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Posts Tagged ‘Jimmy Carter’
April 25th, 2012 at 6:15 pm
Jimmy Carter Likes Romney After Favoring Huntsman

Just when he thought it was safe to grab hold of the GOP presidential mantle, Mitt Romney gets the worst kind of endorsement – a thumbs-up from Jimmy Carter.

Said Carter: “I’d rather have a Democrat but I would be comfortable — I think Romney has shown in the past, in his previous years as a moderate or progressive… that he was fairly competent as a governor and also running the Olympics as you know. He’s a good solid family man and so forth, he’s gone to the extreme right wing positions on some very important issues in order to get the nomination. What he’ll do in the general election, what he’ll do as president I think is different.”

To be sure, Carter’s statement about being “comfortable” with Romney isn’t as bad as the former Democratic president’s labeling one-time Romney rival Jon Huntsman as an “attractive” candidate and “very attractive to me personally.”

However, Carter’s justification for being comfortable with Romney does reinforce the conventional wisdom that Romney’s conservatism is a veneer whereas his “moderate or progressive” past is the truer indicator of how he’ll govern as president.

To paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, maybe we’ll have to elect Mitt to see how he’ll govern.

H/T: Political Wire

October 26th, 2011 at 10:12 am
Whaddya Mean “We,” Kemosabe?

Jimmy Carter lives, but he has big jug ears and he can’t talk without a teleprompter. This is about the fourth time in recent weeks that Barry O has sounded like Carter complaining about national malaise (yes, I know Carter himself never used the word, but Carter did describe it). (For instance, see item number two, about Americans getting “soft,” in Ashton’s story.)  The One says we have lost our ambition and our imagination. Well, no… but his heavy layer of government and his insistence that government do all our thinking and choosing for us has certainly made it hard for us to exercise the ambition and imagination that remain central facets of the American character. We have not lost them; they’ve just been somewhat smothered under Obama’s boots. If he wants us to get our ambition back, he might want to consider taking a permanent vacation, and taking all his rule-by-(illegal)-fiat administrative commissars with him.

August 8th, 2011 at 10:47 am
Ramirez Cartoon: Not Everyone Is Dissatisfied With Obama’s Performance
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Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

May 4th, 2011 at 4:30 pm
This is What Tyranny Looks Like
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In the wake of Osama Bin Laden’s demise, it may be all too easy to forget about the other poweful madmen who continue to be the authors of human suffering throughout the world. One prime example: the leaders of North Korea. Slate reports the disturbing news from the hermit kingdom:

How bad have things gotten in North Korea?

Well for starters, an estimated 200,000 people are currently imprisoned in a network of prison camps spread throughout the secretive nation, according to a new Amnesty International report released Tuesday.

Worse yet, the detainees are forced to work in conditions approaching slavery and are routinely tortured and subjected to other cruel treatments. The vast majority of detainees have also witnessed public executions while at the camp, according to Amnesty International.

Remember those facts the next time you see Jimmy Carter glad-handing in Pyongyang. The leaders he thinks are only a few sweet words away from moderation and sensibility have a population the size of Des Moines locked up at the behest of the dear leader.

May 4th, 2011 at 11:54 am
Carter Gives Huntsman Praise, Kiss-of-Death

Jon Huntsman has the looks, money, and credentials to be a top-tier Republican presidential candidate – if he can stop getting endorsements from the two most liberal presidents of the last 35 years.

President Barack Obama praised Huntsman for the latter’s “enormous skill, dedication and talent” to the job of being Obama’s ambassador to China the last two-plus years.  In acknowledgement of Huntsman’s rumored presidential campaign, his former boss said, “I’m sure that him having worked so well with me will be a great asset in any Republican primary.”

Jimmy Carter likes what he sees too.  Telling CNN that Huntsman is “very attractive to me personally” and an “attractive” candidate, Carter is giving the former Utah governor’s moderate positions on social issues, immigration, and the environment a very liberal hue.

