Tag Archive for: Jimmy Carter

One of America’s Worst Presidents, Jimmy Carter, Dies at 100

Jimmy Carter was such a disaster for America and the free world, the only good thing that came out of his catastrophic presidency was the Reagan landslide.

WATCH: Anti-Semite Jimmy Carter accuse Israel of being an ‘apartheid state.’

WATCH: Jimmy Carter deliberately flew to Syria to meet with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal

Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former President

By Philip Klein, National Review, December 29, 2024:

A popular narrative surrounding the legacy of Jimmy Carter is that as president he was a victim of unlucky timing that impeded him politically but that he excelled during his long post-presidential career. The reality is that he was a terrible president but an even worse former president.

Carter’s true legacy is one of economic misery at home and embarrassment on the world stage. He left the country in its weakest position of the post–World War II era. After being booted out of office in landslide fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him.

A former governor of Georgia who had little charisma and national name recognition when he began campaigning for president, Carter ended up in the White House as a fluke. He presented an image as an honest, moderate, and humble southern Evangelical Christian outsider — an antidote to the corruption of the Watergate era. He also benefited from the vulnerabilities of the sitting president, Gerald Ford.

Once in office as an unlikely president, Carter spent his one and only term showing the American people, and the rest of the world, that he was not up to the job.

When he took the presidential oath in January 1977, the unemployment rate was a high 7.5 percent; when he left office in January 1981, it was just as high. Meanwhile, inflation, which was already elevated at 5.7 percent in 1976, the year he was elected, went up in each of his years in office — and reached a staggering 13.5 percent in 1980, the year he was booted out. The only year in the post–World War II period in which inflation was higher was 1947, when the economy was booming and unemployment was minuscule. Put another way, to maintain the buying power that $100 had on the month Carter was sworn into office, you’d need $150 by the time he left the White House just four years later. Under Carter, gas prices doubled, and the supply became so scarce that Americans had to endure long lines at stations to fill up their tanks.

On the international stage, Carter showed weakness, and America’s enemies took notice. Rather than recognize the true nature of the Soviet threat, he preached the defeatist ideology of “peaceful coexistence,” and the USSR steamrolled into Afghanistan. Also under his watch, radical Islamic revolutionaries took over Iran, holding Americans hostage for the last 444 days of his presidency.

It is telling that the defining speech of his presidency was known as the “malaise speech,” in which he spoke not as a leader but as an essayist writing on the “crisis of confidence” in America. He observed: “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.” As he built a legacy of scarcity, he criticized Americans for wanting plenty, lamenting that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

It should be no surprise that Ronald Reagan’s message of strength and optimism turned 1980 into a complete rout. Carter not only lost 489 electoral votes to 49, but he got trounced by ten points in the popular vote — even though an independent candidate, John Anderson, drew 7 percent.

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RELATED ARTICLES:

Jimmy Carter Brought Malaise to America [And We Ran Out of Gas]

How Jimmy Carter Misread UN Resolution 242, to Israel’s Detriment

Jimmy Carter’s Obsession with Israel

Jimmy Carter’s Friendly Visits with Assad and Hamas

Years marked by crisis — from gas shortages to Iran

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

One Less Communist On The Taxpayer Funded Presidential Retirement Plan

Jimmy Carter made Joe Biden promise to accept the challenge and destroy the future U.S. economy when he was installed as President to thus open the door to a U.S. Socialist ran tyrannical regime much like Venezuela’s. My opinion.

Joe Biden and his woke Communist, lazy, zero work ethic minions almost achieved this goal for Carter and now we must suffer the ridiculous praises from world leaders of how “great” this useless idiot Carter was as President of the United States.

Lucky for us Carter was soundly defeated by former Democrat turned Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 who in 1986 dismantled all of the Communist Chinese made tax payer funded solar panels installed by Carter on the roof of the White House.

Lucky for us also that Dominion voting machines did not exist back in 1980. These fraudulent machines also used by the communist government of Venezuela entered the scene in 2002.

If they did exist back in the day when men and women did know which bathroom to use, Carter may have got a second chance in the White House. My opinion.

Jimmy Carters weakness and zero leadership skills gave the former Soviet Union the opportunity to invade Afghanistan in December 1979, it enabled a massive gasoline shortage in the country and the take over of the US Embassy in Tehran Iran with Iranian students holding 50 Americans hostage for 444 days.

