Hey BT.

So the wingers will try to make Obama the next Carter, blame Republican failures on him.

Loved Obama’s pushback against this from the beginning, with his inauguration speech about inheriting a slimy mess from his predecessor. Right in front of Bush, on camera.

Unfortuantely, Republic religious dogma about Reagan is immune to facts.

Every time I hear that some aspect of the economy, unemployment, for closures etc. it “the worst its been in 16 years” I wonder what was going on 16 years ago. Wasn’t that the second year of the Reagan Revolution?

Yes, that was scathing and awesome.

The media has by now completely absolved itself of even the pretense of social responsibility. They practically admit that they perceive their jobs as being, not the fourth branch of government, but as a “universal lobbyist” who will sing the praises of, adopt the framing of, and defends the actions of whoever guarantees them ad revenue or contractual dollars.

Without a functioning fourth estate, I’m pretty sure the Constitution doesn’t work. When people like us raise a fuss about injustice, corruption or dysfunction in our government, the press is supposed to do their jobs and the word is supposed to get out to the —

— oh, wait… we need an educated, enlightened citizenry, too, or else the press will curdle and decay into credulous tabloidism.

Dang, we’re screwed.

That was during “The Carter Recession.”

Funny how that works, eh?

Never ones to eschew schizophrenic thinking, for wingnuts Jimmy Carter has always been both the Most Ineffective Wimpy President EVAR and at the same time The Nefarious Schemer Whose Liberal Policies Still Cripple America Today. Hey, half the electorate is too young to remember Ford or Carter, so wingnuts can pretty much make up whatever they want without fear of contradiction. Who listens to old fogies with facts?

REregulation is the way to go. Why is it so obvious to this layperson yet so unlikely to be done by the electeds?

We need campaign finance reform, so that we can get rid of the corporations that have bribed Congress to ignore anti-trust rules and create these corporate media empires. Until we have CFR Congress won’t be able to break up these mergers of defense contractors and the national media.

We need to make bribing Congress illegal again.

It’s like how they lie about FDR’s New Deal.

http://www.publicampaign.org

Go there and study how to do it.

Then there was that pesky Iranian revolution in 1979 that sent oil prices soaring. The Iranian revolution, of course, was a direct consequence of the overthrow of the duly elected prez of Iran by, now wait a minute, it’s coming back to me, um, that would R prez Eisenhower.

Had Obama not laid out the mess he inherited from Shrub, he would have proven himself incompetent. Pity he didn’t also connect the dots regarding pointless foreign wars, deficits, health care insurance abuses, the hungry, inadequate tax revenue and domestic torture. The breadcrumbs all lead back to that same little hut in the petrified forest of Republicanism.

Glennzilla excoriates Evan Bayh for giving carte blanche for more war, but denying relative pennies for the American poor and middle class when it comes to health care, jobs, education, economic adjustment and retraining, and infrastructure renewal. Can’t afford those things. Funny, didn’t hear much about his concern for the deficit the last eight years.

Back to Mr. Douthat, who reimagines history even more imaginatively than David Brooks. Why is the Times so addicted to pundits who get their facts (and in Bill Kristol’s case, his diction and spelling) so wrong, and then allows them to call it “opinion” instead of ignorance or openly deceptive propaganda?

So right. I think it already has curdled.

Nixon was bad for the economy and remember he shut down the gold window basically killing Bretton Woods. Ford was even worse. He did nothing but admit he didn’t know what to do.
Obama inherited a huge mess but he will most likely make it much worse with his own spending spree.
Oh, and lets not forget Congress. They may be the worst of the lot. Barney Frank may be the destructive man in Washington from a fiscal standpoint.
In the end Dick Cheney (and many onthers) will be proven wrong. Deficits will matter.

