Carter: the POTUS nearest to JFK?

[Paz Marverde]

Just now, Michael Clark said:

 

Thank you so much, Michael 

[Paz Marverde]

20 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Hate to tell ya but the guy who screwed Jimmy Carter over the most was Teddy Kennedy.

No surprise. Ted thought he was the right guy to choose instead of Carter, in 1976 

[Paz Marverde]

On 7/18/2018 at 7:03 PM, Ron Bulman said:

https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=YP2rpiq4&id=DFD4634B27F651E170787B32FFB77BFA6201A0CA&thid=OIP.YP2rpiq4b7fxLliHTWhnSAHaLn&mediaurl=http%3a%2f%2ffarm2.static.flickr.com%2f1244%2f717711648_7f42a9705f_o.jpg&exph=670&expw=427&q=jimmy+carter+assassination+attempt+1979&simid=608032423696269807&selectedIndex=0&ajaxhist=0

Thank you 

[Paz Marverde]

On 7/18/2018 at 10:39 PM, Joe Bauer said:

Bravo!

Yes, I subscribe. By the way, the right title is: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

[Paz Marverde]

11 hours ago, Ron Ecker said:

I researched this several years ago

Ron, sent you a PM. Please, read it 

[Robert Harper]

On 7/19/2018 at 11:19 PM, Paz Marverde said:

Yes, I subscribe. By the way, the right title is: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

Thanks for info to both of you.

Paz, I've decided not to actually edit  the title of Carter's very readable book,  but will allow your comment to survive, as it properly informs the readers, but also allows me to  flash my Freudian slip.

[Paz Marverde]

2 hours ago, Robert Harper said:

Freudian slip

Yes, I saw it exactly as a meaningful, very interesting Freudian slip

[James DiEugenio]

Ted Kennedy ran that year because he made  astute observations about both Reagan and Carter.

As he told Bob Shrum, he thought that Reagan, off his performance in 1976, would be the GOP candidate.  This was correct, as Reagan steamrolled Bush I in the Republican primaries.

He also thought that Carter was in such a weak position that, not only was there a distinct possibility he could lose, but he would not  be able to motivate the Democratic Base the way Reagan would motivate the GOP Base. Which could lead to a wave election.

It might be  accurate to say that Carter was closest of all Democrats to JFK in foreign policy since 1963.  But Carter was simply an incompetent, non charismatic and rudderless president on domestic policy.  If you recall, there was the rising gas prices, the economic stagflation, that stupid malaise speech, Carter's idiot brother, and Carter wearing his sweater in front of fireplace etc etc. Carter was so non inspirational that John Anderson ran in the general.  Did that make a difference?  From the final results I have looked at, not likely. Arthur Schlesinger wrote a long essay for The New Republic where he just lambasted the Carter administration for being so weak kneed that he pointed out that it was the first Democratic administration since FDR that did not even have a nickname e.g. The New Deal, the Fair Deal, The New Frontier, The Great Society and then ? I make good peanuts?

On  top of that there was the renewed Cold War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan--which Carter's NSA predicted to him would happen and which they planned on--and then John McCloy cinching the decision to let the Shah into the country at David Rockefeller's behest.  

But the final twist was the October Surprise, or actually the second October Surprise--after Nixon and Thieu in 1968.  It has always puzzled me to no end that the media did not pick up immediately on the fact that the hostages were being released right after the bell tolled on Reagan's inauguration. If you recall, the idea this was prearranged and was done with Reagan's campaign involvement did not really pick up any steam until something like 1991.  And then Gary Sick wrote a book about it in 1992 and Bob Parry did a couple of TV specials for PBS around this time.

I will never forget my puzzlement as to the timing of that release.  I recall scratching my head and wondering, "When did Khomeini turn into a good guy and why does he like Reagan?"

As Bob Parry later put the pieces of the puzzle together,  Iran/Contra was not in and of itself.  It was a continuation of what happened in the fall of 1980.  That is how determined Bill Casey was to be sure he finished off the wounded Carter.

Edited July 22, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

This reminded me of an experience I had in Boston in 1979 when I was a first year medical student.

I was in the square at Faneuil Hall on the morning that Ted Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Presidency in November of 1979.

The place was packed-- standing room only-- and loudspeakers were being used to broadcast Senator Kennedy's announcement speech to the rapt crowd standing in the square.

As we were waiting for Mr. Kennedy to speak, an old, intoxicated man in a tattered coat staggered into the square, and was desperately trying to push his way through the tightly packed crowd to get to Faneuil Hall.

When he saw the huge crowd, he blurted out, "Let me through!  I have to take a f--ing piss!"

And some guy in the crowd said, "Oh, no! It's a Carter man!"

Edited July 22, 2018 by W. Niederhut

[Joe Bauer]

Trump compared to JFK?

Regards lying?

The following editorial comment article from today's Yahoo political page is one of the most coherently perceptive and enlightening of Trump and worthy of sharing in my opinion.

Not just in the comparison of Trump to JFK but for other important reasons as well.

