who either started out with money, or have spent a lifetime failing up.  Despite a distinct lack of accomplishment, personal or professionally, they believe they are the smartest person in every room.  They cannot utter a sentence that does not include "I," "me," and "my," and they never stop speaking.  To quote Alice Roosevelt, they are "the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening."

They seem to Forrest Gump their way through life, with one undeserved success after another.

Does this remind you of anyone?

Have you ever noticed how many of these "really smart" people there are in government?  It's a magnet for morons, and it seems every damn one of them is portrayed by the media as a genius in his own right.  Yet, they never seem to be able to do anything but make things worse, and usually much worse. 

These are America's morons and Barry is their leader.

Obama has strange tastes.  His favorite show is Homeland.  He's proud to tell people this, and don't get me wrong, I like the show myself -- as a work of fiction.  Then again, I'm not the President of the United States of America.  In that case, the bar should be set higher. 

Via: American Thinker

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EPIC FAIL: Now JIMMY CARTER is calling Obama an incompetent loser

It’s been a disastrous couple of weeks for President Barack Obama. His signature legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is a slow-motion train wreck. His poll numbers have tanked.

Now, things have gotten so bad for Obama that former president Jimmy Carter has called President Obama incompetent in the family-friendly pages of Parade magazine.

“He’s done the best he could under the circumstances,” Carter said of Obama in an interviewed published on Thursday. “His major accomplishment was Obamacare, and the implementation of it now is questionable at best.”

Carter presided over what was, until the current recession, the longest period of economic stagnation since the Great Depression. There was runaway inflation, high unemployment and an ongoing energy crisis. There was a hostage crisis in Iran involving the capture and imprisonment of 52 Americans for 444 days.

In the summer of 1979, Carter gave one of the least effective speeches any president in the history of the American presidency. The deeply unpopular “Crisis of Confidence” speech became widely known as Carter’s “malaise” speech.

Carter lost his 1980 reelection bid to Ronald Reagan by an electoral vote total of 489 to 49. He won only six states, along with the District of Columbia.

The 39th president’s Parade interview touched on several subjects in addition to Obamacare including his grandson’s role in a hidden camera video of Mitt Romney, the Middle East, the Trayvon Martin case and the recent  tribulations of fellow Georgian Paula Deen.

Carter’s wife Rosalynn was also present at the interview and contributed to it.

Via: Daily Caller

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THE PRESIDENT WHO HAS DONE THE MOST DAMAGE

I have been broadcasting for 31 years and writing for longer than that. I do not recall ever saying on radio or in print that a president is doing lasting damage to our country. I did not like the presidencies of Jimmy Carter (the last Democrat I voted for) or Bill Clinton. Nor did I care for the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush. In modern political parlance “compassionate” is a euphemism for ever-expanding government.

But I have never written or broadcast that our country was being seriously damaged by a president. So it is with great sadness that I write that President Barack Obama has done and continues to do major damage to America. The only question is whether this can ever be undone.

This is equally true domestically and internationally.

Domestically, his policies have gravely impacted the American economy.

He has overseen the weakest recovery from a recession in modern American history.

He has mired the country in unprecedented levels of debt: about $6.5 trillion dollars in five years (this after calling his predecessor “unpatriotic” for adding nearly $5 trillion in eight years).

He has fashioned a country in which more Americans now receive government aid — means-tested, let alone non-means tested — than work full-time.

Via: Human Events

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Obama not Nixon, Carter or Clinton but the president who hates the U.S.

Why do so many empty talking heads and journalists keep comparing Barack Hussein Obama to other presidents?

Journalists: Obama the Worst Since Nixon’ is the latest.

When it comes to presidencies, Obama is not the worst since Nixon, Carter, Clinton, et al, he’s the worst.

“The Obama administration’s hostility toward media and efforts to crack down on whistleblowers and leakers has created “a tremendous chilling effect” on substantive reporting, the Committee to Protect Journalists and veteran reporters said Thursday.” (The Washington Free Beacon, Oct. 18, 2013).

“The CPJ issued last week a scathing report, written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr, on the effects of the Obama administration’s efforts to control press coverage, burnish its image, and thwart unauthorized leaks.

“The Obama administration’s aggressive war on leaks, and its determined efforts to control information that the news media needs to hold the government accountable for its actions, are without equal since the Nixon administration and in direct conflict with President Obama’s often-stated goal of making his administration the most transparent in history,” Downie said.

‘The Committee to Protect Journalists and veteran reporters’?

How about ‘The Committee to Protect average Americans from ‘The Committee to Protect Journalists and veteran reporters’?

How about rather than media scribes racing to the protection of committees, and folding like so many cheap suits, they don’t let Obama get away with it by digging deeper in quest of finding the truth?

The growing trend to compare Barack Hussein Obama to other presidents is a trend that takes its source—from Barack Hussein Obama, who started it all back in 2006.

Via: Canada Free Press

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President Barack Obama’s Six Months of Blunders

WASHINGTON — The other day another pundit came to my side. I have been watching this steady trickle of sages joining the cause ever since the spring of 2012 when I pronounced, at book-length complete with footnotes, The Death of Liberalism.

Now the veteran columnist Daniel Henninger of the nigh unto infallible Wall Street Journal has pronounced the glum news. On July 10 Dan wrote, “July 3 was the quiet afternoon that a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy announced in a blog that the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate would be delayed one year.” And Dan stated with marmoreal solemnity: “Mark July 3, 2013, as the day Big Government finally imploded.” Others too have made similar discoveries, none more memorably than Victor Davis Hanson who celebrated July 4, 2011 by stating that the Founding Fathers’ vision of government had been vindicated. Obamacare had been rushed into law and with its trillion-dollar overruns atop all the other federal overruns would prove to be “unsustainable.” He called the Liberals “Frankensteins.” I called them zombies. Nonetheless, whatever living corpse you choose, with Obamacare, came the last gasp of liberal overreach.

As Wes Pruden said in the Washington Times on July 5, this “one-year delay in enforcing the employer insurance mandate for Obamacare, which might not even be legal,” had top White House advisors heading for the exits and “Minions…hastily assigned to explain the delay.” He added, “Obama and his gang obviously don’t know what to do next.” That is correct. This White House has already transcended that of Warren Gamaliel Harding and of Jimmy Carter. It is the most incompetent in modern American history.

Via: The American Spectator

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