Joe Biden though has overseen the collapse of eleven U.S. embassies on his watch, the worst inflation in 50 years and the Russian Federation invading the Ukraine.

Our new Secretary of State the highly respected and highly educated honorable Marco Rubio will do an excellent job fixing all these problems at the State Department created by Biden.

So Biden has taken the helm from Carter as the worst president in US history with his massive global instability although some historians still give President James Buchanan that credit.

I personally think both former Bush administration’s worked closely with the Obama Administration and Biden to ensure a globalist New World Order which failed when Trump entered the scene.

So we can’t blame Carter alone as the worst president in U.S. history it took a team effort.

So I will state what real Americans really want to say about the passing of Jimmy Carter, who stated to his family on August 24th 2024 he was hanging on to vote for Marxist Kamala Harris. (How did that work out for you?)

I say good riddance to this Marxist useless idiot who tried to do what Biden / Obama almost accomplished. Destroy our economy and dismantle our republic.

The United States is better off now with one less Marxist sucking a presidential tax payer funded retirement paycheck off the backs of hardworking Americans.

I’m sure he died happily knowing his presidential library of far left Marxist propaganda that cost $26 million to build is still open to the public in Atlanta but you must pay $12 to get in.

He should have reused the solar panels Reagan took off the White House roof in 1986 to run the library A/C. I believe one of these solar panels is in a science museum in Communist China so maybe that’s why they are not in Comrade Carter’s library.

So this brings to my attention the Democrats love for Communism and Socialism. While Trump wants to help deliver freedom to Canada as the 51st state the Democrats embrace Communist China as a future partner in political ideology.

Remember also that Trump worked for free. Adios Carter, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

©2024 . All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLES:

One of America’s Worst Presidents, Jimmy Carter, Dies at 100

Jimmy Carter Brought Malaise to America [And We Ran Out of Gas]

How Jimmy Carter Misread UN Resolution 242, to Israel’s Detriment

Jimmy Carter’s Obsession with Israel

RELATED VIDEOS:

WATCH: Anti-Semite Jimmy Carter accuse Israel of being an ‘apartheid state.’

WATCH: Jimmy Carter deliberately flew to Syria to meet with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal

Jimmy Carter’s Animus Toward Israel

Jimmy Carter’s grandson, Jason Carter, said this Monday about his grandfather: “This is a good man who has done remarkable things with his life and has taken the opportunities that he was given and used them to do good.” Back in 2016, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach pointed out several reasons to disagree with this assessment, including Carter’s fondness for the Palestinians, as well as his animus toward Israel and its American abettors:

In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Carter again laid responsibility for U.S. bias against the [supposedly] destitute, depressed and (consequently) violent Palestinians on American policy makers’ helplessness, over the last 30 years, against the menacing tactics of the powerful American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC).

AIPAC, that all-powerful Jewish lobby, as Carter clearly sees it, is a danger, with those “menacing tactics,” whom no one can apparently stand up against. In truth, AIPAC has no “menacing tactics,” but is largely informational: it disseminates information about Israel, and sometimes sponsors trips to that country; it urges its members to support candidates who share AIPAC’s concerns but does not contribute to any political campaigns itself. It is far outspent, in Washington, by the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs who do have small armies of well-paid lobbyists at their disposal, and are also well-versed in contributing to presidential centers and libraries.

However, it seems that AIPAC’s real fault was its failure to outdo the Saudi’s purchases of the former president’s loyalty. “There has not been any nation in the world that has been more cooperative than Saudi Arabia,” the New York Times quoted Mr. Carter June 1977, thus making the Saudis a major factor in U. S. foreign policy.

Carter apparently took no notice of the $100 billion the Saudis have spent around the world to promote Wahhabi (Salafist) Islam. And twenty-four years later, when 15 out of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis, Carter still continued both to praise the Saudis, and deplore the behavior of Israel.

Evidently, the millions in Arab petrodollars feeding Mr. Carter’s global endeavors, often in conflict with U.S. government policies, also ensure his loyalty.

