Thursday January 9th
National Day of Mourning 
For Jimmy Carter

 Steely_D wrote:

 Red_Dragon wrote:

A member of the original boy band, created from nothing, just to capitalize on the folk craze.
He was still so super important, though.

Little known fact: a long time ago my younger sister sent me a picture of her hanging out with Mary Travers. WTF!?!
And as I've said before, my mom used to regularly (regularly) tell me she was going drinking with Boozoo and Leona. WTF!?! 

Bad rubbish

Peter Yarrow

For my part, I meant no disrespect towards Jimmy Carter or people posting here. While I see your point, Gene, Carter's passing naturally inspires a recollection of his impressive and honorable life, including his handling of major issues while president. 

Carter for decades was seen as a weak president but it's more apparent now that this is an unfair or inaccurate assessment. He had to deal with intractable problems like stagflation, oil price spikes, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis. Any American president, regardless of his/her intelligence and character, would have struggled to address these problems. 

Perhaps I should have started another thread outside the Obituary thread to counter the notion posted here that the Iranian hostage crisis was due largely because of Carter's so-called weakness (when it turns out instead that the Republicans sabotaged his efforts to negotiate their release). 

Again, I meant no disrespect. This thread just struck me as the natural place to set the record straight about what Carter did and didn't do when faced with extraordinary challenges. I think his life deserves a strong effort to fully understand his life and times. 

 GeneP59 wrote:

 GeneP59 wrote:
Agreed, thanks for the reminder.

 GeneP59 wrote:
I agree

All you people that perpetuate all this bitchfest on the OBITUARY PAGE make me sick. Create another “I’m righteous comments and conspiracy” on a forum. I don’t need to see a 27 paragraph manifesto on unrelated information unrelated to death.

GROW UP FOR FUCK SAKE!  NO FUCKING RESPECT IN THE COUNTRY ANYMORE.

 kurtster wrote:

Sorry I haven't responded earlier, but the history is clearer now. Reagan's campaign team (largely William Casey, former OSS agent and head of CIA during Reagan's admin) did push the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages until after the US election in 1980. 

Gary Sick weighs in on new evidence that came to light decades later. And a lot of people outside the US corroborate the story of former TX lieutenant governor Ben Barnes.

Expert analyzes new account of GOP deal that used Iran hostage crisis for gain

(excerpt):
Mar 19, 2023 5:45 PM EST

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/s...

• John Yang:

  Almost from the moment Iran free the U.S. hostages in 1981 just minutes after President Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, there have been suspicions about a deal between the Reagan campaign and Iran. The hostage crisis had consumed the last year of the Carter presidency, contributing to a perception of weakness.

  Now, Ben Barnes, a prominent Democratic politician at the time, tells the New York Times he was a witness to Republican efforts to prevent the hostages from being freed before Election Day. Gary Sick was the Iran expert on President Carter's National Security Council. He wrote a 1991 book making the case that there was a deal called October Surprise. Mr. Sick, when you heard what Burr Redwood — Ben Barnes, said, what was your reaction?

• Gary Sick, Former National Security Council Staff:

  My reaction was pretty straightforward. This was the first high level official of any government that had specifically identified the fact that the Reagan administration was trying to make contact with Iran, and tell them that they should keep the hostages until after the election of Jimmy Carter, the election which Reagan was running against Jimmy Carter.

  And we had pretty well figured that out, we had a bunch of evidence that that was the case. But this is the first most credible of all of the sources that have talked about the story to this point.

Was the October Surprise Treason? Craig Unger’s Den of Spies

Many years later, I posted the March 2023 New York Times story, sadly entitled A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election, on my websites. In that essay, former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes explained how his mentor, Texas Governor John B. Connally, Jr., helped Reagan beat Carter. How? Connally visited the Iranians and asked them to keep the hostages imprisoned until Reagan was president. Reagan would give them a better deal, he promised. The Reagan administration gave the Iranians plenty of arms, which Carter had denied them. After his trip, Connolly told Reagan aide Casey what he had done.

Ben Barnes came forward because President Carter was still alive, and he wanted the history made clear. Recently, on Carter’s 100^th birthday, Craig Unger published this new book, Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House. Carter died on December 29, 2024. He was the longest-lived president in American history.

...

Unger is sure the surprise occurred because the President of Iran in 1980, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, confirms it happened. Unger interviewed Bani-Sadr. As Unger puts it, “Bani-Sadr had the receipts” showing that Casey had met with the Iranians in Madrid. The former Iranian president made a “repeated insistence that the October surprise was real.” For the record, Bani-Sadr was quickly eliminated as Iranian president. He moved to Versailles. Instead, Iran kept the religious Islamic leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and eliminated the secular Bani-Sadr.

...

Other sources keep telling us the surprise really happened.

In May 2003, Jonathan Alter, Gary Sick, Kai Bird, and Stuart Eizenstat—all experts about Jimmy Carter—wrote It’s All But Settled: The Reagan Campaign Delayed the Release of the American Hostages, in The New Republic. Their conclusion? “We think there’s now enough evidence to say definitively that Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, the late William Casey, ran a multipronged covert operation to manipulate the 1980 presidential election—and that these acts of betrayal might have affected the outcome.”

Their conclusion is strong: “Casey’s unpatriotic conduct should now be viewed by historians as an established fact.” They mention that one of the hostages, Barry Rosen, said these events were “the definition of treason.” Unger also called it treason in his book’s title.

Kai Bird, in The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, added that Casey’s negotiations “could be deemed a blatant violation of the 1799 Logan Act prohibiting private citizens from negotiating disputes with foreign powers.” Bird also says: “By any definition, this was an act of treason. But Republican operatives and Casey himself probably regarded it as mere hardball politics.” Bird says Carter is “studiously agnostic” about Casey’s diplomacy.