Edit Headline: Ross DoucheHat …

Ross Douthat is yet another one of these conservatives promoted to positions of punditry well above their level of intellect, knowledge, wisdom and expertise. How often can the news print such errors and so much rewriting of history (ala Dana Perino’s recent, “No terrorist attacks on us under Bush” comment) without being called on it by their own profession? Unless it’s a concerted effort on their part to, ala Goebbel’s advice, rewrite history.

I have only one hope about Obama–he came to adulthood before the big Reagan Revolution and didn’t have to drink that kool-aid in order to get ahead in life.

And I certainly hope NO ONE is the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize.

What is striking about Cheney’s deficits don’t matter argument is that he means deficits don’t matter if the borrowed money is spent on the military, black ops, and war. Cheney will be the first to tell you that deficits matter when social spending is what puts us in debt.

Because you’re not being paid to think otherwise.

And, needless to say, Liz will be the second. (Do Dick’s lips move when she talks?)

Also, among Carter’s “hapless liberal” responses to the lousy economy he inherited, unfortunately, was a new era of deregulation, which conservatives to this day are still insisting is the answer to everything.

The other answer to everything is cutting taxes for the wealthy. Look how well Decider Bush’s tax cuts for himself, his family, his friends, and his cronies have worked!

That’s right — tax cuts + deregulation = ATE.

Remember: conservatism never fails, people fail to be conservative (enough).

Let’s not forget tort reform. Gotta have tort reform to accomplish anything.

It wasn’t Carter that had everyone in Washington walking around with stupid “WIN” buttons. It wasn’t Carter that suggested “Wage-and-Price Controls”. It wasn’t Carter that initiated the round-the-block waits for gasoline…or gas rationing.

Stagflation had many causes…but they almost all preceded Carter. The Arab Oil boycott (and OPEC’s formation), the hyper-dependence on the military production that declined as we scaled down from Vietnam (Reagan realized that this was a trough that needed to endlessly fed), Nixon’s running up the deficit, etc.

Maybe we should ask is the basic US constitution correct when a whole party says no to healthcare and want a larger stratification of who has and who doesn’t. I thought that was the concept of the aristocracy that we wanted to change in our US constitution?

Is Norway, Denmark, Sweden as an example, doing miserably with their constitution. Are their people without healthcare, time off of work for Dad with the kids, self sustainable energy, ups and down of market or large stratification of wealthy and poor like our country.

I might be wrong but I think the “framers” (as we called them) wanted a government of the people and by the people and not of the wealthy and by the wealthy.

Silly. The Devil doesn’t need to move his lips to make someone else talk.

And if a conservative does fail miserably then they must not have been a conservative.

See Bush, Dumbya.

Oh…and for god’s sake, don’t let gays marry each other.

I find it interesting that one important area of focus in the current Chilcott Inquiry in Britain is former US-Ambassador Christopher Meyer’s contention that it was the ANTHRAX scare (the second terrorist attack on Bush’s watch) that actually precipitated the IRAQ invasion.

Cheney facetiously told Bush “Saddam was the last person to use ANTHRAX, so we have a choice. Either a) we vaccinate every American against ANTHRAX -which could result in 20 million Americans dead of side effects- or b) we invade and wipe out Saddam NOW!”

The concept of tyranny of the majority was created to protect the rich white landowners from the festering mobs.

Yes. Failure means said R was really a D. See Fox News.

And, of course, we got President Reagan because his people “palled around with terrorists” in 1980 and got them to hold the hostages until after the election.

Strange how Ronnie can go on TV and admit to selling arms to terrorists and giving the money to *other* terrorists, and yet he’s still worshipped as a demigod by the right-wing nitwits.

Imagine that.

Dontcha know, there are good terrorists and bad terrorists? St. Ronnie was only on the side of the gooduns.

FDR paid too much attention to the deficit scolds and prematurely reined in the New Deal in 1937 — thus causing a “second Depression” that wasn’t fully fixed until our entry into World War II provided the stimulus and jobs program that was needed to fully rev up our economy.

Another example: the Senile Movie Star directed his Justice Dept. not to pursue bombings of abortion clinics. Those bombers were good terrists, dontya see.