It’s hard to know if Carter’s animus to Israel reflected all the money that Arab sources supplied to him, to his peanut farm, to his friend Bert Lance, and to his presidential center and library. Was there not a pre-existing antisemitism which then was reinforced by the receipt of all that Arab money? His dislike of Israel was difficult to conceal during the Camp David negotiations.

Many will remember Carter’s behavior during the Camp David negotiations with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. He hero-worshipped Sadat, who in his view, could do no wrong. For Begin, on the other hand, Carter exhibited a palpable want of sympathy, even a visceral physical dislike for the homely Israeli leader. He was cruelly impatient with the anxieties Begin expressed about threats to the Jewish state’s survival. While pressing Begin to make concession upon concession to Sadat, Carter erupted that he was “sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust.” Carter and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski exhibited a clear distaste for Begin, while setting up Sadat as a veritable Prince of Peace, even though it was Begin who was making “sacrifices for peace” by giving back the entire Sinai, while Sadat gave up nothing, and only had to graciously accept what Begin, under American duress, offered. The great sacrifices Begin made to obtain a peace treaty with Egypt were never acknowledged by Carter. When else in history has a nation victorious in war ever had to sue for peace, as Israel did with Egypt at Camp David? On what theory did Carter think an aggressor state deserved to have every last bit of territory from which it had launched such aggression? For Begin was pressured to give back the entire Sinai, from which Egypt had launched attacks on Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973.

Carter has said that Israel should give up all of the West Bank, which he calls “occupied territory.” He seems never to have read the Mandate for Palestine, for if he had done so, he would have discovered that Israel has a legal claim to all of the West Bank which was, according to the Mandate, part of the territories originally assigned to the future Jewish state. But had he done so, would it have mattered? He has for decades been set in his virulent anti-Israel ways, that appeals to history and international law are unlikely to cause him to rethink his deep dislike of the Jewish state.

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RELATED ARTICLES:

Jimmy Carter’s Misreading of UN Resolution 242, and Its Implications for Israel

Jimmy Carter’s Love for Dictators and Jihadis

Jimmy Carter’s Friendly Visits with Assad and Hamas

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski — A Man Without a Country

I wrote an article on Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski for The Intercollegiate Review in 1985. I bring this article to your attention only because it behooves us to gain an in-depth understanding of his potentially pernicious influence on American and Israeli foreign policy and decision-making. At stake is nothing less than the national security of both countries.

Before citing the most relevant passages of the aforesaid article, the reader should remember that Brzezinski, a Harvard alumni and political scientist, served as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser. One does not have to read Mr. Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid to know that Carter was an anti-Semite. Brzezinski has earned the same reputation.

In August 2007, Brzezinski endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, issuing this charming statement: “What makes Obama attractive to me is that he understands that we … have to relate to a variety of cultures and people.” Obama is an explicit moral and cultural relativist. His idol, Prof. Brzezinski, served as an advisor to Mr. Obama, who has said of Brzezinski that he is “one of our most outstanding thinkers.”

Outstanding or not, Brzezinski has voiced the anti-Semitic canard that the relationship between America and Israel is the result of Jewish pressure. He also signed a letter demanding an American dialogue with Hamas, whose charter openly calls for Israel’s destruction.

In a September 2009 interview with The Daily Beast, Brzezinski was asked how aggressive President Obama should be in insisting that Israel not conduct an air strike on Iran. Brzezinski replied: “We are not exactly impotent little babies. They [the Americans] have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?” This was interpreted by commentators as approving the downing of Israeli jets by the United States to prevent an attack on Iran. But there is more here than meets the eye.

Obama’s syrupy attitude toward Iran, a tyranny, is consistent with his Islamic sympathies. It also conforms to Brzezinski’s anti-ideological approach to foreign affairs. Long before he became Carter’s National Security Adviser, Brzezinski rejected what he termed the “black-and-white” image of the American and Soviet forms of government. “This image,” he scornfully declared, “is held by traditional anti-Communists.” Brzezinski deplored anti-Communism as “a relic of the Cold War, of the age of ideology.”

Brzezinski not only rejected the “black-and-white” image of the United States and the Soviet Union; he rejected the very notion of “good” and “bad” regimes! Brzezinski is simply a cultural and moral relativist, and the same relativism stamped Barack Obama’s mentality.

