I Put My Carter Hating RePuke Boss In His Place: So much fun!

[ReformedChris]

First off, My boss (who like me is in his Mid-20's)and I have very open political discussions, so I fear no retaliation whatsoever for standing my ground and letting him know my political views. He is however a very aggressive Fundie RePuke that carries Hanni-Limb-Savage water on a daily basis (Endless RW Talk Radio Talking Points). It was very fun to have him discover that Carter was far stronger and a better president than he could have imagined.

We were having a discussion about worst presidents ever and I let him know Dubya will probably go down as the worst president in history. He took the typical RePuke position and put Carter at the top of the crap list. He was bashing Carter up and down, every issue from the economy, to the military, and Iran Hostage. I just told him the truth and let him know about some "hidden" facts regarding the greatness of James Earl Carter.

1) Military: Carter did absolutely NO damage to the military. His plan for a smaller nuclear force and responsible conventional forces spending was the right thing to do. It would have kept the Soviet threat nuetralized and would not have led to the fiscal disaster of the Reagan 80's wasted arms buildup. My boss took the "Oh He cancelled the B-1 Bomber and made us weaker against the Soviets" angle. Again, I had to smack him down with the truth. Carter cancelled the B-1 program because it was a bumper technology to the next generation. Carter APPROVED the secret ATB Bomber Program in 1978. The ATB eventually became the B-2 Stealth Bomber, America's finest strategic air asset. Reagan abused this issue in the election and Carter COULD have brought the ATB to light for political expediancy, but he chose to keep it quiet! Carter was a patriot and rightly kept this nations secret. I asked my boss, "is that the act of a terrorist sympathizer or a america hater?" Again, just a simply "Oh" in response.

2) Panama Canal Treaty: I simply told him how he would like it if another country owned the most important/profitable piece of real estate in your native country. Jaw dropped, I told him how he would like it if Mexico owned the Mississippi River or Canada controlled the Interstate Highway System. The native population (us) would not like that at all! He was quiet after that.

3) Iran Hostage Crisis: He hammered away on this issue. I asked him flat out "Do you believe military men should plan and execute missions without political interferece?" He said "Absolutely". I let him know to look up Operation Eagle Claw and see how the failure to rescue the hostages rested with the Military and bad weather! The Military planned that disaster (Col. Beckwith I think was his name)and Carter tried his best, but it just did not pan out. I also let him know that Bush lets HIS commanders make the decisions on the ground and that is ok with you, but Carter doing the same thing is ignorance? Simple Silence

4) Economy: I just left it as Free Markets and inheriting the Nixon/Vietnam disaster economy. I was too tired to debate anymore.

It was very fun to put this RePuke in his place. I wish more people would stick up for Carter and not let conservatives take advantage of this hole in history. Carter had his faults, but he did the best possible job he could have. He is an honest American and one President that we can always look up to with pride (Unlike Dubya, who is a skidmark on this nations history!).

[izquierdista]

1. #2

That's not just a hypothetical, plenty of American real estate is being sold off to foreigners as the US goes into hock and foreigners run up a trade surplus.

[maxsolomon]

but... he's History's Greatest Monster!

don't forget the October Surprise.

[Fovea]

2. Very well done.

And if we had listened to Carter on Energy, it would be a different world, both domestically and geopolitically.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

3. but,but,but, I thought everything was Clintons fault?

Now they are going back to Carter?

[Fovea]

6. By October

they will have worked their way back to Wilson.

[Lasher]

4. Good for you but be careful.

You might be giving your boss too much credit when you assume he will not turn against you. I don't know him but I'm assuming he is human. Just sayin'.

Edit: OK I can't help but pitch in.

Here is a spreadsheet I've been updating occasionally:



Based on the closing price on the last trading day of each calendar year, it lists S&P 500 index performance. Saint Ronnie blamed nearly everyting on Carter, almost to the end of his 8 years in office. Republicans have continued to follow this practice, villifying Carter to this very day as you are aware. But check it out, the average annualized gain under Carter was 7.07%. During Junior's first 7 years it has been only 2.73%!

And this doesn't even take into account this year's disaster in the market so far. After the last trading day this month I'll take that closing price and extrapolate to the end of this year, to project how Dubya's total stock market result will look at the end of his presidency if we keep going like we have been.

[Fovea]

10. I had a boss fire me after I refused to attend

promise keepers with the rest of the guys. I told him I was Wiccan.

That, and I told him the design his previous employee excreted for them would not work.

I noted with extreme schadenfreude that their software was still not out the door four years years later, and I was working for the vendor whose programming tools they were using.

[Occulus]

15. You should try to work in an Easter Egg

just for them.

:D

[Fovea]

18. One job many years ago

I quit, and in my exit interview I asked the HR person if I could use their phone line for a minute.

