No, seriously, *prostitutes*??!!! Come on!!!

Bugging the Dems? Really?!

"I don't get the sense from W that he enjoys the battles of politics. It's been said about him that he never really wanted to be president, but the Republicans needed a candidate in 2000 and he made the most sense. I sometimes get the feeling that is true. And Nixon badly wanted to be president. I'm not sure which is better, ultimately."

I've heard it said that the one good argument for hereditary leadership is it keeps the nuts who need power from getting it.

I really, really, really hope I'm wrong, but I'm afraid Obama will be a bad mix of Nixonian and Carterite tendencies. We'll see.

I agree on the political battles stuff. He seems kind of worn down these days. The funniest swamp dream the lefties had was that Bush would stage a coup and retain the presidency instead of handing over power in January. To me it seems like the farthest thing from his mind.

I saw the play and came away impressed. Nixon comes off better than I'd been expecting. Interestingly, David Frost now works for Al-Jazeera.

I'll take bugging the republicans everyday and twice on wednesdays, if you guys take the prostitutes and under the desk intern blowjobs.

I'm sorry, but as someone who is more inclined to the "worst President in 50 years? Hell Yeah!" argument than your personal track I'm going to say that W's only real competition is LBJ and, yes, one Richard Millhouse Nixon.

I mean, everyone brings up Carter but really, what were the worst things that happened during his administration?

1.) The economy--Hmm, aren't the people who say this usually the same people who are trying to swear to me right now the President can't control the economy and it's all a Dem plot? Push.

2.) The Iran Hostage Crisis / Fall of the Shah--Okay, and to counter that I present to you the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Waziristan and the Iranians being 80% of the way to the bomb. Push.

3.) Russians invade Afghanistan--Um, yeah, that Army that LBJ broke was really going to go halfway across the world and punk Brezhnev's boys right next to the Bear den? Really? You obviously go for the pure Colombian cocaine.

Just sayin' (and I hear Casca getting ready to beat down the door now with "you didn't live in those times, you don't understand!"-argument), but while Jimmy Carter is an absolute a** I'm thinking that you're going to have to work to convince me he's worse than the guy whose Treasury Secretary has currently misplaced a few hundred _billion_ dollars.

On a slightly different note, Dawn, IC and I were in Atlantic City last weekend

Yet there are no posts on I Had Outs.

Did you guys stop playing poker or are you guys too ashamed to write about AC trips anymore?

What gives?

Did you guys stop playing poker or are you guys too ashamed to write about AC trips anymore?

I'm just too busy right now. I miss writing about poker, just can't seem to find the time. When I have a free second and I'm not working, I feel like I should be blogging here, or planning the wedding, or finding a contractor for our apt, etc. etc. Just life getting in the way of poker blogging. :-)

K-looking for contractor? Does it mean you're planning reno?
If you need help with it, don't be shy.
[with planning, not with finding contractor. There you're on your own!]

Haha, taunt me will you?

Any exposition of RMN that doesn't begin with his vilification by the leftist/commie media during the fifties, and the subsequent theft of the election in Illinois and Texas in 1960 by Kennedy/Johnson is just so much historical revisionism.

Dubyah & HW, are both weak sauce politicians, probably personally too honest for the game. Clinton was never anything BUT a politician spinning his way through history, all show, no go. The thing I love about Dubyah is that he has tried to do right, the critics be damned. The thing I loathe about JC was that he tried to do right to please his critics. These are two very different things.

As for the Jamesian taunts:

Carter didn't have the stones to tighten the money supply and tamp down inflation. We suffered. Reagan did, and it was perhaps his greatest victory.

You lay the Iranian problem incorrectly at the feet of Dubyah. It is an outgrowth of toppling the Shah. We are still paying for the foolishness of JC.