Yep.

You are forgetting the WIN (Whip Inflation Now!) buttons that President Ford came up with. Yeah, that worked.

Another example: the Senile Movie Star directed his Justice Dept. not to pursue bombings of abortion clinics. Those bombers were good terrists, dontya see.

Janet Reno had no problem with that position either.

Carter’s crime was questioning the growth imperative. For such a transgression of economic sharia, he has been politically declared to be an unperson.

Our wise leaders have been using war as an economic stimulus ever since.

I’d be careful about talking about Denmark, Sweden and Iceland (or Holland and Belgium for that matter). They’ve all had recent Conservative governments that have pledged to scale back the “socialist” nature of their states. In Sweden there has been the massive privatization of formerly profitable, and well-managed, government-controlled industries. This has made the government look “good” in the revenues column (one time burst), but at the loss of thousands of employees.

One reason they opted not to buy into the SAAB deal offered by GM is that, although it would preserve tens of thousands of Swedish jobs, it would engage them in being a partner in something that ideologically “should be run by private business”.

They are talking about reducing pensions, scaling back health care…they’ve introduced taxpayer-supported “private free schools” (many of which are now teaching creationism and religion).

Fortunately their “Emperor Has New Clothes” approach has been revealed as being as decadent and non-functioning as Reagan or Dubya.

http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/view/34443/swedish_political_scene_remains_split_in_two/

Iceland is in economic chaos, too…as pension money and other revenues were turned back into “private investment funds”. These were then invested abroad, with disasterous effects.

In order to grasp “history” that has not been revised you would have to hear it from someone with an omniscient point of view. You would have to hear it from someone who had access to every single fact, relationship and event that unfolded in any given historical time frame.

But no one does, of course. Instead, they have more or less access to some facts, some relationships, some events.

More crucial still, most people start with a narrative of how we ought to think, feel and behave in our social, political and economic interactions with others—and then fit all the alleged facts, relationships and events into that.

Thus, a liberal and a conservative can sift through the zillions of complex, intertwined historical variables that constituted the Carter and Reagan presidencies and pop out any one of dozens and dozens of conflicting “stories” about “what happened” then.

So, what are we really talking about here then? Well, we are talking about psychological defense mechanisms. There is a powerful tendency embedded in the evolution of the human brain to ground reality intellectually and emotionally in a narrative in which there is a place for everything and everything is put in its proper place. Among other things, it’s a way to avoid admitting how futile this really is.

Yes, there are actual facts, relationships and events that can be [more or less] confirmed if we are diligent and honest enough in our effort to unearth them. To put them in the chronological order in which they unfolded.

But there are so many countless variables and so many possible permutations from which to interpret them it is easy to derive conclusions that align themselves with our own moral and political prejudices.

And that is before we poke into other defense mechanisms like denial and cognitive dissonance.

History is largely a rorschack inkblot. We see the patterns we have been predisposed to see by all the uniquely personal influences that have nudged us in one direction rather than another.

And even if we can all agree on how history did in fact unfold that does not then predispose us to interpret how the events should be accepted so as to sanction one rather than another moral or political agenda.

Instead, we have to ever grope about collecting as much information as we can can, comparing and contrasting it with what others have accummulated and then fitting it altogether legislatively into one or another rendition of the democratic process….”the rule of law”.

But even this is always subordinate to the role political and economic power plays in wrenching historical “facts” into policies that always seem to further the interests of those with the political and economic power.

Oh, and then we die.

Carter famously went on TV and spoke to Americans like they were adults. The country (or, at least, the motivated nitwits) decided that they preferred the Republican strategy, where Ronnie talked to us like we were children — children who needed to be reassured that everything was going to be okay, because our wealthy betters were going to be put back in charge of us. And that’s what he (or, rather, his handlers) did.

Didn’t know that about Reno.

Remember that about Carter but had forgotten it.