Relativism permeates academia and influences America’s anti-ideological approach to foreign affairs under Obama’s presidency. Hence, it rendered Obama all the more inclined to appease despotic and terrorist regimes and even to downplay the use of the term Islamic terrorism!

As a cultural relativist, Brzezinski denies the existence of objective norms by which to determine whether the ideas and values of one nation or group are intrinsically superior to those of another. This logically entails cultural egalitarianism, which has profound political consequences. His cultural relativism’s logical and psychological tendency makes Brzezinski “a man without a country” — which may also be said of Mr. Obama, who repeatedly apologized for America’s superiority in world affairs.

Too much is at stake for me to be less than brutally frank about Brzezinski. Steeped in cultural relativism while earning his livelihood in a pluralistic and egalitarian country like America, Brzezinski finds it convenient to use multiculturalism as his working principle on the one hand and equality as his primary value on the other. These are precisely the ingredients of his anti-ideological foreign policy, which dominates the American State Department! Casting logical consistency aside, Brzezinski, like Obama, has harbored a rather benign attitude toward the PLO, a consortium of terrorist organizations committed to Israel’s destruction.

Let us probe even deeper, for what I am saying about Brzezinski applies to countless American academics and policymakers tainted by cultural relativism. This doctrine has impacted the minds of several generations of students at all levels of American education.

Brzezinski views history through the lens of Marxism, which, despite its atheism, has much in common with Islam. Both Marxism and Islam reject the idea of the nation-state. In fact, neither Marxism nor Islam recognizes international borders, prompting both to be expansionist and militant creeds with global ambitions.

Brzezinski’s systematic deprecation of the nation-state appears in his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. He baldly declares that “With the splitting and eclipse of Christianity, man began to worship a new deity: the nation. The nation became a mystical object claiming man’s love and loyalty….The nation-state, along with the doctrine of national sovereignty, fragmented humanity. It could not provide a rational framework within which the relations between nations could [peacefully] develop.”

Brzezinski sees the nation-state as having only partly increased man’s social consciousness and only partially alleviated the human condition. “That is why Marxism,” he unabashedly contends, “represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision.”

He says Marxism “was the most powerful doctrine for generating a universal and secular human consciousness.” However, in the Soviet Union, Brzezinski regretfully said, Marxism became “wedded to Russian nationalism.” For Brzezinski, this was not entirely a tragedy.

Though he poses as a “humanist,” Brzezinski has the audacity to say that “although Stalinism may have been a needless tragedy, for both the Russian people and Communism as an ideal, there is the intellectually tantalizing possibility that for the world at large, it was … a blessing in disguise”! Brzezinski could as readily have said: “Yes, Muslims slaughtered more than 200 million people since Muhammad, but Islam brought hundreds of Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Buddhist communities under a single universal vision, that of the Quran”!

Brzezinski’s globalism infected Jimmy Carter. Under Brzezinski’s influence, Carter pursued an economic and syrupy “Third World” or “North-South” policy as opposed to a politically realistic “East-West” or U.S. anti-Soviet policy. Consistent therewith, Carter slashed U.S. defense spending—the same anti-ideological policy of Obama, who cozened up with Iran and Russia while curtailing American ballistic defense systems for Europe.

Let us conclude. Brzezinski’s cultural relativism opposes and undermines the American Declaration of Independence, which affirms the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” His anti-ideological foreign policy vis-à-vis Iran and Islam cannot but subvert the Judeo-Christian foundations of the American Republic and the magnificent idea of American Exceptionalism.

To put it bluntly, Brzezinski’s relativism is anti-American.

He and Obama are two peas in a pod!

©2024. Amil Imani. All rights reserved.

Five Presidents Who Need to Be Impeached Now

Now that Congressional Democrats have set the precedent that presidents who are no longer in office can be impeached, in flagrant disregard of the Constitutional provision that one of the consequences of impeachment and conviction is “removal from Office,” impeachment has become not only a weapon of partisan politics and naked vengeance, but a way to correct historical wrongs. What’s more, Trump is being tried for inciting a violent riot by telling demonstrators “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” If that will fly, the “high crimes” don’t have to be all that high in the coming trials of former presidents, but there are plenty to go around anyway. Here are the top five presidents who, for the sake of justice and the children, must be impeached now:

  1. Barack Obama

Yes, there was the tan suit, but that would only be impeachable if Trump wore one like it. In his predecessor’s case, the “high crimes” for which he ought to be impeached are the highest of all: treason. Obama paid $1.7 billion to a regime that requires its citizens to chant “Death to America.” That regime used the money to finance jihad terrorists who want to see America’s destruction and are actively working against American interests. Treason is defined as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Is there any reason in light of that, other than the Democrats’ hegemony in Washington, that Obama should not be charged with treason?