If this keeps up, Huntsman may be tagged with the worst label for a GOP presidential contender: the kind of Republican Democrats will feel bad about voting against, but will do so anyway.

None of which helps with the GOP base.

After all, being Obama’s former ambassador to China is already a tough sell for conservative voters.  Getting praise from Jimmy Carter may be the kiss-of-death.

April 29th, 2011 at 8:38 am
Video: Obama Gives Us the Jimmy Carter Blues
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In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses how today, just as in the 1970s under President Carter, Americans are worried about the nation’s future. And just as in the 1970s, our current president doesn’t seem to grasp that his policies are causing the anxiety.  Giachino explains, “The American people need a pick-me-up in the short term.  In the longer run, we’ll have to wait for the ultimate mood enhancer: The 2012 election.”

March 15th, 2011 at 1:24 pm
Fed Board Member Gets Lesson in Real World Economics

In just a few hundred words a Wall Street Journal editorial writer summarizes how out-of-touch supposed ‘experts’ can be when it comes to how policies affect everyday Americans.  The object lesson comes courtesy of New York Fed President William Dudley’s failed attempt to convince citizens in Queens that the economy is doing much better than they think.

The former Goldman Sachs chief economist gave a speech explaining the economy’s progress and the Fed’s successes, but come question time the main thing the crowd wanted to know was why they’re paying so much more for food and gas. Keep in mind the Fed doesn’t think food and gas prices matter to its policy calculations because they aren’t part of “core” inflation.

So Mr. Dudley tried to explain that other prices are falling. “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful,” he said. “You have to look at the prices of all things.”

Reuters reports that this “prompted guffaws and widespread murmuring from the audience,” with someone quipping, “I can’t eat an iPad.” Another attendee asked, “When was the last time, sir, that you went grocery shopping?”

Mr. Dudley has been one of the leading proponents of negative real interest rates and quantitative easing, so this common-man razzing is a case of rough justice. If Mr. Dudley were wise, he’d take it to heart and understand that Americans aren’t buying the Fed’s line that rising commodity prices are no big deal. Unlike banks and hedge funds, they can’t borrow at near-zero interest rates, and most of them don’t have big stock portfolios. Wall Street and Congress may love the Fed’s free-money policy, but Mr. Dudley and Chairman Ben Bernanke ought to worry about losing the confidence of the middle class.

Ronald Reagan destroyed confidence in Jimmy Carter with one simple question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”  Any Republican presidential hopeful that can channel the frustration in Queens into a similarly concise indictment of President Barack Obama will be well positioned to oust yet another bumbling Democratic incumbent.

January 29th, 2010 at 8:02 pm
Obama Plagiarizes From Jimmy Carter in State of the Union
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If George Will and Charles Krauthammer are the brains of the conservative movement in print, then Peggy Noonan probably has a good claim to be the heart. While you rarely see her dissect policy minutiae, nobody does an ethereal meditation on exactly where America is at in any given moment quite as well.

Noonan’s reaction piece to the State of the Union in today’s Wall Street Journal is characteristically strong, but one passage jumped out at me:

They’ve chosen a phrase for the president’s program. They call it the “New Foundation.” They sneaked it in rather tentatively, probably not sure it would take off. It won’t. Such labels work when they clearly capture something that is already clear. “The New Deal” captured FDR’s historic shift to an increased governmental presence in individual American lives. It was a new deal. “The New Frontier”—we are a young and vibrant nation still, and adventures await us in space and elsewhere. It was a mood, not a program, but a mood well captured.

“The New Foundation” is solid and workmanlike, but it attempts to put form and order to a governing philosophy that is still too herky-jerky to be summed up.

Not only is the phrase a bit too pedestrian … it’s also a retread from the Carter Administration.  Readers of Robert Schlesinger’s excellent book “White House Ghosts: Presidents and their Speechwriters” may remember that “The New Foundation” was actually the title that President Carter chose for the agenda he presented in his 1979 State of the Union. Both the policies and the tag line failed spectacularly.

