Jimmy Carter has died (opens in new tab)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident

No, thank you. At very least he destroyed Iran's government and was the American architect of the Islamic Republic in Iran[1], which has a direct causal relationship to many disasters within and outside the country and led to October 7.

But sure he put solar panels on the White House. Great guy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadeloupe_Conference

The U.S. has a sordid history of intervening in the affairs of foreign nations when it suits their interests, from the overthrow of Madero in Mexico in 1913 to interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, and Congo in later years.

President Carter definitely wasn't perfect, but he had a lot more respect for the democratic process than either his predecessors or his successors did.

Which is just as sensible as arguing that the election in Israel of candidates of Likud should not itself be a blocker for peace talks.

Well tried but factually wrong.

Thermal solar is a battle-proofed low-tech for water heating (or even residential heating) that does not require any expensive Gov subsidies or public money to be deployed at large scale.

It is currently common to find such panels in developing countries as a cheap way of providing hot showers to people without power grids. In countries where the notion of gov subsidies often does not even exist.

That has very little in common with the giant public money sink shitshow that is the German energiewende.

Aside from Amity Shlaes, who seems to have worked backwards from her desired conclusion, I've never heard an argument put forward for Coolidge as among the great presidents. What do you particularly admire?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker

For who exactly? The $1.5T tax cut (deficit spend) for billionaires was advertised as a “bill for the middle class” [1] under the assumption of idiotic “trickle down economics. Trump administration at the time even promised a “$4,000 raise” to the middle class. [2]

In reality, in the short term, billionaires able to afford another stupid yacht or pad some offshore accounts. Corporations buying back their stock. In the long term, deficit spending, increasing national debt, jobs lost, cuts of public programs, and further decimation of middle class.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/12/20/572157392/gop-poised-for-tax-...

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/04/10/donald-tru...

As relevant here Carter proposed to make it unlawful to hire illegal immigrants and to impose penalties on companies that did so: https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal77...

I don't vote for him, but I honestly think he's a good person. I hope we avoid getting the same kind of rhetoric and harshness when we have our election next year, that we've seen in recent years in other countries.

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5047042,00.html

Carter wanted to pass legislation to give every American catastrophic healthcare coverage, so that a major medical incident would no longer bankrupt families, as a stepping stone towards universal coverage.

Kennedy opposed this, despite being on record supporting universal coverage.

It would have been a major win for Carter, but Kennedy already knew he wanted to run against the sitting President.

> None of that establishes whether Mr. Reagan knew about the trip, nor could Mr. Barnes say that Mr. Casey directed Mr. Connally to take the journey. Likewise, he does not know if the message transmitted to multiple Middle Eastern leaders got to the Iranians, much less whether it influenced their decision making.

"Historical fact" is a very strong way to say "one man's story recounted 40 years later and backed by modest circumstantial evidence", and even to the extent the story is true as told in that article, Reagan's backers didn't "conspire" with anyone—as recounted, they never spoke with the Iranians, they told other Arab leaders to let the Iranians know.

If true, this is still worth recounting, but you're not helping anything by overstating the degree to which we know this to be fact nor by overstating the crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandals_of_the_Ronald_Reagan_...

Ronald "Small Government" Reagan ballooned the national debt by 160-180%, depending on who's counting. That's higher than any other president by a massive amount: https://www.data-z.org/library/imglib/National-debt-growth-b...

Then there was his disassembling the national mental healthcare system with no substitute, causing a national crisis - and in a real case of irony - getting shot by a mentally ill person who should have been committed.

Then there was him ignoring the AIDS epidemic because it only seemed to affect gay people.

Then there was him coming down with Alzheimer's with symptoms cropping up during his first term, according to his own son and video from his debate against Mondale. At some point the country was effectively being run by Nancy Reagan and her astrologist. Hell, there's hot mic footage of her telling him word for word what to say to the press...

It was a broadly established take, and the reason why there's a superstition about sitting Presidents having opponents in primaries.

Quite - the environment was not much of a concern.

Bear in mind that lead in petrol was your anti-knock agent and the catalytic convertor didn't exist.

I remember really yellow coloured, sickly verges alongside roads and strawberry sellers in laybyes on the A303 ...

The clean air act was in 1967.

How did this set back the whole industry? Experience since then, even in France, is that reprocessing is uneconomical. Understand that Carter's executive order was rescinded by Reagan, and yet reprocessing has gone nowhere since then in the US.

Btw Carter put solar panels on the white house.

Hey, so did I! ORHS class of '82. Maybe we met back in the day?

France also has majority ownership of the nuclear plants, something that would never fly in the US (because Socialism!).

Even when I was an intern at a power company, the leaders there saw the nuclear power plant the company owned as an "albatross around their neck".

Having a president at the time who understood the science behind global warming would have been a game changer. (To say nothing of not invading Iraq)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6nW2Uow-zk&pp=ygUeQnVzaCBub...

In case you don't believe that.

Carter wasn’t responsible for the Iran hostage crisis.

- Someone who lived through his administration.

If they were fractured into 200 different countries, no one would say boo about them.

First of all, the vast majority of Americans like their health insurance [1]. There were talks of a public option but it would be political suicide for anyone in a swing state to support "government death panels." Indeed even the moderate ACA caused Democrats to suffer one of the worst Congressional losses in history [2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/us/elections/health-insur...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_elections

if this is true, “the public” has a very funny way of showing that. you just mention a different health care system to 1/2 of this country and see where that takes you (will guess you will hear socialism during those rants…) :)

It did derail the Democratic agenda, but mostly because Republicans made it their mission to ensure that Obama was a one term President. That has been policy ever since, and effectively zero legislation has come out of Congress since.