  1. Bill Clinton

Slick Willie can and should join Trump in the double impeachment jeopardy club for getting us into the current mess with China. After the People’s Republic stole many U.S. military secrets due to lax Clinton-era security controls, Clinton gave the Chinese even more, including advanced missile technology, allegedly in return for campaign contributions. The Washington Post noted in an editorial that “in the first three quarters of 1998 nine times as many [supercomputers] were exported [to China] as during the previous seven years.”

Yet this was three years after the Chinese spying operation had been discovered, and with no indication that China would not continue to be generally hostile to American interests. That’s a much “higher crime” than telling people to protest peacefully. It was Clinton who paved the way for Beijing Joe and his henchmen.

  1. Jimmy Carter

The senescent, sanctimonious Southerner deserves his impeachment trial for many reasons, but the Department of Education alone is enough. Along with the Department of Energy that Jimmeh also established, it was another manifestation of the assumption, by now taken for granted by nearly everyone, that if the nation faced a problem, the best way to solve it was to unleash a new army of federal bureaucrats.

Neither department has any significant accomplishments to justify their existence. The Department of Education has been a massive failure, and is ultimately responsible for the miseducation of our youth over the last forty years, such that leftist indoctrination substitutes for education nearly everywhere. The federal bureaucrats who oversee the Department of Education have created national standards and curricula that are frequently tendentious and politicized, with a pronounced leftist bias. In our own day, this has taken the form of an almost manic attention to race and diversity, at the expense of giving children a basic education.

  1. Richard Nixon

Yes, he’s dead, but what does that matter anymore? Yes, he forestalled his own impeachment by resigning, but that doesn’t matter anymore either, does it? Nixon is the most likely candidate to be America’s Pope Formosus, the ninth-century pontiff whose body was dug up by his vengeful successor so that he could be tried in what has come down to us with the honorable name of the Cadaver Synod. Today’s Congressional Democrats, who are more vengeful than any group in American history, can top that with their Cadaver Impeachment Trial of Richard Milhous Nixon.

  1. Joe Biden

It’s a bit novel and unorthodox, as Old Joe is still nominally in office, but unorthodoxy is the order of the day. Biden deserves to be impeached because for the Democrats, impeachment is now no more or less than a tactic to discredit and destroy their opponents, no matter what the facts of the case are. And it’s all happening while Old Joe, and/or his handlers, are in charge. That means that he bears the ultimate responsibility for this present travesty. For the high crime of allowing the Constitution and the republic to become a sick joke, House Republicans should stage a quick trial and do their own impeachment walk to the Senate to deliver the articles of impeachment. What’s that? They don’t have a majority? Who cares?

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Remembering the 1979 Russian Invasion of Afghanistan: How Democrats created radical Islamic terrorism

Don Hank in an email titled “This is how the terror started (in 1979)” provided this quote:

In his 1993 memoirs [“From the Shadows“], ex-Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Robert Gates revealed that direct CIA involvement in Afghanistan had commenced almost six months before the Soviet invasion. Jimmy Carter signed a presidential decree in July 1979 to covertly aid the Mujahideen insurgents.

Hank then wrote, “And then came Al-Qaeda and the 9-11 attack, and then ISIS and the invasion of Europe. It all seems to have started with the CIA. If you want a war on terror, you have to start with the people who spawned the terror. A true war on terror would include a war on the CIA. It starts with education.”

Hank provided a link to a Daryl Morini, paper dated January 3rd, 2010 titled “Why Did the Soviet Union Invade Afghanistan?.” Morini wrote:

The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was a costly and, ultimately, pointless war. Historical hindsight has made this evident. However, exactly why the Red Army wound up in direct military conflict, embroiled in a bitter and complicated civil war—some 3,000 kilometres away from Moscow—is a point of historiographical uncertainty. The evidence available suggests that geopolitical calculations were at the top of the Kremlin’s goals. These were arguably to deter US interference in the USSR’s ‘backyard’, to gain a highly strategic foothold in Southwest Asia and, not least of all, to attempt to contain the radical Islamic revolution emanating from Iran. The subsidiary goal of the invasion was to secure an ideologically-friendly régime in the region.