Using their end user software, I crashed the app, was sitting at a dos prompt in the main server directory.

I typed del *.* and asked them if I should hit enter, or if they now understood why I would not be responsible for their app being secure.

It was not long after that I started doing consultant work for them.

[Occulus]

22. Oh my- what was their reaction to *that* power play?

Talk about righteous revenge. I bet you very thoroughly enjoyed it too :D

Did they then play nicey-nice when you became a consultant?

[Fovea]

25. The I.T. head was subsquently fired

and replaced by a consultant from Cap Gemini.

Who did a surprisingly good job.
He was concerned about retaining institutional knowledge and was pretty nice to work with.

[ismnotwasm]

21. Ewww

Sorry, but the promise keepers gross me out no end.
Nothing like a little schadenfreude after being subjected to that!

Did you really mean "excreted"? LOL

[Fovea]

26. As in Dilbert.

"having the house programmers excrete steaming piles of worthless code."

[Xenotime]

5. Good job. If only we could do that with the rest of those assholes.

[Gabi Hayes]

7. show him this, then ask him what he thinks of it. don't tell him its provenance:

The first principle is that we can have an effective and comprehensive energy policy only if the government takes responsibility for it and if the people understand the seriousness of the challenge and are willing to make sacrifices.

The second principle is that healthy economic growth must continue. Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living and keep our people at work. An effective conservation program will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

The third principle is that we must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems -- wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both at once.

The fourth principle is that we must reduce our vulnerability to potentially devastating embargoes. We can protect ourselves from uncertain supplies by reducing our demand for oil, making the most of our abundant resources such as coal, and developing a strategic petroleum reserve.

The fifth principle is that we must be fair. Our solutions must ask equal sacrifices from every region, every class of people, every interest group. Industry will have to do its part to conserve, just as the consumers will. The energy producers deserve fair treatment, but we will not let the oil companies profiteer.

The sixth principle, and the cornerstone of our policy, is to reduce the demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy. Conservation is the only way we can buy a barrel of oil for a few dollars. It costs about $13 to waste it.

The seventh principle is that prices should generally reflect the true replacement costs of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford.

The eighth principle is that government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can count on so they can plan ahead. This is one reason I am working with the Congress to create a new Department of Energy, to replace more than 50 different agencies that now have some control over energy.

The ninth principle is that we must conserve the fuels that are scarcest and make the most of those that are more plentiful. We can't continue to use oil and gas for 75 percent of our consumption when they make up seven percent of our domestic reserves. We need to shift to plentiful coal while taking care to protect the environment, and to apply stricter safety standards to nuclear energy.

The tenth principle is that we must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_energy.html

the rest is there. better yet, ask him what he thinks of Bush's, or Reagan's energy speech, and isn't it a shame that Clinton sabotaged it?

then you can tell him that the dems started to implement much of it, but Reagan ABANDONED all of it

have fun

[Clark2008]

8. You should also have mentioned that Carter told us 30 years

ago that we needed to reduce oil consumption, improve our transporation technology and find alternatives to the oil-based combustion engine.

Then we wouldn't be relying on all this foreign oil in 2008.

:hi:

[Gabi Hayes]

14. ahemmm

look ^

[ismnotwasm]

9. Good for you

My personal objections to Carter had nothing to do with what the media spoon feeds us. He was NOT a so-called "Dove". I do believe he did what he truly thought were the best possible actions with what was going on at the time. In other words he did care about the country.

The paranoid in me wants to blame Reagan for things like extending the hostage crisis. In fact, I don't think it's particularly paranoid. Now there was a evil motherfucker.

It's fun to have a repuke to argue with. So many of them listen to oft repeated bullshit on the radio, and don't bother to look up a single fact.

[Iris]

11. Nice work. They really don't have much after the Limbaugh talking points are exhausted, do they?

[Larkspur]

12. Good job!! On free markets

Thom Hartman has it right -- there is no such thing as "free market". Markets are created by government. That's the line Hartmann uses with Liebertarians and "free market" evangelists.

I'm a basketball fan and use basketball in my disccussion of "free market". Lots of people like basketball, but its regulated basketball that makes the big $$. The NCAA for colleges governs the regulations for basketball at the college level. Not sure what is the high school and elementary school regulatory bodies. But I stick with the NCAA. I use the basketball court in my discussion of "free market" versus "regulated market". The NCAA sets the standards for the size of the basketball court that is to be used in games for teams who are members of the NCAA. Each school has to meet those standards or they are penalized. The NCAA also sets the rules of school, coaches, and player conduct and ascribes appropriate punishment for transgressions. Within those rules, coaches and players can freely create strategies and plays to win the game and entertain the audience. That's what "regulated market" is.

