The Corner on National Review Online
Jonathan Demme, who won an Oscar for bringing Hannibal Lecter to life, now turns his hagiographic documentary camera on James Earl Carter, who would happily eat Israel’s liver with fava beans and a nice chianti:
The Hollywood Howler Machine goes to work to save the image of the man who is either the worst, or the second worst (the jury is still out) American President of the past fifty years.
One of my intermittent daydreams is that some conservative or libertarian multibillionaire would sink two or three billion into starting a Hollywood studio that put out films with a conservative or libertarian point of view. Think of all the money he could save in production costs by using unknown but talented actors, non-left-wing directors who weren’t prima donnas, and by relying on solid, well-written scripts and all the advantages of modern technology to put out films that the rest of us might want to watch.
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On second thought, make that “…starting a studio anywhere but Hollywood…”
And then go and make Bill Whittle’s movie, too.
Fifty years? How about ever?
How about ever?
Well, the competition gets a bit stiffer, then.
Sure, Carter’s spinelessness in the face of the Iranian invasion of our embassy probably jump-started global Islamist terrorism, but it was already around in the form of the Palestinian gangs.
But one could make a case that Wilson’s bungles were directly responsible for the rise of the Nazis in Germany.
And GHWB’s failure to “Go to Baghdad” probably provided a huge impetus to today’s current crop of Islamist lunatics, although I think Carter overall was a much worse president.
Of course, LBJ’s decision to politicize the Vietnam war on very granular domestic considerations, coupled with his use of the draft to do so, by activating the Boomers as an anti-war political force may have done the most damage of all in that arena. We are still paying the price for that one, and will be until the last of my generation is rotting in the ground.
There are several possible candidates in the 19th century as well.
And, of course, GWB is making a frantic stretch run to overhaul Carter for the modern title.
Lincoln destroyed federalism.
The Roosevelt cousins institutionalized big nanny government and socialism.
Those are my 3 worst. Carter is just a piker.
And Nixon is the worst of the modern Presidents for his absolutely stupid economics.
Absolutely not. Economic policies are, by their very nature as policies, malleable and correctable. Ideologies - which is what FDR changed - are not so much. FDR instituted socialism as the official US governing ideology, and that dictates a host of policies. On the other hand, picture, say, GWB as president during WW II, for an appreciation of FDR’s strengths.
Presidents who create or encourage existential enemies of the country are the worst leaders, from my pov, and Carter and Bush have both done that through their fecklessness.
Disagree. Bretton Woods and wage & price controls. Nixon caused the inflation of 1976-1988. That was not a short-term effect. Now the Fed is ensconced as the supreme economic arbiter and I say that is a HUGE warp of our government. We still haven’t seen all the bad effects from that.
Yes, it was. 12 years - and I’d argue that the inflationary period ended prior to 1988 - is not a long time, in terms of economic cycles.
Nor did Nixon create the Fed, or “ensconce” it. Nor is the Fed the “supreme economic arbiter.”
I don’t have a lot of use for either Nixon or the Fed worshippers, but I don’t elevate them to the level of supreme devils. I leave that sort of thinking to the left - vis Nixon - and the paleocons, vis the Fed.
As for wage and price controls, they were such a failure one can convincingly argue that Nixon actually did the nation a failure by imposing them. They only lasted a very short time, and nobody, faced with that horrible example, has seriously considered trying them since.
And for this reason, Nixon deserves some credit.
Somebody will, at some point, but probably not in our lifetimes. No one ever learns.
Bretton Woods was just an American version of the early-20th-century English con. Nothing new, nothing imaginative, just another con. Doesn’t make it constitutional, of course.
As for the Fed, it’s pretty close to the devil in my book. I’m not a paleocon, but I am a strict constructionalist and a goldbug. (Well, actually I’m not a strict constructionalist. More of an anarchist. But I’m realistic about it and realize that most people want Nanny Gummint. A strict interpretation of the US Constitution is a reasonable compromise.)
Fine, Steve, but my first point was that Nixon did not create the Fed - Democrats did that.
I also don’t think the Fed does whatever damage it does in a vacuum.