St. Ronnie's Boondoggle Lives!

Wow. That's some serious revisionist history right there. The Shah -- the very ideal of a corrupt autocracy that had rotted from within-- got overthrown by an authentic popular revolution about which the United States could do nothing. The Embassy wasn't seized until AFTER Carter, against his better judgment and at the urging of Henry Kissinger, allowed the Shah into this country for medical treatment. At which point, the Iranian revolution turned on us. Carter immediately froze their assets and waited. The one genuinely stupid thing he did -- the attempted rescue mission -- was a result of his taking bad advice. (Cyrus Vance saw it coming and quit in protest). Whether or not you believe that they monkeyed around with the Iranians during the 1980 campaign -- and I do, to a limited extent -- the Reagan people immediately capitulated, unfreezing the assets and, ultimately, arming the mullahs, who waited until the moment that Carter was out of office before releasing the hostages. All of this is in the historical record.
We'll get to the causes of the 1982 recession some other time, although it takes some real economic gymnastics to prove that a ballooning deficit had less to do with a 1982 recession than a president whose last budget was signed two years earlier.

 

And he raised his arms to Heaven, bellowed, "Begone, Communism!" and it was so!

 

Fenian - simple straightforward question. Are you saying Jimmy Carter was a better steward of the economy than Ronald Reagan? Simple question - no need to quote some ancient Greek or make some obscure literary reference to answer it.

 

Oh, but Reagan went on TV and said he "assumed full responsibility" for the deaths of the Marines.

Then he went back to sleep, seeing as it was after 7 p.m., his bedtime.

 

In the final year of the Carter Presidency there were 2,392 military deaths. No year during the Reagan administration topped that figure including the year the Marines were killed in Lebanon.

Much of the deaths during the Carter administration were due to neglect. Reagan ran up big deficits retooling the military and with that money came a reduction in accidental and training related deaths.

IN NO YEAR UNDER BUSH WERE THERE MORE MILITARY DEATHS THAN THE FINAL YEAR OF THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION. Wrap your mind around that for a minute. Wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and yet members of the military are safer today than they were under James Earl Carter.

 

The junior communicator with another non sequitur.

Source, please.

Point, please.

 

I think the point is that it's safer to be a soldier under Bush 43 than it was under Jimmy Carter. But I could be wrong...

 

Without seeing your source for this information, as a veteran I can tell you that a big part of the problem with the military in the 70s and early 80s had to do with sub-standard safety policies and massive drug use in the wake of the Vietnam War. And I don't need a source on that one...I talked with active military men who were still in uniform and served at that time.

Once drug testing and a major stepup in safety was put into place, the numbers started to decline.

 

Good call.

 

Rather than pin the blame on preceding presidents, the junior communicator wants to blame this on the one US president to graduate the Naval Academy. The state of our armed forces in the late 70s was an inheritance from Mr. Nixon (and before that, Mr. Johnson) and our corrosive policies in Vietnam.

So was that crappy economy.

Google "Whip Inflation Now" for more.

The world as you see it didn't begin the day we inaugurated Carter.

 

By your logic the economy should have not improved under Reagan nor should the conditions in the military have improved because that's the way they had been for years.

The world didn't begin the day Carter took office but it got a hell of a lot better the day he left it.

I notice that not even on this ultra-liberal board does anyone want to praise Carter for his handling of the economy.

 

Yes.
The economy was pretty bad in both eras. Carter's problem was an oil shock and leftover economic neglect from the last two years of Nixon, when the old guy was consumed by Watergate and didn't do his job, and Ford, under whom inflation began to rise for reasons he couldn;t do very much about, truthfully.
Reagan's policy deliberately ran up the debt, for reasons the Reagan people were not shy about projecting ("Starving the beast") at the expense of wildly out-of-control military spending. Poverty went up. A recession came down. So, in a battle of neither one being, say, Bill Clinton, I'd say Reagan was worse.
Thuycidides is really good. You should check him out sometime.