[ … ]

Following the 1970s period of détente between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union, the latter seemed to be in an advantageous strategic position, compared to the post-Vietnam paralysis which plagued its main opponent. Scott McMichael, a military historian, argued that this “turned out largely to be an illusion,” although there is substance to the claim that the Soviet Union was ahead of the game in the lead u p to 1979. This is exemplified by Moscow’s increasing assertiveness in foreign affairs during this period. As a direct result of the so-called ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, the USSR asserted its “right and duty” to go to war in foreign countries “if and when an existing socialist regime was threatened.” [Emphasis added]

Read more…

Is Russia, under Putin, making the same mistake that his predecessors in the Former Soviet Union made by exerting Russia’s “right and duty” to go to war in foreign countries “if an when an existing socialist regime [like Assad’s Syria] was threatened.” According to Wikipedia:

The Ba’ath Party, and indirectly the Syrian Regional Branch, was established on 7 April 1947 by Michel Aflaq (a Christian), Salah al-Din al-Bitar (a Sunni Muslim) and Zaki al-Arsuzi (an Alawite). According to the congress, the party was “nationalist, populist, socialist, and revolutionary” and believed in the “unity and freedom of the Arab nation within its homeland.” 

[ … ]

The party merged with the Arab Socialist Party (ASP), led by Akram al-Hawrani, to establish the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party in Lebanon following Adib Shishakli‘s rise to power. [Emphasis added]

Read more…

Has President Obama made the same mistake as Jimmy Carter did in 1979 by arming the anti-Assad Mujahideen insurgents? Is the CIA complicit, once again, in doing the wrong thing for what it believes is in America’s national interests?

President-elect Donald J. Trump has expressed his doubts about the CIA and other U.S. national intelligence agencies, especially when it comes to Russia, Iran, North Korea, China and Syria.

On January 20th, 2017 Donald J. Trump will be sworn into the Office of the President of these United States. Will a President Trump learn from the failures of both Democratic President’s Carter and Obama? Me thinks so.

RELATED ARTICLE: Secretary of State Kerry’s Speech on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The $15 Billion Failure to Store Nuclear Waste

“The American people have spent 30 years and $15 billion to determine whether Yucca Mountain would be a safe repository for our nation’s civilian and defense-related nuclear waste.” That’s a quote of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) reported in the April issue of The Heartland Institute’s Environment & Climate News.

Compare that with the one year and 45 days it took to build the Empire State Building or the five years it took to build the Hoover Dam in the depths of the Great Depression. In the first half of the last century, Americans knew how to get things done, but the rise of environmentalism in the latter half, starting around the 1970s, has increased the cost and time of any construction anywhere in the U.S. In the case of Yucca Mountain it has raised issues about nuclear waste that is currently stored is less secure conditions.

As reported by CNS News in January, “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has released the final two volumes of a five-volume safety report that concludes that Nevada’s Yucca Mountain meets all of its technical and safety requirements for the disposal of highly radioactive nuclear waste.” Five volumes!

So why the delay? The NRC says the Department of Energy “‘has not met certain land and water rights requirements’ and that other environmental and regulatory hurdles remain.”

Harry ReidA Wall Street Journal editorial on March 30 asserted that It is not about environmental and regulatory hurdles. It is about a deal that Nevada Senator Harry Reid, the former Senate Majority Leader, cut with President Obama to keep Yucca Mountain from ever opening for use. In return, Reid blocked nearly all amendments to legislation to shield Obama from having to veto bills. He virtually nullified the Senate as a functioning element of our government.

“Since there is no permanent disposal facility, spent fuel from the nation’s nuclear reactors—‘enough to fill a football field 17 meters deep’ according to a 2012 Government Accountability Office report—is currently being stored at dozens of above-ground sites. The GAO expects the amount of radioactive waste to double to 140,000 by 2055 when all of the currently operating nuclear reactors are retired.”