A "free market" is one where the largest schools set the standards and rules, rules that favor them over their opponents, especially smaller schools. The standards and rules are constantly modified by large schools so that smaller schools can not defeat them or decrease the chances of defeating larger schools but the large schools promote a propaganda campaign to delude the smaller schools and indpendent basketball fans think that small schools have a shot at defeating them.

Now some will say that the NCAA is more like my "free market" model. That may be true in some instances but I still think the NCAA rules apply equally to every member.

If my basketball scenario is not useful, then in a brief sense, "free market" = Corporate Feudalism. Global corporate feudalism is economic model that multi-national corporations want to promote.

[JHB]

20. Goverments have "interfered" in free markets...

...since the first ancient kings established standards of weights and measures.

It "interferes with the market" by creating penalties for theft and fraud.

It "interferes with the market" by licensing limited-liability corporations.

"Interference with the market" (read "regulation of economic matters") is one of the oldest established and recognized functions of government. A generation of propaganda doesn't change that reality.

[WA98070]

13. I can hear your boss now, "Yeah but, if Carter had Nuked Iran we wouldn't be in Iraq today."

[AwakeAtLast]

16. Glad to be #5!

:kick:

Any time you can educate, it's a good thing!

:hi:

[yardwork]

17. Iran hostage crisis - all hostages released unharmed.

War in Iraq and Afghanistan - what is today's total of dead Americans? Dead Iraqis? And where is Osama bin Laden?

[JHB]

19. Another point: Reagan rode in on a wave of Soviet scare-stories...

...Lots of scary stories about Soviet miliatry capabilities, poorly verifiable at the time (Cold War secrecy and such), all or nearly all proven wrong or wildly exaggerated after the Soviet collapse.

And who promulgated this "hard analysis" of Soviet capabilities: Hint: run down W's top dozen advisors, and at least 10 will be on that list.

Back then they were "Liberal Hawks". Since the 80's, they've been "the neocons".

[Felix Mala]

23. A Few Thoughts

People mistakenly believe that Reagan's inauguration had something to do with the release of the hostages (Iran feared him...)when it was Carter's people who got them released.

I think I read somewhere, once, that Ollie North was involved with operation Eagle Claw and might have even "sacrificed" a few good men to assure Reagan's election.

I also recall reading a declassified CIA memo during the Carter era stating that the Soviet system was getting harder and harder to prop up and that Russia was going to fall to pieces. I think a good argument can be made that Reagan's "get tough" policies delayed this.

For some reason, lots of people think the Arab Oil Embargo occurred under Carter. It happened under Nixon in 1973. That's when prices went through the ceiling.

Similarly, many people think the fall of Saigon was a Carter disaster, but it happened when Ford was president.

Carter also gets blamed for the EPA (Nixon), limiting FBI and CIA power as recommended by the Church Committee (Ford) and for getting Homer Simpson hired at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant! D'oh! I think he was responsible for that! ("Thank you President Carter!" - Monty Burns)

[leftofthedial]

24. "conservatives" are wrong about EVERYTHING

it's really quite ammazing.

[ileus]

27. Uh...Yeahhhhhhhhh, we're going to need U to work the weekend.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

28. About the hostage crisis: I heard Carter speak in the early 1990s, and

someone asked him why he hadn't "done more" about the hostages.

His answer was that his advisors on Iranian culture had warned him that the macho "honor" ethos over there requires a person to defy a direct public threat from an adversary or else lose face. So if Carter had said publicly, "Release the hostages or we'll bomb Tehran," the Iranians would have felt that they had no choice but to kill the hostages.

The culturally appropriate way to deal with an Iranian adversary is to negotiate privately on the side through intermediaries. That's what Carter was doing the whole time. (You'll recall that the hostages were finally handed over to the Algerians to be released.) He sent word through back channels, the diplomatic missions of seven foreign countries, that he would order the bombing of Tehran if any of the hostages were harmed. He said it was extremely frustrating to know that the media pundits and much of the public were blaming him for "not doing anything," but he felt that publicizing what he was doing would endanger the hostages.

He noted that all the hostages came home alive.

Carter didn't mention this, but I recalled that one hostage was released early because he started developing strange neurological symptoms. (He turned out to have multiple sclerosis.) I bet the Iranians looked at his symptoms and thought, "What if he has a brain tumor and dies on us?"

[malaise]

29. Send him this - The "Crisis of Confidence" Speech

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html

[LSK]

30. did you ask him why the hostages were released on Reagan's Inauguration Day?

Coincidence?

[cascadiance]

31. And had Reagan left the solar panels on the white house that Carter put up...

... and followed through on Carter's plan THEN to get us off of fossil fuels and onto alternative energy, this world now might not be facing the same global warming disaster it is now!