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Everything posted by Gil Bang
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Derka's out of the penalty box today, right?
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BTW...the women in Argentina...holy moly.
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I was in Buenos Aires a few years back. The GF and I met two other couples (one gay, one straight) in the hotel bar one afternoon. They were fun, funny people, all of them. One of the gay dudes spoke the lingo and had been there a lot. He suggested we all go to dinner together at a steakhouse that he liked. So, we jump in a couple of cabs. I remember eating like a pig...I think the 6 of us had 4 nice bottles of Malbec. Great steaks, sides, trimmings, etc. When it came time to split the bill, I think our share was 45 bucks or so. I wish I remember the name of the restaurant.
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I think if you check, you'll find that it's a 24 pack of Ultra vs 30 with the others. Meanwhile, can anybody tell me who is the annoying cunt that sings "paramount paramount paramount plus" to the tune of Jingle bell rock? Because I will hire a hitman to get rid of her.
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Mace is so great. Who else would tell the crowd at a "prayer breakfast" that she didn't give her boyfriend any pussy that morning because she was running late to the prayer breakfast. "
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Oh shit: New pillow guy lawsuit coming "in two weeks"
Gil Bang replied to Gil Bang's topic in Cloak Room
MyPillow founder Mike Lindell has once again found himself staring down the wrong end of a seven-figure lawsuit, this time being dragged into court by a merchant cash advance firm that accuses the bedding magnate and election fraud conspiracist of ducking out on nearly $1.5 million in outstanding debt. Cobalt Funding Solutions, a New York City-based “alternative capital provider,” makes loans to businesses against their future sales, taking a set portion of a company’s revenues until the principal is repaid, plus a handsome premium. Lindell, for his part, has called the entire future receivables industry a “sham,” and drew first blood against Cobalt earlier this month with a lawsuit claiming the whopping 409 annual percentage rate it charged him while in a desperate cash crunch was “illegal,” “usurious,” and a legalized form of loan sharking. Now, Cobalt has returned fire in a civil complaint filed last Friday in state court. Although the 63-year-old MAGA fan has stopped paying, the complaint says he has “continued to generate and collect millions of dollars in revenue from sales of, among other things, Pillows and bedding accessories since October 18, 2024.” Reached by phone on Monday, Lindell told The Independent he had not been previously aware that Cobalt was countersuing and had not yet reviewed any of the court filings. He claimed, without providing specifics, that Cobalt has “gotten in trouble before” for its business practices, and that “there was a lot of stuff that went around with that,” but that “they keep doing what they’re doing.” However, Lindell continued, “I don’t know what it all involves.” As for Cobalt’s lawsuit against him and MyPillow, Lindell said, “I just don’t want to get out in front of things here. The lawyers are handling that. It’s not my priority right now, I’m trying to run companies and get rid of the electronic voting machines. That’s my focus.” In an email on Monday, Christopher Murray, the attorney representing Cobalt in court, declined to comment on the case, citing firm policy. Merchant cash advances, also called “factoring” arrangements, are not subject to usury laws. The ugly dispute between Lindell and Cobalt dates back to September 16, when Cobalt paid Lindell about $1.5 million for $2.2 million in expected MyPillow receipts, according to the complaint. From that point on, Cobalt would debit MyPillow’s bank account each business day for $45,000, an estimated 7.57 percent of its proceeds, a spreadsheet attached to the complaint shows. Lindell made regular payments through mid-October, for a total of $814,064.76, Cobalt’s complaint states. But it says Lindell suddenly cut off Cobalt’s access to the account, and has prevented it from debiting the rest of the money due under the contract — $1,447,226, plus $200 in blocked payment fees charged by the bank — as agreed. Since then, Lindell, who personally guaranteed the loan and is himself liable for it, has “refused to resume” making payments, according to the complaint. After Lindell launched a personal crusade to “prove” the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, his products were dropped by big box retailers and the cash-strapped MyPillow was evicted from its Minnesota warehouse over unpaid rent. He has been dropped by his attorneys over millions in unpaid fees, ordered by a judge to pay $5 million to a computer programmer who disproved his claims of voter fraud, and continues to battle defamation suits by America’s largest voting machine companies over Lindell’s false allegations. In September, Lindell was sued by a California vendor for ignoring bills adding up to the mid-six-figures. -
so, you're calling for the assassination of Don Jr? wait...the WHITE guy was the one driving the cab? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
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You're a wise man. Pool contractors are notoriously shitty.