As the Obama Administration starts contemplating staff shakeups, someone in personel might want to start asking around about which White House staffers think that plagiarism is (a) necessary and (b) best accomplished by borrowing from the work that came out of dying days of the Carter Administration.

January 6th, 2010 at 5:44 pm
North Korea Provides Another Cautionary Tale to the Naive
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In 1994, North Korea placated the Clinton Administration by agreeing to discontinue its nuclear program.

Jimmy Carter trumpeted this supposed achievement of peaceful negotiation.  Bill Clinton sang its praises.

Since that date, of course, we have endured the “Groundhog Day” style cycle of North Korean troublemaking, hollow admonitions from the “community of nations,” more “peaceful negotiations,” and ultimately successful North Korean nuclear blasts.

In other words, as conservatives and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton have often pointed out to an unwelcoming mainstream media, the popular process of toothless negotiations with incorrigible rogues was again proven pointless.

But chilling news from the Korean peninsula suggests that it was even more dangerously naive than we realized.  According to South Korea’s foreign minister, North Korea resumed its nuclear program almost as soon as it agreed to the 1994 accord.  In other words, Kim Jong Il never intended to respect his obligations, and made dupes out of Carter, Clinton and liberal non-confrontationalists.  Instead, it was all merely another maneuver in his endless game of squeezing largess out of all-too-willing negotiators, a process that continues today with both North Korea and Iran.

It all puts Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize in a different light, doesn’t it?

September 23rd, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Thomas Frank Can’t See As Far As His Own Backyard?
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In his weekly descent into leftist frivolousness today, Wall Street Journal token columnist Thomas Frank argues that Democrats have remained far too…  get this…  “civil” in contemporary political debate.  Frank absurdly claims that in response to conservative activism, Democrats “pine for civility, pretending that the argument comes down to the scary rhetoric issuing from the right.”

On what planet is he living?  As noted by Tony Blankley in his most recent commentary, Democrats have met citizen activism by labeling them “evil” (Senator Harry Reid), “un-American” (House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer), “racist” (Jimmy Carter)  and accusing them of employing “Nazi” tactics (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi).  In contrast, Republican leaders have maintained a professional, restrained, rational tone, as illustrated by Senators Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl, and Representatives Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor.  Frank proceeds to unfurl his usual litany of anti-capitalist tirades and bogeymen, but that’s nothing new.  Asserting that Democrat leaders have somehow taken the rhetorical high road, however, is remarkably silly even for him.

September 18th, 2009 at 12:46 am
Obama’s Foreign Policy Meltdown
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Today’s revelation that the Obama Administration is pulling missile defense out of Poland and the Czech Republic reflects a complete ignorance of (or apathy towards) the point that I made in yesterday’s post — that the Western commitment to collective security in Eastern Europe has made the continent (and the world) a safer and freer place.

It also reflects a total strategic miscalculation. The oldest con in international diplomacy is to get an adversary to give up something tangible today for an abstract promise tomorrow (see “Land for Peace”). The notion that Russia will be of more assistance in sanctioning the Iranians (and the broader idea that sanctions will have any serious effect) ignores a question that the self-proclaimed realists in the Obama Administration have somehow overlooked. Why is it in Russia’s interest to play ball when they’re currently getting major concessions from the U.S. at no cost?

Though it’s been overshadowed by the healthcare debate, the last month or so of the Obama Administration has been its absolute worst for foreign policy. We’ve agreed to one-on-one talks with North Korea (with the laughable goal of getting back to the six party talks — you know, the ones we had before we agreed to one-on-one talks?), decided to pursue prosecutions of CIA interrogators, announced that Iran likely already has the ability to build nuclear weapons, seen the White House put political pressure on General McChrystal to keep from requesting more troops in Afghanistan, and imposed a foolish tire tariff that’s threatening a trade war with China.

The President can get away with Jimmy Carteresque policies for a lot longer than Jimmy Carter ever could because Obama has considerably more political gifts. But in the end, politics (particularly the presidency) is always about performance. This will not end well for Obama or the country.