Democrats did manage to finesse the sole legislative accomplishment of the last couple of decades, the Affordable Care Act. In a lot of ways it was a fairly trivial change to the health care system, but getting anything passed at all was, in the Vice President's words, "a big [effing] deal".

"More people died at Chappaquiddick than at Three Mile Island."

On the "October Surprise" topic that other posters have asked for more information about -- it's a fascinating story that ultimately leads to the Iran-Contra scandal:

Here's a transcript of a 1987 broadcast by The Other American's Radio about the October Surprise:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/october-suprise...

And a paper I wrote about it in 1988 for a university writing class, with lots citations to sources I looked up in newspaper microfilm archives (what researchers had to do before google and youtube and wikipedia were a thing), plus a couple links at the end I added later when I transcribed it to html, once the world wide web existed:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/OctoberSurprise.ht...

Here's my criticism of Carter's response to the hostage crisis, and a description of the failed hostage rescue mission that Oliver North, Richard Secord, and Albert Hakim sabotaged, years before they caused the Iran Contra Scandal by trading arms to Iran for money and hostages, then illegally channeling the money to the Contras:

>III. Carter's Response

>From the beginning, President Jimmy Carter gave the hostage crisis a high profile. It was the focus his and his country's attention, day after day. But that was exactly wrong approach to take if he wanted to get the hostages out, without making it seem like he conceded to terrorism. Not only did the Iranians benefit from the publicity, but the constant crisis took time away and attention from other important problems, like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the 1980 presidential election.

>What Carter should have recognized was that there were different factions in the Iranian government competing with each other for power, and the hostage situation would go on as long as the Iranians could use the situation to their political advantage. If there was not as much attention on the hostage crisis, it would have not been as useful a propaganda tool.

>The President threatened a military response if the hostages were harmed or put on trial. The threat was deterrent, not coercive. Such threats are most effective at keeping somebody from doing something they haven't already done. The threat worked. Iran stopped saying they were going to put the hostages on trial and execute them.

>Carter considered several courses of military action. He decided not to mine Iranian ports, as that would interfere with other countries, and might provoke the Iranians to harm the hostages. He did however order that a rescue plan be drawn up, but he hoped it wouldn't have to be used.

>The other effective measures he took were to freeze Iranian monetary assets, and to impose an arms embargo and economic sanctions. His goal was to get other countries to go along with the embargo and sanctions.

>IV. The Hostage Rescue Mission

>On April 23, 1980, an abortive Iranian hostage rescue mission took place, conducted under the utmost secrecy. The plan was to storm the American embassy in Tehran, and bring home the hostages.

>8 helicopters, 6 C-130 transport planes, and 93 Delta force commandoes secretly invaded Iran. They were to rendezvous at a place in Iran they called Desert One, move out to another point called Desert Two, and then go on to Tehran to rescue the hostages. But Delta force never made it to Desert Two or Tehran. The mission was aborted after three of the eight helicopters failed, on the way to Desert One. The operation was a miserable failure, resulting in an accident that caused the loss of 8 American lives. Later investigation revealed a surprising level of negligence. [4] [7] [13]

>Just before the rescue mission took place, several other countries had finally agreed to level economic sanctions on Iran. Some of them agreed to the sanctions because they thought that if they did, the U.S. would not take any military action. They were quite irate when they heard about the rescue mission after the fact.

>At least three central figures in the Iran-Contra Scandal were involved with the Iranian hostage rescue mission: Secord, Hakim, and North.

>General Richard Secord helped to organize the abortive rescue mission. After the first mission failed, he was the head of the planning group that eventually decided against another rescue attempt. Because the whereabouts of the hostages were unknown, the second rescue attempt (the October Surprise that the Reagan-Bush campaign was so worried about) never happened.

>Secord was later suspended from his Pentagon post because of the EATSCO probe. EATSCO is a company that belongs to Edwin Wilson, the CIA operative who is currently serving time in a federal maximum-security prison for, among other things, secretly supplying 43,000 pounds of plastic explosives to Kadaffi. [21]

>In 1981, he became Chief Middle East arms-sales adviser to Secretary of Defense Casper W. Weinberger. [21]

>Albert Hakim is a wealthy arms merchant, an Iranian exile, and CIA informant, who had a "sensitive intelligence" role in 1980 hostage rescue. He worked for the CIA near the Turkish boarder, handling the logistics of the rescue mission in Tehran. Hakim purchased trucks and vans, and rented a warehouse on the edge of Tehran to hide them in until they were needed for the operation. Unexpectedly however, he skipped town the day before the rescue mission. [2] [13] [25] Later on, in July, 1981, Hakim approached the CIA, with a plan to gain favor with the Iranian government by selling it arms. [22]

>Oliver North led a secret detachment to eastern Turkey. He was in the mother ship on the Turkish border awaiting the cue from Secord to fly into Teheran and rescue the hostages. [2] [25] After the first aborted rescue mission, he worked with Secord on a second rescue plan.

>According to the October Surprise theory, Secord, North and Hakim did not intend Desert One to carry through. The miserable failure of Carter's Desert One rescue attempt may have been deliberate.

[More intriguing details about the sabotage, election, Iran Contra Scandal, and citations in the full paper: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/OctoberSurprise.ht... ]