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Negative Recruiting Your Own School: The aggy Screenshot Megathread
Gil Bang replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
well, it USED TO BE a fucking total shithole. So it could only get better.. -
uh... fuck it. no CR, posted without comment.
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and, I don't dare CR the music board, but...
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We in the news media and chattering class mocked Jimmy Carter as a country bumpkin, with cartoons depicting him installing an outhouse next to the White House. His public approval dropped to 28 percent, and when Ronald Reagan succeeded him, the Reagans’ interior designer reportedly smirked about the need to “get the smell of catfish out of the White House.” President Carter, a member of Congress lamented in 1979, “couldn’t get the Pledge of Allegiance through Congress.” Rolling Stone described Carter as “the great national sinking feeling.” Ousted after a single term, he wasn’t so much criticized as sneered at. Even Democrats like Bill Clinton treated Carter as an embarrassment who had undermined liberals and paved a path for Reagan. Yet all this speaks to our failure of discernment. Carter, who died Sunday at the age of 100, probably improved the lives of more people over a longer period than any recent president. He was a far better president than is generally acknowledged — and is the only one in modern times who didn’t lose a single soldier to combat (although he did lose eight service members to an air collision during the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran). Carter was also the best-ever ex-president: Hundreds of millions of people around the globe are living better lives because of his relentless efforts to overcome violence and disease. So Carter’s death is a moment to reassess his legacy, but it also is an opportunity to reflect on how we in the news media and the political world got him so wrong and treated him so unfairly. This is not to say that Carter was always saintly, charming or successful. I interacted with him periodically over the decades in person, on the phone or by email, mostly on issues of peace or poverty, and I found he could be tough, headstrong and dismissive; there were times when I said something he disagreed with and he abruptly turned as icy as the Hudson Bay in winter. At times Carter was maddeningly difficult. He adored his wife, Rosalynn, who died in 2023, and championed her heroic efforts to improve America’s mental health care. But when they wrote their first book together, disagreements as they edited each other grew so fraught that they were reduced to communicating via their word processors. “It really was a strain on our marriage,” he acknowledged, and they resolved never to write another book together. I’ve interacted in some form with eight presidents (I first encountered Carter when I was a high school senior covering his run for president in 1976), and Carter stands out in three ways. First, he was less focused on himself than almost any other leader I’ve known. He never sought riches, and he continued to live in the same humble bungalow that he and Rosalynn constructed in 1961 in Plains, Ga. His study was a converted garage. Second, he took on superhuman challenges: Middle East peace, eradication of Guinea worm, energy independence — and, at a personal level, running as an unknown for president. (When he told his mother he was running for president, she supposedly asked, “President of what?” His campaign rented a hotel ballroom for his Iowa campaign kickoff, and just three people came.) Sure, Carter often fell short, but it’s only because he persistently aimed so unreasonably high that we’re talking about him today. Third, he was guided by principles more than politics, and he sought to use his platform to help others. That’s not to say he refused all moral compromises: He wanted to be elected governor of Georgia, so in 1970 he stayed quiet on civil rights and even feigned respect for the segregationist George Wallace. That’s an ethically complicated side of Carter, who believed that repudiating racists “would have been the end of my political career,” as he told Jonathan Alter, the author of an excellent biography of Carter and a contributor to Times Opinion. So he could indeed be calculating, but his aims were loftier than his means, and — imperfectly — he regularly did what he thought was right even when it was politically costly. My admiration for Carter was shaped by seeing him in the field. In 2007, I joined him on a trip to Africa, where he explained his passion for eradicating Guinea worm disease so that it could become the second human ailment, after smallpox, to be eliminated forever. He told me of seeing patients in agony from Guinea worm, which looks like a long white thread of spaghetti and can grow three feet long under the skin. “Little 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children were screaming uncontrollably with pain,” Carter told me. “I cried, along with the children.” I admire a man who seeks out suffering children, weeps unashamedly with them — and then does his utmost to eradicate the parasite that torments them. Perhaps Carter was so empathetic because he was the last president who truly grew up seeing poverty around him. His home had no