If others here feel this posting is too current day political versus JFK related, let me know and provide me the link to our political forum. 

However, I do feel the article and it's view of Trump's moral character and mental and emotional make up ( including his constant brazen lying and dismissing of the consequences ) are some reasons why we will never see Trump do anything substantial regards helping to open up any truly important JFK assassination files.

When Trump shouted what we see on the news "is crap" yesterday in his nationally shown Vet speech, I couldn't help but compare Trump's raw street/bar/locker room talk presidential governing and public speaking style to JFK's vastly more eloquent, mature and office respecting one.

GW Bush was no JFK at the public podium, but even he gave some consideration in his public speaking to the office of the presidency. He didn't devolve into beer bragging, fart joke telling good-ole-boys Texas barbeque talk which I think most of us knew he felt more comfortable with in his private life.

Trump however, doesn't seem to know or care that his public speaking style and content as president is of the lowest brow and that as president he should set a higher example of responsible discourse leadership versus the opposite. 

I do wonder though, would JFK have lied if publicly confronted with charges of infidelity and affairs, several while in office?

The following article was written by Matt Bai.

Plenty of presidents lie. Only Trump doesn't care if you catch him.

Matt Bai

National Political Columnist

,

Yahoo News•July 26, 2018

 

 

 

Yahoo News photo illustration; photos: AP, Getty

More

 

Some former White House aides write memoirs so they can set the record straight for historians. Others do it to rehabilitate their reputations, or just to make some money while they figure out what’s next.

In the case of Sean Spicer, the once respectable Republican aide who became President Trump’s first press secretary, the main purpose for writing a book seems to have been to re-ingratiate himself to a boss who probably forgot about him 10 minutes after he left, mainly by repeating a bunch of things that were demonstrably untrue when he said them and haven’t gotten any truer since.

If you really need to know more, here’s a pretty brilliant review of “The Briefing,” which just arrived in stores, by ABC’s Jonathan Karl. (It appeared in the Wall Street Journal, so I’m afraid you’ll need a password to read it, and I’m not giving you mine.)

Personally, I don’t intend to read Spicer’s memoir, for the same reason I don’t call 1-800 numbers for personal injury lawyers who advertise on billboards along the interstate. Life is full of deceit — there’s no reason to go seeking it out.

Also, the world is full of other books, some of which I haven’t gotten around to yet, that don’t contain lines like this description of the president: “He is a unicorn, riding a unicorn over a rainbow.” I swear I’m not making that up.

As it happens, one such book offers a very different window into the contentious relationship between presidents and the press corps. It’s a recent memoir, simply titled “Reporter,” by Seymour Hersh, one of the most important investigative reporters of the last half century. Most of what’s in it is verifiably true.

“Reporter” does suffer from an inexplicable omission of unicorn tandems. What it has, though, is a fascinating chapter, among others, in which Hersh recounts his work from the early 1970s, when, as a young reporter at the New York Times, he did a series of stories exposing the mendacity of the Nixon administration.

Suffice it to say that Nixon and his secretary of state, the beguiling Henry Kissinger, lied a lot, and they lied about stuff that really mattered. They lied about bombing Cambodia. They lied about the existence of a secret White House team known as the Plumbers. They lied about covert efforts to topple the Chilean president, Salvador Allende.

Hersh’s account is made more chilling by some of the notes and transcripts that were later released. At one point, hours after Kissinger flatly told Hersh he didn’t know anything about a secret scheme to cover up the location of bombing runs in Southeast Asia, Kissinger spoke on the phone with his deputy, Gen. Al Haig, who suggested they shouldn’t be talking to Hersh at all.

“Well, you can take that attitude but I can’t,” Kissinger said. “I knew about the operation.”

What I found fascinating about Hersh’s revisiting of all this wasn’t that Nixon and Kissinger knowingly misled the press and the public (this has been long established, after all), but rather why.

They lied because they were afraid. They lied because they strongly suspected that if reporters like Hersh found out the facts and wrote about them, the public would recoil in disgust, and the administration’s policies, exposed to scrutiny, would have to change.

They feared the consequences of truth. And, as it turned out, they had good reason, since Nixon ultimately had to flee office to avoid impeachment, the lies having eaten away the foundations of his crumbling presidency.

(Kissinger, on the other hand, was allowed to graduate to the role of American statesman, in no small part because of relationships he had cultivated in the media.)

If you think about it, this has been more or less the norm in American politics, to the extent that it’s normal for the government to lie at all. When presidents aren’t truthful, it’s because the repercussions of telling the truth are thought to be unbearable.

Which brings me back to Spicer’s memoir and the Trump administration, which from day one has pursued an entirely different kind of systematic deception than Nixon or anyone else who came before.

 

Trump and his minions don’t fear the consequences of truth, because they don’t believe those consequences really apply to them. The president doesn’t habitually lie — about Russian election meddling, or about his paying off a concubine, or about what he said on camera or into a tape recorder just yesterday or the day before that — because he thinks the truth will be politically calamitous.

