Liberal Forum

Cannonpointer » 07 Apr 2014 12:56 am » wrote:
It's true that Nixon's Bretton Woods default and Johnson's Great Society and the oil companies' fake gas shortage and the CIA's previous misbehavior in Iran all came to a head and exploded during Carter's tenure, and that DID make things kind of "suck." But I think there was more to his defeat than that.

For example, there is pretty good evidence that Carter's rescue attempt in Iran was sabotaged by the intelligence community and a deal was struck by the reagan campaign with the Iranians. In exchange for holding the hostages until Reagan's inauguration, they would be rewarded with the freeing up of every penny of frozen assets, they would face no reprisals, and they would receive American weapons - even if Congress passed a law forbidding it.

In any case, they DID do exactly that thing, and they DID receive precisely those rewards. Maybe it was just synchronicity, or haphazard coincidence.

Right.

And more than that, economic theory holds that unemployment, interest rates and inflation interact and mediate against each other. Any two being in double digits SHOULD drive the third into single digits. That theory was "disproved" under Carter. Yet, it is STILL taught at Yale and Harvard and Stanford and every other university in the country.

It's almost as if the folks in the know understand that "the fix was in" against Carter - the money guys wanted him gone.

America was feeling pretty low in the Carter years - and not just about the economy. We had disgraced ourselves in Viet Nam. Kent State, the Chicago Democratic Convention, Patty Heart, the Weather Underground, enormously divisive war protests involving hundreds of thousands, sit-ins, the murders of Bobby and MLK, and draft card burnings and flights from compulsive military duty to Canada - all of these gripping issues and many others were more recent and hotter in our national blood than 9-11 is today. We were at each other's throats about gun control and women's right and race relations and many, many other things. We were divided.

Reagan was a great shill and practiced bromide spewer. He had the banksters on his side and the media fawning over him - calling him "the Gipper," and "the Great Communicator." He tossed out wonderful marketing slogans like, "Morning in America," and "There you go again." He asked rhetorically, "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago" - a winning question, the answer to which was not in any way the fault of Jimmah Cawhuh. Reagan underestimated the American people, and, sadly, it paid off.

I CHALLENGE you to watch the last real presidential debate. It was between Carter and Ford. After that, there have been some retarded exchanges of scripted bumper stickers and talking points, allowing the proponents of both candidates to declare victory since their candidate's slogans seemed the most palatable to them.

So, when you talk about why people like me wrong-headedly elected Ron Reagan, just know that it was because we were not so good and wise as to deserve good and wise leadership. I can play the youth card - it was my first presidential election. I was a raw-boned, patriotic country boy who drank the koolaid and responded like a good little monkey to slogans over substance and PR over statecraft. Mostly, we were pissed about Iran, and believed Reagan would bomb their *** - never DREAMING that the fix was in and he would unfreeze their assets and give them a free pass and sell them American military technology - never dreaming that he would declare jihad on the American working man and set the stage for a return to PRECISELY the wealth distribution of 1929, which brought on the Great Depression.