electricity or running water until he was 11 years old, and he told me that many of the ailments he battled in Africa — such as worms and blinding trachoma — were common in rural Georgia when he was a child. Racism was endemic, and Carter’s father was a staunch segregationist. Yet Carter himself reportedly was the only prominent white man in Plains who refused to join the White Citizens’ Council, and when his church refused to integrate, he left to help found a new one that welcomed everyone. After being elected governor of Georgia in 1970, he placed a portrait of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the State Capitol. As governor, Carter became convinced that a Black woman convicted of murder, Mary Prince, was innocent. After being elected president, he applied to be her parole officer so that he could take her to the White House to work with his family. Many Americans now accept that Carter did fine work as an ex-president but still judge him a failure as president. It’s true that his presidency, from 1977 to 1981, was a dismal time of inflation, recession, the Iran hostage crisis and the humiliating failure of the hostage rescue mission. But I don’t believe Carter is much to blame for those traumas, and it was he who started the process of taming inflation by recruiting Paul Volcker to run the Federal Reserve — even though Carter knew that the result might be a politically damaging recession. It was likewise Carter more than Reagan who deregulated American industry (trucking, airlines and natural gas). Carter could have responded to the hostage crisis with an ultimatum and missiles fired at Iran; some aides thought that was the proper course, and he said he probably would have been re-elected if he had bombed Tehran. But countless innocent Iranians would have died, and the hostages perhaps would then have been executed as well. So Carter resisted that course — even when Rosalynn urged him to consider it. A pioneer, Carter appointed more women and people of color than all previous presidents put together. He put solar panels on the White House roof. (Reagan pulled them down.) He established diplomatic relations with China. If you’re young, you probably don’t know that we faced an emerging crisis over the Panama Canal, one that Carter resolved at considerable political cost. The United States had controlled the Panama Canal, and many Americans were aghast at the idea of giving the area back to Panama. (“We stole it fair and square,” one senator noted.) But keeping the canal would have led to guerrilla resistance, sabotage, economic turmoil and enormous damage to American influence in Latin America, so Carter lanced the boil and negotiated its return. Most important, Carter achieved the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, essentially ensuring Israel’s survival. In the 1973 war, combined Arab armies seriously endangered Israel, but without Egypt, the other Arab armies no longer appeared to constitute the same threat to its existence. So it’s grotesque when Carter is denounced as an antisemite because he criticized Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinians. He arguably did more than any other president in the past half-century to secure Israel’s future. In any case, it was fitting that Carter spoke up for Palestinians, for he was the first president to put human rights forcefully on the global agenda. When you hear governments around the world criticize one another, sometimes hypocritically, for violating human rights, it was Carter who elevated the issue. Is all this the hallmark of a failed presidency? Carter’s favorite president was Harry Truman, likewise a strong-spined man whom many in Washington dismissed as an incompetent rube. But assessments of Truman have risen over the decades, and I’m betting the same will happen with Carter. Truman and Carter share political courage and a personal integrity that — long after political battles are forgotten — we can’t help admiring. After his defeat in 1980, Carter returned to Plains in disappointment and humiliation. He eschewed golf, corporate boards and lucrative speeches. Instead, he took on world peace. His Carter Center helped negotiate peace deals, monitored elections and battled tropical diseases. Carter told me that we conceive of human rights too narrowly as political rights. He believed passionately in a child’s right to health, peace, safety and opportunity, and that’s what he strove to advance. In Liberia, I saw his projects to bring peace and end sexual violence. In Ethiopia and Niger, I saw his work against river blindness. In Haiti, his work against deformity caused by lymphatic filariasis. In South Sudan, his work against Guinea worm. These diseases are devastating to impoverished people. Trachoma is an excruciating way to go blind; one woman told me it was like enduring the pain of childbirth — for years. As for lymphatic filariasis, it leaves people’s legs grotesquely disfigured and causes men’s scrotums to swell so much, they sometimes must carry them on a wheelbarrow. These are the people whose lives Carter has transformed, on a grand scale. In Nigeria alone, the Carter Center helped to treat 32 million people for a devastating parasite that causes a chronic ailment called schistosomiasis. “He redefined public service,” Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, told me. I once