The United States where the development of nuclear fission and its use to generate electrical energy occurred is now well behind other nations that have built nuclear facilities and are adding new ones. As Donn Dear, an energy expert with Power For USA, points out “there are only four new nuclear power plants under construction, all by Toshiba-Westinghouse LLC. One other plant, Watts Bar 2, whose construction was held up for several years, is being completed by TVA.”

Meanwhile, as Dear notes, “South Korea is building four nuclear reactors in the United Arab Emirates. The Russian company, Rosatom, is building power plants in Turkey, Belarus, Vietnam, and elsewhere. The China National Nuclear Corporation is scheduled to build over twenty nuclear power plants.”

These represent jobs and orders for equipment that are not occurring in the United States, along with the failure to utilize nuclear energy to provide the growing need for electricity here. The same environmental organizations opposing construction here are the same ones supporting the Environmental Protection Agency’s attack on coal-fired electrical plants. The irony is, of course, that nuclear plants do not produce carbon dioxide emissions that the Greens blame for the non-existent “global warming”, not called “climate change.”

A cynical and false propaganda campaign has been waged against nuclear energy in the U.S., mostly notably with the Hollywood film, “The China Syndrome” about a reactor meltdown. If you want to worry about radiation, worry about the Sun. It is a major source. Three incidents, Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, added to the fears, but no one was harmed by the Three Mile Island event and Chernobyl was an avoidable accident.

More recent was the March 11, 2011 shutdown of the Fukushima reactor in Japan as the result of an earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Three of its cores melted in the first three days, but there have been no deaths or radiation sickness attributed to this event. That’s the part you’re not told about.

CarterIn the end, all it takes is one ignorant President to set progress back for decades. In this case it was President Jimmy Carter for not allowing reprocessing of nuclear waste, a standard practice in France where only one-fifth of spent fuel requires storage. In the 1980s there were three U.S. corporations leading the way on the introduction and use of nuclear energy to produce electrical power; General Electric, Westinghouse Electric, and Babcock & Wilcox. Today only Babcock-Wilcox continues as a fully owned American company.

Thanks to President Obama, we have lost another six years on the Yucca Mountain project. That fits with his refusal to permit the Keystone XL pipeline. No energy project that might actually benefit America will ever see his signature.

Some are arguing that America is a nation in decline and they can surely point to the near destruction of our nuclear energy industry as one example. That decline can begin to end in 2017 with the inauguration of a new President.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

The “Malaise” Has Returned

The joke is that Jimmy Carter is happy that Barack Obama has replaced him as the worst President of the modern era. It is a supreme irony that Obama’s campaign theme was “Hope and Change” when Americans have lost a great deal of hope about their personal futures and the only change they want is to see Obama gone from office.

Elected by a narrow margin in 1976, Carter managed in his one term to see his approval ratings fall to twenty-five percent by June 1979. The lesson Americans have to learn over and over again is that liberal policies and programs don’t work.

In six years, the kind of dependence on the government to take care of people from cradle to grave has left the nation with 92 million unemployed or who have stopped looking for a job, entitled 45 million to food stamps, and there is still talk of a “minimum wage” in the interest of “fairness” that simply kills jobs, especially those that used to be filled by young people just entering the workplace. The worst part of Obama’s presidency is the lies he tells in the belief, apparently, that most Americans are so stupid they won’t see through them.

On July 15, 1979, in an effort to encourage a greater sense of confidence, Jimmy Carter delivered a speech that became known as the “malaise” speech, but which did not include that word. What it did, however, is double down on all the bad policies Carter had pursued and blamed Americans for not accepting them. By then the economy was in decline, gasoline prices and interest rates had climbed to record levels, and the voters were understandably pessimistic. Iranians had taken U.S. diplomats hostage and they would not be released until Ronald Reagan took the oath of office.

Carter’s speech began by asking “Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?” Quite literally there was no need then or now for an energy problem because, as recently noted by the Energy Information Administration, the United States has enough coal to last more than 200 years! With the development of hydraulic fracturing, fracking, we now have access to more oil than exists in Saudi Arabia.

