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Isn't it odd that Carter was the president we needed so badly after 9/11? Instead of checking our cocksize around the world, we should have engaged in deep diplomacy and strapped on a sweater. Instead "the most trying times our country has seen" got tax cuts.
What we did in Afghanistan immediately post-9/11 was mostly right. Had Bush continued to chase Al Qaeda where they were at the time, we'd perhaps be in much better shape (or maybe we'd be at odds with a nuclear power in Pakistan, but that's a different story). Our solution was to melt down some other country to make it a magnet for terrorists who otherwise wouldn't be there -- fucking brilliant.
American peeps don't want us to be torturing the way the middle east countries do, but I'm confident they want us to do it, if it means getting info to defend the country.
A few of those dirt bags we captured in Pakistan and elsewhere chirped like little birds once 'techniques' were used.
Yea, Carter did a great job with the Hostages in Iran when he was prez. My God, the worst president in history, imo.
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Originally Posted by Tahoe
Iran has hostages right now? Link? Can we sell them arms to get them back? Maybe trade them some plutonium?
Carter has done some great things in his post Prez, but he was fucking horrible. The economy sucked, everything sucked.
13.5 inflation, 7.1 jobless, prime interest rate of 21.5 52 hostages in Iran that had been there over a year...I don't see how anyone could call that good. No one could buy a house. It was some shitty times.
I'm not so sure. There's some people who'd want to rip some Al Qaeda guy's testicles off and feed them to him, regardless of whether or not it derives useful information. That's perfectly appropriate and justified because "they're bad guys, ferchryssake!". It gets worse if there's something that resembles "orders from a higher authority" behind it. Abu Ghraib involved a lot of people.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tahoe
And you know this how...? The THREAT of torture extracts more than the torture itself, as far as I can tell from the research I've read. Once you start psychologically and|or physically mutilating when they refuse to tell, they go numb. The state of the art for truth serums is little better than taking them to a bar and getting them drunk. Lie detector and MRI techniques to confirm veracity fall down, so your ways of confirmation often involve traps. And of course, the distributed cells makes it hard to extract a lot from any one person.Quote:
A few of those dirt bags we captured in Pakistan and elsewhere chirped like little birds once 'techniques' were used.
Oh yeah, all that was shit. But his strengths would have shined in the past 6 years supposing the economy didn't tank.
George Tenet wrote in his book about it. He has said many times on interviews on CNN, Fox, etc. Rockafella concurred that we got useful info with our techniques. I assume as Intel ? whatever he is, he saw the info.
I'll see if I can find some links on his book..excerpts. Right now I'm looking for up-to-date crime rates in cities in the US and I can't find shit. But I'll look it up after I'm done wasting my time on crime.
Carter inherited a really shitty situation economically from the Nixon/Vietnam era, and didn't make it better. But, there wasn't a lot that he really could have done at the point he was elected. Carter was fundamentally a fiscal conservative -- mostly-balanced budgets, wearing sweaters rather than turn up the heat, etc. The one thing he did do right on that front, putting Paul Volcker in the Federal Reserve, took awhile to bear fruit and was a bitter pill to swallow (Volcker was public enemy #1 for years). The solution that did "work" wasn't politically feasible without years of more-traditional economics failing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tahoe
The Reaganomics solution was borrow the money and pay it back later, hoping the interest wasn't crushing, that the borrowing would lead to enough people prospering where the guv'mint fixes itself. Reagan never got to the end part of Reaganomics really. It took Clinton and a tech boom to really make that happen. Remember that unemployment rose from 7.1% to over 10% under Reagan and was higher when Reagan was re-elected than it was under Carter. Real earning power dropped all throughout his term. Reagan didn't pass his "are you better off now than you were four years ago" challenge he made in 1980. He did, however, pass the "are you better off than you were two years ago" challenge, and that's about as far back as people can remember.
Of course, the borrow-and-spend trend has gotten out of hand, the current generation aggressively steals from the future as never before, and the world is waking up to just how badly leveraged we are and pricing the U.S. dollar appropriately. People think they're actually winning when they see the Dow Jones climb, not thinking that it has a lot more to do with international investment and the decline of the dollar than any great economic strides. Real earning power has gone down to the point that we can employ a few more people and pay them less -- that's progress, people!
Ok, enough ranting!