No, he lies because he’s pretty sure he can make you believe whatever he wants you to believe (it worked for a self-promoting developer in the New York tabloid world), and there doesn’t seem to be a penalty for trying.

To put it starkly, Trump is the first president in my lifetime to essentially say to the press that covers him: “Go ahead, jump up and down, prove all the lies you want with your fact checks and your transcripts and your phony outrage. Nobody believes you anyway.”

In fact, if there was any doubt that this was Trump’s basic philosophy, he put it to rest just a few days ago, during a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “Don’t believe the crap you hear from these people — the fake news,” Trump said. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Now, as I’ve written before, my industry bears a lot of the blame for making this possible. My colleagues in the media often seem to blame Trump for creating and stoking the public’s abject distrust, when in fact it was our own vanity and triviality — the glib cable punditry, the obsession with rumors and ratings — that created him.

When you look through a telescope and see the light from a supernova, you’re not actually seeing a star erupt in real time — you’re seeing something that happened eons ago, whose effects are only now reaching us. And, similarly, when you watch Trump undermine the idea of provable truth, what you’re really watching is the reverberation of something that began 30-plus years ago, a slow burning out of public faith that the president merely exists to exploit.

But if there’s a burden on journalists to rebuild that trust (and there is), then there’s a burden on you, too, to be a shrewder consumer. Because make no mistake: Trump and his acolytes disdain you, in a way Nixon on his worst day did not.

They don’t think you’re smart enough to recognize truth or care about it. They don’t fear your judgment, because they don’t think you have any.

So by all means, be skeptical of the media — we’ve earned it. But don’t be blind. Don’t be taken in by a demagogue, or the sycophants around him, who would have you believe that everything you read that doesn’t conform to your worldview must be nothing but garbage, because he says it is.

That’s just a unicorn riding a unicorn, spearing you in the back.

 

 

Edited July 27, 2018 by Joe Bauer

[James DiEugenio]

The reason Nixon and Kissinger hid the bombing of Cambodia was that it was illegal.  

There was no declaration of war against that country, as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was supposed to be a declaration of war against Vietnam.

If you recall, as Mr Bai does not, the secret bombing of Cambodia was one of the five proposed articles of impeachment against Nixon in the House.

It was the exposure of that disastrous operation that led to the eventual repealing of the Tonkin Gulf resolution. And that eventually led to the congress shutting off the funding for all Indochina operations. 

As per the point of this story, Trump actually told Lesley Stahl that this was his strategy.  He would negate the bad press by telling his public that the news media was full of crap.  

[Robert Harper]

22 minutes ago, Joe Bauer said:

When you look through a telescope and see the light from a supernova, you’re not actually seeing a star erupt in real time — you’re seeing something that happened eons ago, whose effects are only now reaching us. And, similarly, when you watch Trump undermine the idea of provable truth, what you’re really watching is the reverberation of something that began 30-plus years ago, a slow burning out of public faith that the president merely exists to exploit.

Wonderfully put - although I'd change the "30-plus years ago"  to " 55 years ago." 

[Joe Bauer]

8 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

The reason Nixon and Kissinger hid the bombing of Cambodia was that it was illegal.  

There was no declaration of war against that country, as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was supposed to be a declaration of war against Vietnam.

If you recall, as Mr Bai does not, the secret bombing of Cambodia was one of the five proposed articles of impeachment against Nixon in the House.

It was the exposure of that disastrous operation that led to the eventual repealing of the Tonkin Gulf resolution. And that eventually led to the congress shutting off the funding for all Indochina operations. 

As per the point of this story, Trump actually told Lesley Stahl that this was his strategy.  He would negate the bad press by telling his public that the news media was full of crap.  

Yes Jim, the Nixon and Kissinger lies were of monumental importance and consequence.

Trump's lies have not resulted in huge death toll war crimes.  However, Trump's lies about Russian influence and effect in our most major election process is also extremely important on so many levels. And should be addressed as seriously as Nixon's and Kissinger's.

[Joe Bauer]

6 minutes ago, Robert Harper said:

Wonderfully put - although I'd change the "30-plus years ago"  to " 55 years ago." 

Agreed Robert.

[Paz Marverde]

On 7/23/2018 at 1:10 AM, W. Niederhut said:

This reminded me of an experience I had in Boston in 1979 when I was a first year medical student.

I was in the square at Faneuil Hall on the morning that Ted Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Presidency in November of 1979.

The place was packed-- standing room only-- and loudspeakers were being used to broadcast Senator Kennedy's announcement speech to the rapt crowd standing in the square.

As we were waiting for Mr. Kennedy to speak, an old, intoxicated man in a tattered coat staggered into the square, and was desperately trying to push his way through the tightly packed crowd to get to Faneuil Hall.

When he saw the huge crowd, he blurted out, "Let me through!  I have to take a f--ing piss!"

And some guy in the crowd said, "Oh, no! It's a Carter man!"

Thanks for sharing. Found it really interesting