Obama literally came into office saying he intended to wage a war on coal and he has; using the Environmental Protection Agency to institute regulations that have led to the closing a mines and the shutdown of coal-fired plants that used to produce 50% of the nation’s electricity; now down to 40%. He resisted allowing the drilling for oil in the huge reserves on our east and west coasts. He has refused to permit the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. These policies have led to the loss of thousands of jobs during the time that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

In his speech, Carter said, “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” We would do well to remember that we have been through periods like this before and corrected course.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan would be elected to replace Carter and America prospered through his two terms, returning to being a major superpower, economically and militarily. That’s what conservatism produces.

Carter, however, blamed Americans for the problems of his times. “Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.”

One of Obama’s earliest acts was to visit foreign nations and blame America for many of the world’s problems. Militarily he pulled our troops out of Iraq and he intends to do the same in Afghanistan. He has cut the military budget to the bone and has now defined its mission as one to address “climate change”, not the enemies of our nation.

Obama spent his entire first term blaming George W. Bush for every problem that he did nothing to correct. Indeed, Obama has never seen himself as the real problem, finding anyone else to blame.

Those Americans watching Carter deliver his speech must surely have cringed as he announced that he intended to set import quotas on foreign energy resources. He said he wanted Congress to impose a “windfall profits” tax on the very energy firms that he wanted to get us out of the doldrums and dependency that was causing the problem. He wanted the utility companies to “cut their massive use of oil by fifty percent within a decade.” He wanted them to switch to coal and now we live in a nation whose President doesn’t want our utilities to use coal. Why? Despite massive evidence to the contrary, he has advocated “renewable” energy, wind and solar, neither of which can ever meet the nation’s needs.

“In closing, let me say this: I will do my best, but I will not do it alone. Let your voice be heard,” said Carter.

In the 1980 election the voter’s voice was heard. Carter was gone and Reagan was our President. With him came his infectious patriotism and optimism. By late 1983 his economic program had ended the recession he inherited from Carter. A similar program would have put an end to what is now routinely called Obama’s Great Recession.

We are at a point not dissimilar from the days of Jimmy Carter and with an even greater sense of dissatisfaction and distrust of Barack Obama.

I reach back in our recent history to remind you that on November 4th in our midterm elections and in the 2016 presidential election we can repeat history by ridding the nation of those members of Congress that voted for ObamaCare and have supported President Obama. We must wait to see who the GOP will offer as a presidential candidate, but we have time for that.

We have time to “hope” for a better future and we have the means to make the “change” to achieve it.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Allen West: Remember when presidents stood up to Russia?

Thirty-five years ago I was finishing up my senior year of high school and heading to my first year at the University of Tennessee. Something also happened that year — the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and began the 10 year Soviet-Afghan War. If anyone had told me in 1979 that one day, 26 years later, I would be landing at the Kabul Airport in Afghanistan, I would have thought them crazy. However, history does indeed repeat itself for those who fail to learn from it.

So here we are in 2014 with a weak president, just as 35 years ago, watching another invasion. Once again we have a president who has diminished our military capacity. Once again we have a president who is limiting our energy security advancement in favor of radical environmentalists.

There are so many parallels between the tenures of presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama some postulate this is what a second Carter presidency would have resembled.

This past week, President Obama was in Europe displaying his failure to comprehend strategic level geopolitics. Europe has always been a battleground between East and West, between liberty and tyranny. The difference now is that we do not have resolute leadership such as President John F. Kennedy who went to West Berlin and stated, “Ich bin ein Berliner” meaning to say he was a citizen of Berlin (not a “Berliner” jelly-filled doughnut). And young Kennedy was indeed challenged by the brutish belligerence of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev by way of the Cuban missile crisis. Yet he stood his ground.

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Years later it would be another American president, Ronald Reagan, standing at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin demanding, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And indeed the wall did. It was Reagan who clearly defined his Cold War strategy, “We win; they lose.”

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So when our current president makes weak, stumbling, incoherent statements such as, “this is not some zero-sum game” referring to Ukraine and Russia, he evidences his ignorance and cowardice to belligerents worldwide — and worse, to our allies. It is a zero-sum game and as Kennedy stated in his 1961 inaugural address:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge —- and more.

To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do—for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder….We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.

And so we sit back and watch history all over again as weakness becomes the enticing elixir drunk by dictators, autocrats, theocrats, and despots. There is only one way to meet evil: head on. It is not about being a “warmonger” but rather a guardian of liberty and freedom — and a guardian of the republic for which we stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on AllenBWest.com.