I do think he made a mistake welcoming the Shah but I'm not sure how much he could push back on that. There may have been too much momentum there to do anything about it in a short period of time.
Tbf Reagan was such a terrible person that his actions and stance on renewable energy is overshadowed by his actions on issues like AIDS and other issues.
im old not that old. The political leanings of The OC in the 80s is slightly before my time. That said as long as I can remember it’s be chud central so I doubt it was any different then. I remember visiting family there and hating it.
I love these threads where we learn some things, had no idea Reagan was such a piece of shit. What he did was criminal and treason.
Don’t worry, when W Bush passes the amount of revisionist history and straight lies about his presidency should make all our heads explode.
Jimmy Carter and the end of democratic capitalism The myth and reality of our 39th president Robert Reich 8 hr ago 160 Friends, I’m honoring Presidents’ Day by sharing with you some thoughts about Jimmy Carter, who is now in hospice care. Carter’s administration marked the end of 45 years of democratic capitalism, whose goal had been to harness the private sector for the common good. It’s important to understand what happened and why. For years, the rap on President Carter has been that his presidency failed yet his post-presidency was the best in modern history. This is way too simplistic. Spoiler Carter’s life after his presidency was exemplary for the same reason he was elected president after the disasters of Richard Nixon and Nixon’s vice president, Gerald Ford (who unconditionally pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed): Carter’s modesty, decency, and humanity. Not only were these traits the opposite of Nixon’s, but they would shine even brighter 40 years later in contrast to the loathsome Donald Trump. One-term presidents are always presumed failures because voters didn’t reelect them. But Carter lost his reelection bid (as would George H.W. Bush 12 years later) not because his presidency failed but because the Federal Reserve Board hiked interest rates so high as to bring on a recession. Recessions do not just choke off inflation; they also choke off presidencies. During Carter’s term of office, the OPEC oil cartel raised oil prices from $13 a barrel to over $34, resulting in double-digit price increases across the economy. Paul Volcker, Carter’s appointee as Fed chair, was determined to “break the back of inflation” by hiking interest rates to nearly 20 percent by 1981, bringing on a deep recession and causing millions of people to lose their jobs — including Carter. It was not Carter’s fault that democratic capitalism ended with him. To the contrary, he appointed many consumer, labor, and environmental advocates to his administration. Full disclosure: I was a Carter appointee, but met him only twice, once at a Rose Garden ceremony and years later at a dinner party at the home of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. (He was uncharacteristically late for dinner but made a surprise entry, coming down the stairs from a bedroom where he had taken a nap. He apologized profusely, making two un-Trump-like concessions in a single sentence: “I’m getting old and need my nap,” he said with a self-effacing grin, “but I should have told someone I was heading upstairs.”) Many of his initiatives — ending funding for the B-1 bomber, seeking a comprehensive consumer-protection bill, proposing broad-based tax reform, opposing traditional “pork barrel” spending, establishing a “superfund” to clean up toxic waste sites, and deregulating the airline, trucking, and railroad industries (resulting in lower transportation costs for industry and consumers) — were commendable. But much of what he did seemed to justify Lewis Powell’s warning to corporate America in a 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that corporations must bulk up their lobbying muscle in Washington or suffer political defeat. The untold story of the Carter years is the vast increase in corporate political firepower during this time. Trade associations, law firms, lobbying firms, political operatives, and public-relations specialists swarmed Washington, offering executives so much money that most retiring members of Congress also became lobbyists. The city went from being a sleepy if not seedy backwater to the hub of America’s political wealth — replete with tony restaurants, upscale hotels, expensive bistros, and 25-bedroom mansions (one of them now owned by Jeff Bezos), and bordered by two of the richest counties in the nation. With the defeat of Carter’s consumer protection legislation in 1978 at the hands of corporate lobbyists, Richard Lesher, then president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, presciently boasted that: “30 to 40 years from now people will look back and say ‘These were the years when the transition took place.’ … We're waking up. And big business is going to be in the forefront of this drive.” Perhaps Carter could have staved this off had he been more politically cunning, but I doubt it. After 45 years playing defense, corporate America was eager to grab back the reins of power. Despite his best efforts, Carter paved the way for Ronald Reagan — and America’s return to the corporate capitalism that had dominated the nation before the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Carter was trying to tell Americans to grow the fuck up with his infamous "malaise" speech. He specifically mentions that we lost in Vietnam. Reagan said MAGA
Generally, it takes several decades to truly judge a presidency and Carter is going to be looked on much more favorably for generations to come than Reagan will be. One is aging like a fine wine and one is a rotting corpse. I think that's the exact opposite of what any of us were taught to believe.
Do you mean to tell me the propaganda we’re spoon-fed from birth isn’t the truth? I need to speak to a manager.
Old man let it slip. Biden told people at a fundraiser in Rancho Santa Fe, California, on Monday that he had recently visited Carter after the 98-year-old former president’s health had “finally caught up with him”, according to multiple reports on the remarks. “He asked me to do his eulogy,” the president also said of Carter. Biden then suggested he might have provided that information unintentionally, telling those who were listening to him: “Excuse me, I shouldn’t say that.”
Is always made me physically cringe every time Obama would wax poetically about his reverence for Reagan.
Unfortunately, I've tried to tell educated conservatives (still dullards) this and they look at me like I told them something qanon-adjacent.
iirc it was even reported relatively soon after reagan had been elected and just never got any traction for whatever reason
that was pretty interesting actually but i hate how they tiptoe around something that has been pretty well known (and bragged about by the people involved!) for decades by saying something like it has been "long suspected" do they need the ayatollah to be like "yeah we did that shit"?