REST IN PEACE MR. PRESIDENT: Jimmy Carter vs. The Dirty Tricks and War Machines.
It is clear that global challenges must be met with an emphasis on peace, in harmony with others, with strong alliances and international consensus. Jimmy Carter, The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture
Why Republicans play dirty? They fear that if they stick to the rules, they will lose everything. Their behavior is a threat to democratic stability. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
The problem with the Democrats is that they actually believe in democracy. Anonymous
As Jimmy Carter shuffles off this mortal coil, we should recognize that he might be the last truly decent person to ever serve as our supreme leader. More importantly, we should acknowledge that he was undermined at every turn by sinister forces in our society. In at-least one situation Carters political enemies engaged in activities which our laws clearly designate as tantamount to treason. Oddly enough, within days of Jimmy entering home Hospice, a Republican operative from Texas revealed (Note: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html) that back in 1980, Reagan supporters secretly traveled to the Middle East to seal a deal that would keep American hostages imprisoned in Iran until following the November election. This was a clear violation of the Logan Act (which makes it a serious felony for unauthorized individuals to interfere in foreign policy).
This incredibly heinous act was known to many for decades, but it was deemed less than newsworthy at the time. It was labeled an “October Surprise”, only in this case it was designed to prevent the President from being able to provide a favorable event (i.e., release of the Americans embassy staff captured following the Iranian Revolution) just prior to the election. I worked on a national policy review in DC during the Carter Administration, and beyond my incredulity that so few seemed to care about altering our fatal energy policies, I was gob smacked that Americans could ignore such a clearly treacherous act. People would tell me Nixon did the same thing to LBJ (delaying a treaty to end to the Vietnam War) and “no one gave a shit”. “It is just standard dirty tricks and everybody does it.” Except some tricks really are dirtier than others, and the modern-day Republicans are by far its masters. Nixon’s acceleration of the DT cavalcade (labeled “Rat-fucking”) culminated in the Watergate Affair, and actually opened the door for an earnest outsider, like the Georgia governor to become president, with a mandate to delimit the “Imperial Presidency”. The issue was revisited briefly during the Iran-Contra scandal, but it only served to further obscure the unlawful harm done to Carter and US democracy.
In reality, various former/or re-appointed spookmasters and former elected and/or yet to be elected Republicans continued to run a Shadow Government of their own. Check the revolving doors at the CIA, NSA and weapons industries. This notion has been shrugged-off as mere conspiracy theory. Republicans, moreover, have turned the tables with their “victimization strategy”, contending that all such conspiracies are actually against them.
One might have imagined that in the post-Watergate Era, skullduggery would have been dialed down a good bit, but the Republicans were really enraged that their reign was cut short (not to mention the embarrassment to their permanent war apparatus). Many a policy wonk has agreed with me that Jimmy and his “Georgia hillbillies” were never really allowed to run things in DC. Carter was never even given the chance to subdue the major “Iron Triangles” (policy control by industry lobbyists, bureaucrats, and Congressional committees) such as the famed Military Industrial Complex. More crucially, he could never quite contain the Great Oil Octopus which promoted its own foreign arrangements (e.g., Petrodollar, OPEC Embargo, and other supply “choke points”) with their engineered inflationary implications.
Meanwhile, Carter inherited a rogue financial system, unleashed by Nixon’s unilateral abandonment of the international Bretton Woods Agreements (e.g., The Gold Standard) and the installation of completely fiat currency, not to mention the flight of investments to China via Nixon’s deindustrialization strategy. The economy was already rushing headlong to become a great financial Ponzi scheme, with hyper-securitization displacing actual productive activity.
Carter’s battle with his own bureaucracies and senior staff (with mixed loyalties) became the stuff of legend. Following a second global oil shock and corporate caused gas lines, he returned from an especially embattled weekend at Camp David and demanded resignations from his entire cabinet (eventually accepting several). It is noteworthy that Reagan’s first act in office (along with tearing down the solar panels from the White House), was not only a firing most of the schedule C and super-grades (political appointments), but a wholesale cleaning of the entire Federal bureaucracy right down to GS-3s (very low-level career civil servants) suspected of democratic leanings. This reversal of the long-standing tradition of bureaucratic “neutral competence” was akin to a Stalinist purge.
Just prior to the “Cabinet Massacre”, Carter delivered the infamous “Malaise Speech” (a term that actually never appears). Malaise was the title Reagan gave to it when he ridiculed Jimmy’s call for a national re-awakening. Contrary to Republican rewriting of history, the speech (which described civic virtues and public responsibilities to combat the energy crisis) was actually extremely very well received by the American public at the time. Each successive generation would benefit from revisiting these themes (Note, the Kevin Mattson’s book: What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President: Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country). Nevertheless, Neocon crafted Reagan platitudes about American Exceptionalism still seem to carry the day for those who want to embrace the fantasy of past glories. They didn’t want Jimmy’s “moral equivalent of war” on energy, they wanted very real (yet senseless) wars in perpetuity.
The passing of Jimmy Carter is a good time to ask ourselves what do we really want in a President? Do we really want someone that panders to our delusions and tells us that monumental crises (like climate change) will just go away, so pass them another barrel of oil? After all, we already paid for it with planetary buckets of blood and galactic mountains of treasure. Do we want fake populists who continue to placate plutocrats (not to mention kleptocrats)? Or worse, do we want fledgling Fuhrers who blame innocent scapegoats for the nation’s systemic ills?
This is especially cogent since we currently have at least one such candidate that openly engages in societal blackmail, implying that if we don’t elect them (let alone ignore their crimes), then violence will follow. We face the very real possibilities that our selection of supreme leaders will become a charade, like those in Russia, China, as well as numerous Banana Republics. Jimmy (and he always told folks to call him Jimmy) might not only be one of our last inordinately decent presidents, but the one of the last elected presidents, mic drop.