The Nixon Administration devalued the US dollar, which meant it cost more dollars for everything (especially gold, which became legal to own again); that’s not inflation even if it feels no different.

The Republicans it seems didn’t want to win the 1976 election, with what the economic forecasts showed. I recall that the difference between Carter’s victory and Ford’s loss was as small as one vote per precinct. Had Ford not run a ‘Benign Neglect’ campaign, had he said one word or half a word to gather minority support, that future and our past would be very different. I won’t bring up the Shah or Central America; it was a long time ago.

What does the US constitution have to do with healthcare?

The prolonged Iranian hostage crisis doomed Carter’s reelection chances. If not for that he might have squeaked by because there was a fairly widespread perception that Reagan was a reckless warmonger.

Carter has since taken comfort in the knowledge that the hostages all came back alive. That never satisfied his critics who felt we should have been willing to sacrifice them all to protect our “honor.”

Carter was the beginning of DLC ideas. He started deregulation. Against the advice of Bert Lance, he appointed Paul Volker to head the Federal Reserve. Lance had told Carter that if he appointed Volker it would mean higher interest rates and higher unemployment and the outcome of the 1980 election would be “mortgaged” to the Federal Reserve. (Secrets of the Temple by William Greider, p. 47). Volker was the pick of Wall Street. Without telling Carter, he decided to raise interest rates. The Democratic congress had already done away with interest rate ceilings. Thus started the pillage which continued for years leaving busted home builders and farmer suicides.

Reagan made things worse with his tax cuts for the wealthy. But the deal to double our payroll taxes in 1984 was again a bi-partisan deal that came out of a Democratic congress.

The enemy is within. A pox on both their houses.

Yeah, but there is such a thing as reason, and to the degree that you either utilize it, or eschew it in favor of self-serving biases, you engage in either a functional or a dysfunctional analysis of history.

The reason why the economy began to founder in 1968 was 1) the mid-wave cycle of the WWII boom began to bust because the vanquished nations had rebuilt industrial capacity that could out compete the US’ aging facilities, that is why the USD was “devalued,” and 2) Viet Nam sucked a hole in the economy.

Nixon, Ford and Carter were left but to try to figure out how to deal with it as fiscal stimulus had ceased to function (too small relative to the hole in the economy) and Volker hadn’t figured out how to use monetary policy to smooth out the business cycle.

amen. thanks for that comment.

Revisionist history? Give me a break. The shit hit the fan during the Carter Administration. What are you going to do next, claim Ford twiddled his thumbs while the hostages rotted in Iran?

I don’t know how old you are but I was in college when we had the Nixon price controls and Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now” gibberish. It was during those years that we first had the gasoline rationing due to OPEC jacking up the prices,

I repeat, it was during the Nixon and Ford years that this happened, not the Carter years.

So take your “revisionist history” crap …

(Oh, and Carter can’t really be blamed that much because the rescue attempt failed – and all the hostages DID come home alive – I’m sure to the dismay of someone like yourself who it appears would have been happy if they all died as long as we had bombed Tehran)

Aggggh! Reagan did NOT cut taxes. He, with help from “fiscally responsible” democrats, cut income and capital gains taxes for the wealthy, and at the same time increased the FICA withholding to create the “social security trust fund” which was immediately used to hide the true cost of the tax cuts to the wealthy.

The increase in the FICA tax effectively shifted the burden of taxes on the lower and middle classes as they never tended to pay much in the way of income tax. I graduated from college in the Reagan years, and the job market was horrific.

Carter’s problem was that he kept turning more and more conservative as he was in the white house. I’m sure it was inn response to the lapdogs of the washington media circus. Had he not allowed the Shah into the country, we might have never been saddled with reagan, bush, bush, cheney, and the rest.

No, but then again don’t we have evidence that Casey contacted the iranians to prevent the release of the hostages until after the election? Weren’t the connections between reagan’s people and Iranian governmental contacts involved in Iran contra made prior to reagan winning the election?