asked Carter about prayer — he was an evangelical Christian — and I found his answers illuminating. “I pray often during each day,” he told me. “Prayer helps internally, as a private conversation with my creator.” Carter was then fighting cancer that had spread to his brain and liver, and I assumed he was praying to be cured. But no. He suggested his prayers weren’t so much for recovery as for help in making the best of his condition, in being a follower of Jesus Christ and in being a blessing to others. So how did we get him so wrong? Why were we so unfair? I think one reason was that his presidency felt like a grim time and we wanted someone to blame, and another was that he was an outsider whose aspirations to be virtuous came across to some as sanctimonious. Other presidents concealed affairs, while Carter stepped up simply to confess that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust.” Too much information. One lesson for journalists like me is the danger of tumbling into a narrative that takes on a life of its own. Coverage of Carter came to revolve around the theme of a hapless president overwhelmed by the challenges of his office, and reporters could always find evidence to plug into that (or any) narrative. Carter was once fishing from a boat in a pond in Plains when a rabbit swam frantically for his boat. He used an oar to divert the rabbit, and it swam off. But Carter’s press secretary unwisely mentioned the incident to a reporter, and the upshot was gleeful coverage of a loser president outmatched by a “killer rabbit.” Cartoonists pounced, showing the leader of the free world cowering beneath a terrorist rabbit. The folk singer Tom Paxton caught the moment with a brutal song, “I Don’t Want a Bunny Wunny.” Fortunately for all of us, Carter found refuge from unfair attacks in service to humanity. That doggedness to help people is how I’ll always remember him. On that trip with Carter to Ethiopia, he told me of one of his life ambitions: to outlive the Guinea worm. He wanted to eradicate it from the planet before he died. “I’m determined to live long enough to see no cases of Guinea worm anywhere in the world,” he told me. He probably failed at that bold task, for there were still 14 human cases in 2023. But hold on: The total when Carter took on Guinea worm in 1986 was 3.5 million cases a year. Eradicating Guinea worm disease was quintessentially Carteresque. It wasn’t meant to burnish his legacy. Few had heard of it. Those suffering from it were among the most marginalized people in the world. Eradication was almost unimaginable. That was Carter. He took on herculean tasks and registered imperfect progress that left millions better off. I joined him on that Africa visit because his aides had told me it would be his last big foreign trip. That sounded historic. Upon reaching a remote village, he sat down in his bluejeans, and I began my interview by saying that this was his last major overseas trip. Carter interrupted me and glared. “Whatever would give you that idea?” he asked icily. He seemed to be planning to tour remote Ethiopian villages until perhaps his 200th birthday. No, he didn’t quite manage that. But few did so much to make this planet a better place. A Advertis Advertisement
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Negative Recruiting Your Own School: The aggy Screenshot Megathread
Gil Bang replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
Joan -
The Leopards Eating Faces and Unlubed Dildo of Consequences Thread
Gil Bang replied to Horn Dog's topic in Cloak Room
Sure Elmo. America wasn't "strong" before Spacex and tesla came along. -
Yeah...he did that. https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/jimmy-carter-nuclear-meltdown-clean-up-canada-navy-history
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Similar experience. I was young...23 tops. Took the GF to Vegas for the weekend (4 hour drive for us). Staying at the Imperial Palace, because my dad was friendly with the owner (he bought an Allis-Chalmers (sp?) tractor from the guy...another story for another time). Anyway, the place was VERY popular with Asian folk. As we are about 3rd in line to check in, a couple of tour busses roll up, and about 100 asian are suddenly in the check in line. Some supervisor guy goes "oh shit" and starts running around setting up the pole-and-rope queue lines. I offer to help the guy, and he accepts. Within 3 or 4 minutes we have a satisfactory maze line setup, and he says thanks, and goes back behind the desk. When it's my turn, the girl helping me starts the process, and the supervisor guy pushes he aside and says that he'll help me. We end up with a deluxe suite with a hot tub, etc. all for about 20 bucks a night.
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Who among us doesn't have a brother that's a pain in our ass?
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I wonder about the components. A few years back, GF's son bought a Rav4. The dealer (owner) is a family friend, and he was "assigned" a sales guy by that friend. Sales guy told him hey, we've got 30 on the lot, go pick one out. BTW, the "Xth" character in the VIN is a "C" or a "J". That indicates where the engine was manufactured. GF's son is quite literally married to a woman from China. They met when they both lived in Japan. She insisted on finding one with the "J".
