Obama compares McCain to Bush.
McCain compares Obama to Carter.

Only problem is, Bush is still fresh in all of our minds. Carter, not so much.

All it will do is remind people of McCain getting compared to Bush.

Good job McCain.

and here i thought mcCain was stuck in the 80s. I stand corrected.

Dan Abrams is like the last bastion of MSNBC journalist still singing the Clinton VP meme. lol

Obama would be like FDR's fifth term and McCain would be like Hoover's second... WTF? I'm forty-three. I was fifteen when Carter left office, and he has been - hand's down - the best ex-President in my life-time. Even as a president his administration has out performed every Republican in terms of economic and job growth since Eisenhower. Yeah ... I'll take me some Mr. Carter.

Don't you remember? He is stuck in the late 1800s:

http://www.thepersonalispolitical.com/2008/06/mccain-invokes-wjb-oh-no-he-didnt.html

At least McCain's poor historical comparison is from the last half century this time.

JERUSALEM (AFP) - The parents of Corporal Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held by Gaza militants for two years, were passed a handwritten letter from their son on Monday, the foundation of former US president Jimmy Carter announced.
The Carter Centre said that its office in the West Bank town of Ramallah received the letter on Sunday in accordance with an undertaking given to the former US president in April by Khaled Meshaal, the exiled leader of the Islamist Hamas movement which is holding the soldier.
"President Carter and his staff will attempt to arrange for a return letter from Shalit's parents to their son and hope that an arrangement enabling Gilad Shalit's release will be reached soon," the foundation added.
The letter was the first evidence Hamas had provided that Shalit remained alive since a recording released on June 25 last year in which the soldier said his health was deteriorating and called on the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to make greater efforts for his release.

"Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?"
Jeremiah 8:22

Go up to Gilead, and take balm,
Jeremiah 46:11

Its worth noting that McCain is equating Carter and Bush as failed Presidents. McCain really doesn't care about the 28% dead-enders and what they think of him. He will throw their dear leader under the bus whenever he can. Thing is, I would love to see a statistic on how many of those dead-enders vote. I imagine they do it quite frequently and you question their leader at your peril.

All I know, is that I'm too young to remember much of anything about Carter, and that I'm also not really that young.

Say what you will about Jimmy Carter, but he began a plan to have our country energy independent in 20 years. Then along came Reagan and undid every effort he made and put a halt to everything. Carter doesn't look so foolish today.

Why not compare McCain to Bob Dole, the hippy hating, viagra popping old loser from the eighties? Both reject universal health care and social security as governmental handouts and find the company of Lobbyists a barrel of laffs.

From: Head of State

http://headofstate.blogspot.com/2008/06/world-will-welcome-obama.html

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The World Will Welcome Obama

In today's Post, Anne Appelbaum asks:

"Will foreigners accept a black American president?...I realize that this, too, may seem like a rather offensive question, particularly if one believes everything that one reads in newspapers. Germany, to take one random example, is at the moment experiencing something like its own version of Obamamania. The media appear to see the Democratic candidate as what a Der Spiegel journalist calls "a cross between John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr."; the German foreign minister has been heard chanting "Yes, we can!"; and Obama T-shirts can be spotted in the hipper quarters of Berlin. This sort of enthusiasm isn't unique to Germany: British, French and even Polish newspapers splashed Obama and his candidacy on their front pages this past week, most accompanied by laudatory articles that solemnly proclaimed, "America has changed. But has Europe changed? And have Asia and the Middle East changed? I hate to put it so crudely, but -- European newspaper reporting to the contrary -- racism is not unique to the United States."

The world will welcome Obama. Nationalism trumps racism, and fear of an extra-national threat trumps such internal biases.

Even in this increasingly global world, nations tend to reduce other nations to single concepts--highly reductionistic and based on media driven perception of current events, and further narrowed by lack of personal experiences (or often research) and by protective impulses. This is human, and we see it here and elsewhere--until the globe is so reduced that such distortions naturally blend into the fuller understanding of more direct experience.

The relief, excitement, and surprise that nations will experience when they find that the current and typically reductionistic extranational concept that Bush equals America is false will override other biases in most of the world--except for those who also exist the world over, whose need for a fanatical hatred is more important than the "better angels of our nature."

There will, of course, be conspiracy theorists who will arise, with their fervent inventions and gap-ridden, convoluted, cherry-picked distortions and "evidence", as they always arrive at moments of change--they, too, even in their anxious desperation and fantasies of control, are canaries in the coal mine of change, however retrograde and pathological. And there will be those, as always, who find safety and security in the blinders and binders of their own personal pasts and traditions, generalizing widely, as they always have, from these to the world. Some will attach their own distortions to these changes; others will rely on such distortions to rappel from such change.

Most will respond with pleasure and hope--if accompanied by an understandable whiff of suspicion carried by the past, and perhaps a moment of equally understandable chest-puffing self-regard that we have seen the light--an acceptable excess, given the opportunities for restoration and repair ahead.

Cite:

Head of State

http://headofstate.blogspot.com/2008/06/world-will-welcome-obama.html

Somehow I think if Obama responds to this it will be a big smackdown and McCain will come out looking like a fool.

I will take the Carter comparision anytime. Hey, that was when US foreign policy seriously (albeit imperfectly) was committed to making human rights a central component. Few people realize he was help up in Kennedy-like love by many people around the world for his work keeping various political prisoners alive through US advocacy. We could use a foreign policy that took human rights (or any rights, for that matter) seriously and sought peace in the Middle East.

And think about this...where might we be now if we really took Carter's serious call for creative thinking on renewable energy serously for the last 30 years? Mock the cardigans all you want, but the man was trying to "walk the walk" not only as an ex-president, but also as president.

On another note...I think history will more likely vindicate/be kind to Carter than Bush II any day of the week.

Ah, that is "held up", not "help up". My wife is the great proofreader and typist. ;-/

My friends, mcbush is really at a loss what to do. Now that voters and the media are focusing on him, he is floundering all over the place. His poll numbers are tanking and the economy is tanking big time. He is clueless. Any day we will see an eruption of his notorious temper and lights out. Too funny. Thank you.

I know Carter has become the whipping boy of the Right, but this will NOT help McCain among evangelicals, who remember that Carter was more Christian than Reagan and Bush ever were.

And of course, McCain is unwittingly accepting the "Bush 3rd Term " label.... Not very smart.

Why did Reagan win?

Because of the economy.

How will McCain fix that?

Unlike the subliterate cretin presently occupying the White House, Carter was one of the few presidents of my lifetime who was a consistently impressive extemporaneous speaker. Reagan's "communicator" myth be damned - without his teleprompter he was useless. The only presidents who could compare with Carter, in terms of being quick on their feet, were Clinton and Kennedy.

Carter could give honest, complex and direct answers to difficult questions, and it was always heartening to know that a legitimately elected president was that intelligent, regardless of whether things seemed exasperating on his watch, in some respects. At least there was the sense that he was a good man operating in good faith, as opposed to now, when every assertion or floated idea has to be looked behind for its conniving subtext. People overlook the extraordinarily stressful environment of the Carter presidency, and the fact that if the helicopter rescue in Iran hadn't failed, he probably would have spared us Reagan.

Bush may have taken to channeling Fidel Castro lately, as to his notion that somehow "history will absolve him", but Carter is indeed someone whom history will probably look back upon favorably and cut through the simplistic, derogatory held truths that have distorted his actual stature for many, in recent decades.

(Actually was an Art Garfunkel cover of a Sam Cooke hit...don't know who authored it but it was not written by the master himself, PS.)