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The thing that strikes me about this is that it's written by a former president. It's hard for us to compare the present behavior of the US government to past
by pg 13y ago
The thing that strikes me about this is that it's written by a former president. It's hard for us to compare the present behavior of the US government to past behavior, because we don't know how many bad things the government did secretly in the past. But Carter, as a former president, does know. So if he says we're behaving worse than we used to, we are.
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoNot to mention the fact that they're both from the same political party, so Carter does not have a partisan interest in portraying the current administration as worse.
- sliverstorm 13y agoBut, maybe it's just part of the ol' "Create a problem, then offer to solve it" con. I mean, Carter only had one term, so this could be part of his re-election bid... ;)
- pekk 13y agoI like Carter, but he is a politician. You don't get elected to the Presidency for being a plain old dude uninterested in politics. Any time you think a politician is not being political, you should reflect on whether you've been had. The problematic assumption is that his 'partisan interest' would be to favor (D) over (R). That's not the only possibility. I think that Carter's interests are more in steering (D) and other issues like Israel and Palestine. And perhaps, a little, in glorifying himself - the possibility should not be excluded.
- hedonist 13y agoIt also happens to be a president who spearheaded that great adventure in nation-building which continues to serve as a catalyst for a broad swath of the epic plauge human rights abuses we're presently, and systematicaly, engaged in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Afghanistan#Covert_action including, in particular, the drone and other airstrikes he's referring to, and the continuing use of Guantanamo.
- enraged_camel 13y agoWhich makes him even more of an authority on American human rights abuses!
- tptacek 13y agoLook at the history of the 20th century to see how that logic might be fallacious: Teapot dome, Japanese internment camps, the deliberate nuclear bombing of civilian centers in Japan and the fire-bombing of Dresden, the corporatist colonization of Latin America, the Red Scare, blacklists, and House Un-American Activities committee, the attempted invasion of Cuba, the massed invasion of Vietnam under false pretenses, the covert bombings of Cambodia and Laos, the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile that ushered in the rule of Pinochet... Then, a historical blip: the 4-year single-term presidency of Jimmy Carter, widely derided as one of the least effective administrations in the 20th century... ... and, bang: covert deals with Iran for hostages, the support of the contras in Nicaragua, the support of right-wing death squads in San Salvador, the bombings in Beirut, and on & on & 9/11 & on until today and the Obama administration. It's possible that things are worse today than they were in 1978, but it's also likely that 1978 isn't a particularly useful date to compare 2013 to.
- dfc 13y agoI thought Dresden was the brainchild of Bomber Harris.
- mechanical_fish 13y agoI believe this is true, but Wikipedia reports that half the force that bombed Dresden was USAAF. I'm sure their commanders didn't shirk the responsibility. Anyway, if you don't find the USA's involvement in Dresden horrifying enough, we can always bring up, say, the Tokyo firebombing – a 100% all-American operation that killed 100,000 on March 10, 1945 alone. World War II was horrible on a scale that defies description today. There is plenty of horror to go around, from every theatre of war.
- dfc 13y agoI think you meant less than half? War is horrible. There is plenty of horror to go around, from every war. But I do not think that an abundance of horror means that we should do away with the desire for accuracy.