Bani-Sadr told Unger that he had mentioned the connections between the Iranians and Casey to Congressman Lee Hamilton, who directed the House study of the surprise. Hamilton found the story “so chilling that he didn’t know what to do.” Bani-Sadr agreed with Hamilton that the news was horrible, but told him “the price is much heavier if you don’t tell the truth to Americans. Then, you really endanger democracy.”

The Price

There was an early result of the October surprise. Do you remember the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration illegally sold arms to Iran, and then gave the profits to the Contras in Nicaragua? Unger says that series of illegal sales of arms started with the surprise. The October Surprise and Iran Contra “are identical.” The first encouraged the next.

This piece may be the one to read first, but whatever:

A SHORT HISTORY OF EVERYONE WHO CONFIRMED REAGAN’S OCTOBER SURPRISE BEFORE THE NEW YORK TIMES

March 24 2023, 7:00 a.m.

A lot of people beyond Ben Barnes have said that Reagan’s 1980 election campaign conspired to keep American hostages in Iran.

(EXCERPT):

ON SATURDAY, THE New York Times published a blockbuster story that said two prominent Texas Republicans flew across the Mideast in the summer of 1980 for secret meetings with regional leaders to urge them to tell Iran to keep the U.S. hostages in Tehran until after the election that pitted GOP candidate Ronald Reagan against then-President Jimmy Carter.

The Times reported that Ben Barnes, a key figure in Texas politics, said he made the trip with former Texas Gov. John Connally, a major supporter of Reagan’s campaign, and that when they returned home, Connally met in an airport lounge with William Casey, who’d been a top U.S. spy during World War II and was then Reagan’s campaign manager. Connally and Casey discussed the trip, according to Barnes, who The Times quoted as saying, “History needs to know that this happened.” After Reagan beat Carter in a landslide, Reagan appointed Casey head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All this is powerful evidence that the Reagan campaign did — as has been alleged for decades — strike a deal with the Iranian government to prevent the hostages from being released. While that has never been proven, what’s known beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the Reagan campaign was deeply worried that Carter might get the hostages out before November and thereby give a big boost to his prospects.

You might understandably ask: If this actually happened, how could it have been kept secret? Why hasn’t anyone with knowledge of it spoken up before? The answer is that it hasn’t been kept secret, and many, many people have said it occurred. But most of the people doing so have been foreigners. Barnes is merely the most important American to finally come out and support the story.

 Lazy8 wrote:
I never realized that the entire lock system was driven by rainfall until recently.  Seems sort of odd that the canal between two oceans depends on rainfall, but each trip through the locks uses 50 Million gallons.

The lakes also supply roughly half of the drinking water in Panama, so there is a balance between commerce and consumption.

I guess if we take back the locks... we can turn off the spigots. 

 kurtster wrote:
Your response to Richard's question regurgitated some familiar—and, as I pointed out, historically illiterate—right-wing talking points. That doesn't make them wrong of course so i'll point that out now.

Carter signed the canal treaty, but it had been under negotiation for decades, thru 3 previous administrations. Those negotiations fueled Ronald Reagan's unsuccessful primary run against Gerald Ford in the 1976 election.

There were all kinds of predictions about the dire consequences of turning the canal over to Panama (look them up, they're hilarious)—none of which came to pass. Even your allegation that China controls the canal is a lie; a company based in Hong Kong has a contract to manage the ports at either end of the canal—like the dozens of other ports around the world they operate, including (surprise!) one in Ukraine. The government of Panama owns and operates the canal. Period.

The US decommissioned its bases in the Canal Zone (we once had 23 facilities there; the navy still operates a pipeline across the isthmus) mostly around the turn of the century. This includes the ones we had re-established during the 1989 invasion—remember that? If the US needs control of the Panama Canal for a war emergency it can take it back over a long weekend. The country of origin of the company writing the checks for the crane operators in the ports on either end of it would mean approximately nothing.

As for excessive fees*...since when is that grounds for violating another country's sovereignty? If coffee prices rise should we invade Brazil?

Administrations change. Biden s a lame duck, Trump will be in power in a week or so. Even if he weren't senile there would be no point talking to him. Trump's term will end too, and at the end of it he will also be irrelevant. We call this the calendar. 

As for Carter's foreign policy...your criticism is subjective and unsupported so...eh. I will say this about him relative to Reagan: Carter adhered to the (very common) doctrine of the time, namely that the Soviet Union was an extremely dangerous opponent that needed to be contained and appeased rather than confronted. Reagan didn't get everything right but he got that right where Carter got it wrong, and that was his most important contribution to America's role n the world.

*The locks are run with fresh water out of Gatun Lake. Inflow into this lake is driven by rainfall; the recent drought drove up transit fees, since the locks can only be operated at the rate the lake fills up, Seizing the canal wouldn't change this.

 buddy wrote: 
Just because you don't agree makes everything I say wrong, is what I get out of that.

I guess that is how it works when one stands in a forest and only sees the tree in front of them.

Have a Happy New Year.

 kurtster wrote:

Is William/Alanna censoring you?

 Coaxial wrote: 
Truer words never spoken, in regards to an echo chamber that only allows one POV.

If they didn't deserve respect while they were alive, then they certainly don't deserve respect in death.

 Steely_D wrote:

 kurtster wrote:

Respectfully, Rush didn't deserve respect.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
Sorry, not.

It was just an example of the many types of reactions in here.

The dead do not always get respected in here was my point.