"Making strides in American foreign policy"? Is that what they're now calling the unmitigated foreign policy disaster that was the Carter administration?
Some "students" in Tehran loved him to pieces. After they committed an act of war against the US, Carter just...fapped. They committed the act of war because Carter abandoned the Shah of Iran, leading to the radical Muslim overthrow of Iran's government.
Oh! But it was democratically elected!
...the same way Fidel Castro was "democratically elected" in Cuba's last election. The same way Saddam Hussein was "democratically elected" back when he was still running Iraq.
Carter has shown many times that he wouldn't know a true "democratic election" if it bit him on the ass like an aquatic vorpal bunny. As I recall he said that Hugo Chavez was "fairly elected".
Jimmy Carter was celebrated for making strides in American foreign policy, all right. Dictators, terrorists, and communists think he's the cat's meow.
Oh, I know what that "making strides" bullshit is supposed to mean--the Camp David Accords, which worked for about twenty minutes and garnered him his Nobel Peace Prize--but I'm afraid that crap is obscured by doing nothing after one of our embassies was taken over by terrorists because the Carter administration turned its back on an ally, who was deposed.
Now that one of those terrorists is President of Iran (and got invited to speak at Colombia University, which would also invite Hitler if he were still alive) President Carter can congratulate himself on his stellar foreign policy "strides".
The seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, in 1979, was one of the (if not THE) foundation stones of the entire problem we now have with Islamic terrorism today. It certainly was the opening shot in Islamic fundamentalism's war on America. Carter's failure to deal with the situation properly was glaringly obvious even at the time--though no one knew what it would lead to--simply because an act of war had been committed against the US, and rather than answer war with war, Carter answered war with "sanctions" and an utterly botched covert rescue attempt.
So here we are now, almost three decades later, and Carter is trying to build himself a legacy--one that's not "I only got elected because I didn't have anything to do with Nixon", that is. Anyone nominated by the Republicans in 1976 would have found it nearly impossible to win the Presidency, given that Nixon had resigned rather than be impeached, and Ford had pardoned him; it made the Republican Party look nefarious. Carter's advantage was that he was from the other party.
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An interesting footnote to all this: when I was in fourth grade, our teacher had us write letters to the new President after the elections. Many of the letters were insulting, calling him a stupid peanut farmer and worse. I was shocked at the other kids' letters as they read them aloud. My letter was tame by comparison, though I explicitly said in my letter that I would have voted for Ford.
The teacher angrily seized on my letter, telling the other students that "Ed has tact!" As a teacher she probably voted for Carter, and it was pretty obvious even to me at that tender young age (I was eight) that the "peanut farmer"--and other--insults were making her angry.
Yeah, way to go, Mrs. Gurney; thanks a lot for making an example of me. Thanks for telling the other kids that I was somehow better than they were. You really helped me a lot. Bitch.
The punch line to this story is that I had avoided insults not because I had "tact"--I had wanted to demean the President-elect, too--but because I was afraid I could go to jail for insulting the President.
I mean, come on, I was eight.