Worst President? Nixon and Dubyah created new paradigms of the world, to make it a safer place. JC opened Pandora's Box; Clinton wallowed in a softspot of history made by the sacrifices of better men; Kennedy is a mythical media created fraud; Johnson was a criminal in over his head. Reagan, class of the field. JC was easily the worst of the lot, with Clinton luckier but close on his heels, and LBJ bringing up the rear.

James,

Carter didn't understand the threats of the world. He didn't get that Communism was a serious threat to America and he didn't get that the Islamofascism was real and developing. He just lalala'd his way through his term. Weak.

Actually Carter did tighten the money supply and in fact appointed Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve Chairman.

He also deregulated airlines and trucking -- monumental achievements.

Creating Departments of Energy and Education were his biggest blunders. On balance, he was bad, but not as bad as people think.

Casca is reading my mind (and verbalizing it in far better form I could).

Tat, I love you too.

I must be really naive, because when I heard that Elliot Spitzer was resigning I initially thought that it was because of his gross abuse of power, not for being a disgusting, philandering pervert.

Thank you Jim, as you hit the nail that I was going to hit with regards to the money supply.

Casca, come now, you're not really going to put the fall of the Shah on JC, are you? Hmm, let's see what's wrong with that theory, shall we:

1.) It absolutely _ignores_ the role the Dulles brothers and Operation Ajax played in generating a simmering resentment in the Iranian people, especially towards the United States and Great Britain. Generally when you kill a democratically elected prime minister...well, that's just never going to end well down the road. While we forgot in the intervening 26 years, the people around Khomeini and in Iran _did not_.

2.) I want you to tell me _precisely_ what Jimmy Carter did that was the proximate cause of the fall of the Shah. No, no, no, not your usual BS of it just is because I say it is, but _what specifically Jimmy Carter did that so undermined the Shah that he fell_. The Shah did plenty of sh*t to his own self that blaming the Georgian Peanut Farmer for his fall is like blaming the little old lady at the Budweiser factory for every drunk driving death involving Bud beer.

From social (ignoring the Shia clerics), economic (not properly developing Iran's infrastructure), to military (poorly armed students beat the living sh*t out of his extremely well-equpped forces in 1978-1979), the Shah own goaled himself well before Carter showed up on the scene. If you're going to build a throne on bayonets you best doublecheck your geometry--otherwise don't complain when you get your prostate checked via cold steel.

In short, you're basically saying you don't like Jimmy Carter because he wasn't willing to invade Iran in support of idiocy that had been going on more or less for 23 years. Well, sorry, I'm afraid I'm not going to say a guy's the worst President ever because he didn't start a war that he didn't have the votes to sustain with a military that just might have got it's a** handed to it given its other problems. _You_ may continue to say that, but people also say the moon's made of cheese and each statement has the same amount of factual basis--none.

Karol, Islamofascism is a lazy man's way of saying "Crazy religious f*ckers who need a good spanking." The reason Carter didn't think Islamofascism was a threat was because it _wasn't_ in 1979--Communism and it's half-sister, Pan-Arab nationalism were. I ask you the same question I ask Casca--just what could Carter have done other than present the Brezhnev ultimatum (i.e., threaten to nuke Tehran)? Invade? Do you not know how Operation Eagle Claw turned out? I'm not saying that I agree with Carter's decisions, but I am saying the choices he made were based on existant constraints. Point blank, Congress was not going to go to war over 52 hostages and the reason that Reagan could be a little more bellicose was that the 1980 elections had changed the political landscape and the Southern Dems Congress Critters would have backed the B-52s (and I don't mean the band) going on tour to Tehran.

I did not mean to leave Bill Clinton off the list of competition for worst President--complete and utter oversight on my part. However, contrary to what Casca seems to think, I still think Richard Nixon and LBJ are much better candidates. Set up a new security paradigm for safety? You're joking, right? This is the man who got so drunk during the October '73 crisis that Haig and Kissinger told the Pentagon not to accept any orders that didn't go through them first. The guy who had multiple Air Force officials and his own SecDef put under surveillance during the 1972 offensives against Vietnam. The gentleman whose "Southern Strategy" was predicated on an implicit go ahead to many Southern states to return to the de facto policies they had against minorities in exchange for electoral success. Yes, you're right, Richard Nixon _did_ set a new paradigm--and I'm glad Watergate shattered it.

