Thread: Worse. Than. Carter.

equilibrium,

It actually took closer to three years- beginning about a year before the 1973 Paris Peace Accords.

the borders stayed put until Dec 1974, as you say:

But 1973, the year after US ground forces departed the South and US airpower was removed from the region actually saw the ARVN push the NVA to the extreme northwest border regions. It had gained more control of its territory- 85%- that at any time in is history.

so, when this happened:

When the North's invasion finally occurred in 1975, the world's fourth largest air force lay grounded for lack of spare parts and fuel. Over half of the ARVN's trucks and armored vehicles were imobilized and its soldiers had not been paid in almost five months. Ammunition had been rationed to one rifle magazine per month and artillery rounds were limited to five per cannon per week. Under these conditions, the fact that the ARVN were able to resist for almost a month and the strategic reserve was able to fight the NVA to a tactical stalemate outside Saigon at Xuan Loc is creditable.

as OoE mentioned a long while back, there is something seriously wrong with a country unable to produce/acquire small arms and ammo.

Its not the success of the actual US combat and stabilization operation in Iraq and Afghanistan that concerns me more than what happens after our direct military commitment ends.

i agree-- but has there been any indication from the DoD or the obama administration or even (past the one or two isolated nuts) in congress, that they are going to do the same? i'm wary of drawing wrong historical analogies.

Transponder code 7500: HIJACK.

ANYhoo...Obama's worse than Carter.

Originally Posted by Bluesman

Transponder code 7500: HIJACK.

ANYhoo...Obama's worse than Carter.

Correction:

Obama's ONE year is worse than Carter's four years!

Originally Posted by gunnut

Correction:

Obama's ONE year is worse than Carter's four years!

I stand corrected, because yeah, that's a plain fact.

Originally Posted by Bluesman

I stand corrected, because yeah, that's a plain fact.

Someone should make a bill board with Jimmy Carter's mug on it with the caption of "Miss Me Yet?"

:P

you have to admit, it is something to be compared to that many people. i've heard obama compared to mao, stalin, hitler, OBL, the Joker, and the anti-christ.

somehow the comparison to Carter just doesn't have as much oomph to it.

Originally Posted by astralis

you have to admit, it is something to be compared to that many people. i've heard obama compared to mao, stalin, hitler, OBL, the Joker, and the anti-christ.

somehow the comparison to Carter just doesn't have as much oomph to it.

But it sure is funnier.

Originally Posted by astralis

you have to admit, it is something to be compared to that many people. i've heard obama compared to mao, stalin, hitler, OBL, the Joker, and the anti-christ.

somehow the comparison to Carter just doesn't have as much oomph to it.

People go over-the-top on stuff they care passionately about all the time. See: George W. Bush.

My OP didn't do that. Wasn't going for oomph. By any objective measure, he IS worse. By a very long way.

from David Brooks.

Op-Ed Columnist - What Obama Stands For - NYTimes.com

Getting Obama Right

David Brooks

If you ask a conservative Republican, you are likely to hear that Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.

If you ask a liberal Democrat, you are likely to hear that Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through.

You’ll notice first that these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed. You’ll, observe, second, that they are entirely predictable. Political partisans always imagine the other side is ruthlessly effective and that the public would be with them if only their side had better messaging. And finally, you’ll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Obama himself.

The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.

He has tried to find this balance in a town without an organized center — in a town in which liberals chair the main committees and small-government conservatives lead the opposition. He has tried to do it in a context maximally inhospitable to his aims.

But he has done it with tremendous tenacity. Readers of this column know that I’ve been critical on health care and other matters. Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.

Liberals are wrong to call him weak and indecisive. He’s just not always pursuing their aims. Conservatives are wrong to call him a big-government liberal. That’s just not a fair reading of his agenda.

Take health care. He has pushed a program that expands coverage, creates exchanges and moderately tinkers with the status quo — too moderately to restrain costs. To call this an orthodox liberal plan is an absurdity. It more closely resembles the center-left deals cut by Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, or Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney. Obama has pushed this program with a tenacity unmatched in modern political history; with more tenacity than Bill Clinton pushed his health care plan or George W. Bush pushed Social Security reform.

Take education. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency.

Take foreign policy. To the consternation of many on the left, Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term. Obama conducted a long review of the Afghan policy and was genuinely moved by the evidence. He has emerged as a liberal hawk, pursuing victory in Iraq and adopting an Afghan surge that has already utterly transformed the momentum in that war. The Taliban is now in retreat and its leaders are being assassinated or captured at a steady rate.

Take finance. Obama and Tim Geithner are vilified on the left as craven to Wall Street and on the right as clueless bureaucrats who know nothing about how markets function. But they have tried with halting success to find a center-left set of restraints to provide some stability to market operations.

In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.