Gee, where have I heard those words before?
It’s more than a passing resemblance.
via Steven Hayward.
(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)
So argues Thomas Ricks, a lifelong Massachusetts Democrat, in a short article at Foreign Policy:
“As I studied the Vietnam war over the last 14 months, I began to think that John F. Kennedy probably was the worst American president of the previous century.
In retrospect, he spent his 35 months in the White House stumbling from crisis to fiasco. He came into office and okayed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Then he went to a Vienna summit conference and got his clock cleaned by Khrushchev. That led to, among other things, the Cuban missile crisis and a whiff of nuclear apocalypse.
Looming over it all is the American descent into Vietnam. The assassination of Vietnam’s President Diem on Kennedy’s watch may have been one of the two biggest mistakes of the war there. (The other was the decision to wage a war of attrition on the unexamined assumption that Hanoi would buckle under the pain.) I don’t buy the theory promulgated by Robert McNamara and others that Kennedy would have kept U.S. troops out. Sure, Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam — just like Lyndon Johnson wanted out a few years later: “We’ll scale down our presence after victory is secure.” And much more than Johnson, Kennedy was influenced by General Maxwell Taylor, who I suspect had been looking for a “small war” mission for the Army for several years. Indochina looked like a peachy place for that — warmer than Korea, and farther from Russia.”
It’s an interesting argument. Clearly Kennedy has been overrated to the point of canonization by Democrats who see a Golden Age in his administration that was lost to assassination. Along with the foreign policy problems Ricks mentions, many of Kennedy’s major domestic initiatives were stalled in Congress, only to be pushed through because of LBJ’s skillful politics in the wake of Kennedy’s murder.
On the other hand, JFK’s reputation has had a bit of a revival on the Right, at least by comparison with those Democrats who came after him: he did set us on the course to the Moon; he was a Cold Warrior vis-a-vis the Soviet Union (albeit an inept one); and he pushed through major tax cuts that lead to the early 60s boom.
But the worst of the 20th century? It think Ricks is using a bit of hyperbole to to force a reconsideration of Kennedy, for I can posit a few candidates for “worst:”
So, while Ricks has a point about Kennedy’s weaknesses, there are others arguably as bad or worse. If forced to make a choice, for now I’d choose LBJ; Carter was weaker, but Johnson’s entitlement binge is doing us much greater long-term damage. And while FDR expanded the government and mishandled the Depression badly, he at least won his war.
Whom would you choose?
LINK: Doug Mataconis votes for Woodrow Wilson.
via Big Peace
(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor when Carter was president, thinks the US should shoot down Israeli warplanes if they cross Iraqi airspace to attack Iran.
Now, I’d like to think even Team Obama would laugh Zbig and his lunatic ideas out the door, but, given their bizarre foreign policy that seems to consist of pimp-slapping our allies and appeasing our enemies, I’m not so sure.
At the very least, they’re all too likely to give this failed incompetent elder statesman a serious hearing.
LINKS: Gateway Pundit.
UPDATE: At Conservatives for Palin, Doug Brady looks at Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter, the mystery of the pro-Democrat Jewish vote, and Sarah Palin’s position on Iran and Israel.
Hans von Spakovsky wonders if Jimmy Carter’s disgusting accusation that most of those opposed to Obama’s policies are motivated by racism isn’t due to guilt over his own racist past:
As Laughlin McDonald, director of the ACLU’s Voting Project, relates in his book A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia, Carter’s [school] board tried to stop the construction of a new “Elementary Negro School” in 1956. Local white citizens had complained that the school would be “too close” to a white school. As a result, “the children, both colored and white, would have to travel the same streets and roads in order to reach their respective schools.” The prospect of black and white children commingling on the streets on their way to school was apparently so horrible to Carter that he requested that the state school board stop construction of the black school until a new site could be found. The state board turned down Carter’s request because of “the staggering cost.” Carter and the rest of the Sumter County School Board then reassured parents at a meeting on October 5, 1956, that the board “would do everything in its power to minimize simultaneous traffic between white and colored students in route to and from school.”
So, is America’s worst ex-president seeing racists everywhere out of guilt for his own defense of segregationism? Maybe. Regardless, it’s a disgusting insult to people legitimately concerned with the country’s direction and opposed to Obama’s policies. It cheapens the very real suffering of Blacks under slavery and Jim Crow by equating that with mere political opposition. And it’s a pea in the same rotten pod with his antisemitism.
Jimmy Carter truly is an embarrassment to his country and a disgrace to the office he once held.