Just sayin', but if you're going to roll the "Bush can't be the worse, there's always Carter"-route then, hey, God bless ya and I hope the other side is lax in preparation. Because I've done all this without sources and in about 20 or so minutes--and I'm reasonably certain that A. the people you're facing are much smarter than me, B. if I had a week or so to prepare I could find about 20 other examples, and C. I haven't even started into the ways that Bush compares unfavorably with the "gentleman" from Georgia. Sorry, but if you roll with the "Carter Gambit" and your competition is even halfway sentient you're going to get destroyed.

James, you had me bored to tears before the end of the third paragraph. Suffice to say, that JC pulled ALL support from the Shah save nightflighting him out of the country to safe haven in Panama, because he didn't like SAVAK's methods. They didn't fit his human rights based foreign policy. He also publicly fellated The Ayatollah, all to no avail. JC was the classic appeaser. To not know this, is to not know much.

It's always possible to create a useful fiction that supports a world view. After all, didn't Stalin drag the Soviet Union into the 20th Century, kinda sorta? What's fifty years of negative population growth compared to that?

I'm sure you are a very good student of history. I'm not very confident that those who instructed you were/are.

As for Carter restricting the money supply, that's not the way Volcker tells it. It was Reagan who told him to do what he needed to do to get inflation under control, despite Volcker's warning that it would cause recession.

JC was much like the man he is today, lurching from one incomprehensible contrarian action to the next. Imagine life under an executive, run by a man like that. It sucked.

Simple etiquette forced me to go back and skim the rest of your mouth-frothing nitwittery. I suggest you sue your alma mater. You've been cheated.

Casca,

Always a pleasure reading the ad hominems. The fact that you have been reduced to not being able to process anything beyond simple slogans and sound bites may be a sign of advancing age, curmudgeonliness, or repeated blows to the head. However, just because you were bored doesn't mean I wasn't right--and I notice you haven't produced facts to the contrary.

I did not say that JC's policies on human rights were not, shall we say, idealistic. However, believe it or not, there is a body of thought that says the United States shouldn't support nations whose secret police are known to hang people from meat hooks. Moreover, misjudging fellow world leaders (thanks for putting that mental image with JC and the Ayatollah in my head by the way--I'm now praying I get Alzheimer's) isn't something unique to one Mr. Carter. Remind me again who stared into Putin's eyes and saw his soul? Sorry, but that's a little bit more of a misjudge than thinking some cleric isn't as crazy as you might think he is.

As to suing my alma mater--suits against the government don't usually go well, and I still need to go back for my Doctorate so I don't think suing the state school would end well. As to whom my professors were--well, considering my major professor undergrad is from a family of noted conservative columnists and has more brainpower than you, I, and Karol put together, I'd say I'm in good standing there.

Like I said--in no way shape or form am I trying to imply JC was a _good_ President. However, the question at hand is _worst_ President--and I'm merely pointing out that the evidence does not necessarily support. A**hole, yes. Naive to the point of dangerousness, certainly. But JC was at least smart enough to realize that getting in a fight with the Iranians might not have ended well, nor was Afghanistan worth unleashing multiple Soviet OMGs across the Central European Plain. Saying that JC had a bad hand to start with is _not_ the same as saying he played it well--it's just saying a handful of red while playing spades sorta limits your options.

Finally, come on--as someone whose said that the dumbest thing Truman did was not immediately nuke the Kremlin during the Berlin Airlift Crisis ("Cold War, Hot War...we're the ones with the bomb!"), I think it's safe to say that my "world view" doesn't portray Communism or its leaders as a good thing.

Relax James, there's not much space between us except for your lawyerly penchant for incessant wrangling over things, and habit of mixing the occasional apple among the oranges.