Tag: UnitedStates

On Jimmy Carter, the 39th president and responder in chief of the USA

Last week former US President Jimmy Carter celebrated his 100th birthday. This piece sums up how many think of Carter as president:

In the popular imagination, his presidency was viewed as a fiasco. Besieged by inflation and a hostage crisis in Iran, it ended with a landslide loss to Mr. Reagan after just four years.  … But Mr. Carter’s presidency was more consequential than is commonly remembered, said Stuart E. Eizenstat, his chief domestic policy adviser in the White House. Eizenstat’s 2018 book argued that Mr. Carter notched significant but overlooked wins, including on energy, the environment and foreign policy.

All that’s true, but it leaves out an important detail. Whatever Jimmy Carter was, he was Not Nixon. Indeed he came across as the anti-Nixon. President Ford was Not Nixon either, but he was still attached to his disgraced predecessor. Carter allowed Americans to turn the page on Nixon in a way Ford never could.

The Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers and then Watergate were a lot for Americans to handle. Carter gave Americans an opportunity to move on from all that and restore the presidency by being everything Nixon was not.

Sometimes presidents come along and act like first responders to a crisis. FDR did that. So did Obama and Biden. In between them was Carter. He restored the country in a way he doesn’t get credit for. Here’s hoping that becomes a bigger part of his legacy.

For more on the aftermath of Watergate, see here and here.

The badness of America


America is great in many ways, but when it’s bad, it’s terrible. Much of this has to do with the Republican party and the people who support it. That support means that people in Republican Counties Have Higher Death Rates Than Those in Democratic Counties.  People are stupid, but it doesn’t help when those that lead them are evil or incompetent.  Speaking of evil, here’s a piece on  Tucker Carlson and why it is pointless to interview him. It’s not all evil though, some of it is just incompetent, like the Texas power grid. Also dumb are Republicans thinking they should have the right to spam people. Back to evil, this piece on Citizen Bopp, explains how much toxic legislation gets drafted. Now back to freedumb and how Americans will sooner metaphorically shoot themselves in the foot for freedom than to act reasonably.

Besides the GOP, much of the badness of the US rises out of political Christians, which has lead to the rise of Christian nationalism . Evil. As for dumb? What Happens To Christian Influencers When They Get Married?

All that helps explain why the American right falls over terrible world leaders like the bigot Victor Orban from Hungary. (Not that we Canadians should be smug: our ex PM Harper is apparently a fan.)

America still reserves the right go assassinate people around the world, and because the weapons are getting better and the targets are awful, no one blinks an eye at stories like this:  Little-known modified Hellfire missiles likely killed al Qaeda’s Zawahiri.

Anyway, those are just some of the links I’ve saved over the last while on the badness of America. Never mind their Supreme Court and how evil and incompetent they are.  It’s one thing to be right wing, but they had a chance to limit Roe v Wade in a way that would be less damaging and they refused to take it.

Maybe next week I’ll be in a better mood and I will write about why American is great.  Often times they are great because of their enemies and the challenges they pose. Some of those enemies are foreign, but many of them are domestic.

A good profile on Jimmy Carter, who is 95 years young today


This recent piece in the Washington Post is a reminder what a good man and what an under appreciated President that Jimmy Carter was: The un-celebrity president: Jimmy Carter shuns riches, lives modestly in his Georgia hometown – The Washington Post.

He was dealt a bad hand a number of times, but he achieved greatness too. His greatest deed may have been to allow the United States to transition from the debacle that was the Nixon Presidency.  Like Obama with the Great Recession, he saved the country from those that would harm it.

Thinking about Woodrow Wilson (and other American leaders)


Before this piece, I had limited knowledge of Woodrow Wilson. Most of that was centered on the work he did at the beginning of the 20th century, and much of that came from Margaret McMillan’s book, “The Peacemakers” (in the UK) / Paris, 1919 (in North America)”. My impression of him was a giant, transforming the old world with his ideas and his actions, and it was a transformation that was much needed. The world transformed after the first World War, leaving behind much that was bad, and a lot of that was Wilson’s doing.

However, Wilson racism was a terrible thing, and there is no overlooking it. There is no way to say Wilson was simply a great man: his racism and the discriminatory actions he took stain him permanently. He is a complex man, though, and there is no one scale to measure him on.

This complexity is  true for all American presidents. There is a part of Americans that want to revere their leaders. They build them monuments, they sanctify them, they constantly assess and reassess them, be they Wilson, or Grant, or even Reagan. No doubt this will happen to Obama, too. This desire to sanctify leads to trouble, just as it is leading to trouble in Wilson’s case.

Ideally Americans would spend less time idealizing their past leaders and building them monuments and centers like the one for Wilson. Anything like that should include all the history of the person and the time they lived in. Show the complexity of the person, their strengths and their weaknesses, and highlight both what they achieved and what they failed to achieve. Give a full accounting of the person.

(Image is a link to a photo by Mark Makela for the New York Times)