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Negative Recruiting Your Own School: The aggy Screenshot Megathread
Gil Bang replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
is that the place with 99 cent Michelob Light bottles? -
Carter biographer John Alter and I share a close, mutual friend. Here's what Alter wrote today: When I heard the news of Jimmy Carter’s death, I felt a sense of loss for the country and the world. We need his sense of decency and ceaseless commitment to helping other people. But I was also flooded with personal memories — not just of my time with Carter and his family but of the whole process of trying to write a biography of a formidable, complex man who became a world-historical figure. Rather than writing another piece about his legacy, which I did here when he went into hospice in early 2023 and in TIME, I thought I’d take you back to researching and writing the book between 2015 and 2020. The timing was auspicious. When I began my research, the importance of character in the White House was not yet an issue in America. I was working in the Carter Library in Atlanta when Donald Trump came down the escalator on June 16, 2015. MSNBC asked me to go to a studio and comment on his attacks on Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. When I returned to the library, I found that turning the pages of documents that validated Carter’s core values had the effect of brushing away some of the toxins of our times. My book became a kind of balm — and continued providing relief for me in the following years. At the same time, Trump’s election in 2016 gave my Carter project a new urgency — and it kindled a fragile hope that his life story might help light our way back to at least a slightly better politics. I first met Jimmy Carter — for a split-second handshake — on the South Lawn of the White House on the 4th of July, 1978, when I was a college intern in his speechwriting office. In early 1980, like so many Democrats, I grew disillusioned with him. I worked for a few weeks as a part-time volunteer on Ted Kennedy’s campaign against him in the Democratic primaries. That was dumb. Carter wasn’t a bad president, just swamped by cataclysmic events and ideologically trapped: Too conservative for liberals, too liberal for conservatives. Thirty-five years later, I found myself drawn back to a perplexing leader and to his virtuoso achievement— the 1978 Camp David Accords, which brought peace to Israel and Egypt after 2000 years of enmity and became the most durable major treaty of the postwar era. My book group in New York was reading a book about Camp David by Lawrence Wright, and one of our members had worked in Jason Carter’s unsuccessful campaign for governor of Georgia in 2014. He arranged for Jason and the former president to come to our group. Carter was 90 and ridiculously sharp. As he talked about Camp David, the idea of a book took shape. If he pulled that off, I figured, there must be more to him than the easy shorthand — inept president/noble ex-president. Fortuitously, my editor, the late Alice Mayhew, was also Carter’s book editor, and she smoothed the way for lots of access to the Carters and their whole family. When I learned that he would almost certainly have begun to address global warming in the early 1980s had he been reelected, I was hooked. I became a bit obsessed with trying to understand the most misunderstood president in American history. Carter was politically tone-deaf and made plenty of mistakes in office; even as he moved up a few places in the latest historians’ list, he will never be in the top tier of chief executives. But I came to believe he was one of America’s most consequential one-term presidents, with a long list of unheralded achievements and an enduring moral vision. I was surprised to learn that Carter was our greatest environmental president. (Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were also historic conservationists but in the era before efforts to combat industrial pollution). I knew about his human rights policy but had no clue how much change it helped bring worldwide. Many little-known accomplishments — from normalizing relations with China to diversifying the federal judiciary to enacting the whistleblower protections that made the impeachment of Donald Trump possible — have shaped our own time in ways that almost no one connects to Carter. Now, thanks to the publication of a handful of new books, the long goodbye afforded by his time in hospice, and the striking contrast to Trump, more people are beginning to appreciate him, and a broader reappraisal is underway. I hope that interest and appreciation will grow in death. From the start of my research, Carter’s journey from barefoot farm boy to global icon struck me as an American epic. I wanted to understand how he evolved from a short, timid kid nicknamed “Peewee” into an ambitious and born-again governor of Georgia; how — straddling two worlds — he miraculously advanced from obscure outsider to President of the United States; how he stumbled as a leader at the time but succeeded in reinventing himself as a warrior for peace. Carter was warm in public, brisk — sometimes peevish — in private, and decent at his core. Throughout his long life, he passed what his Naval Academy rule book called “the final test of a man”—honesty. Like most politicians, he exaggerated. But he fulfilled his famous promise in his 1976 campaign and never lied to the American people, which is no small thing today. I decided to call my book His Very Best because it reflects not just the title of Carter’s 1975 campaign autobiography (Why Not the Best?) but his intensity and his sense of obligation to God, humanity, and himself. In his daily, even hourly, prayers, he asked not just “What would Jesus do?” but “Have I done my best?” After cantankerous Admiral Hyman Rickover sternly asked the nervous young lieutenant in a job interview if he had done his best at Annapolis — and he confessed that he had not — Carter disciplined himself to make the maximum effort in every single thing he did for the rest of his life. When bestowing the Nobel Peace Prize on Carter in 2002, the chairman of the Nobel committee said. “Carter himself has taken [from Ecclesiastes 11:4] as his motto: ‘The worst thing that you can do is not to try.’ Few people, if any, have tried harder.” Share Whether sprinting as a naval officer through the core of a melted-down nuclear reactor, laboring to save tens of millions of acres of wilderness, driving 100 miles out of his way on rutted roads to talk to a single African farmer, or turkey-hunting at age 95 — Carter was all-in, all the time. Calling him the least-lazy American president is not to damn him with faint praise; the story of his long life should endure as a master class in making every minute count. I interviewed him more than a dozen times in his home, office, over meals, in transit, and by email. I saw him teach Sunday school and helped build a Habitat for Humanity house with him in Memphis. I also interviewed Rosalynn Carter — who was kind enough to share Jimmy’s tender love letters from the navy and portions of her unpublished diaries for the first time. My most memorable interviews took place in Plains, the tiny town in Southwest Georgia that Jimmy and Rosalynn — married for 77 years — always called home. They met there as infants more than nine decades ago. Jimmy’s mother, a nurse, delivered Rosalynn and brought her nearly three-year-old son over to see the new baby. Plains is a friendly place, but I learned of its harsh past, with a county sheriff who Martin Luther King Jr. described as “the meanest man in the world.” I concluded that Carter’s historic focus on human rights abroad has been at least partial atonement for too often ducking brutal abuses of civil rights at home — the white terrorism in his own backyard. Carter’s storied 1976 presidential campaign transformed American politics, but his presidency bogged down for reasons often beyond his control. In his last two years, he was often flailing, buffeted by events, and stripped of the mystery and elan he needed to perform in the theater of the presidency. One day, I asked him to identify the biggest myth about his time in office. He answered: “That I was weak. I made many bold decisions, almost all of which were difficult to implement and not especially popular.” This is true. Carter was not fundamentally weak, though he allowed perceptions of weakness to harden. They have warped our impression of him, obscuring the enduring truth that contemporary unpopularity is often unrelated to larger significance. One of my challenges was to untangle the two and lift Carter from the muck of his times for inspection in the sunshine of historical context. He was the first American president since Thomas Jefferson who could reasonably claim to be a Renaissance Man or at least a world-class autodidact. At various times in his life, he acquired the skills of a farmer, naval officer, electrician, sonar technologist, nuclear engineer, businessman, equipment designer, agronomist, master woodworker, Sunday School teacher, land-use planner, legislator, door-to-door missionary, governor, long-shot presidential candidate, U.S. president, diplomat, fly-fisherman, bird dog trainer, arrowhead collector, home builder, painter, professor, memoirist, poet, novelist, and children's book author — an incomplete list, as he would be happy to point out. Midway through my research, it struck me that Carter was the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: His early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the 19th; he was connected — before, during and after his presidency — to many of the significant events and transformative social movements of the 20th; and the Carter Center he founded is focused on conflict resolution, global health, and strengthening democracy — major challenges of the 21st. Throughout Jimmy Carter’s long life, classmates, colleagues, friends — even members of his own family — found him hard to read. The enigma deepened in the presidency. From my own observations and the people who worked for and with him in Atlanta and Washington, a complicated picture emerges: I concluded that Carter was a driven engineer laboring to free the artist within. He once told me that he could only express his true feelings in his poetry, which he wrote after leaving the presidency. Some of it is quite good. I enjoyed trying to peel back the layers of his complex personality. Carter was a disciplined, driven and incorruptible president equipped with a sharp, omnivorous mind; a calm and adult president —dependable in a crisis — whose religious faith helped keep him focused on saving lives; a friendless president, who in the 1976 primaries had defeated or alienated a good chunk of the Democratic Party; a stubborn and acerbic president, never demeaning but sometimes an SOB; a non-ideological and logic-driven president who worshipped science along with God and saw governing as a series of problem sets; an austere, even spartan president out of sync with profligate American culture; a sometimes-obsessive president whose diamond-cutter attention to detail brought ridicule but also historic results; a charming and formidable president in small groups and when speaking off-the-cuff but often underwhelming — even off-putting — on television, especially when reading prepared texts; an insular, all-business president, allergic to schmoozing, with few devotees beyond his intimate circle of Georgians, in part because — like his father and Admiral Rickover, two of his greatest influences — he rarely spared time for small talk and often had trouble saying “Thank You”; and an unlucky president — hamstrung in Iran by his own humanity — who was committed first to doing what he thought was right in the long-term, with the politics that often imperiled him distinctly secondary to his larger aims. For some in Carter’s orbit, his impatient and occasionally persnickety style — a few dubbed him “the grammarian-in-chief” for correcting their memos — would mean their respect would only turn to reverence and love in later years. Only then did many of those who served in his administration fully understand that he had accomplished much more in office than they knew and that he had done so with passion and foresight they had not fully appreciated at the time. Now, the rest of us are learning that, too.
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prediction: I promise that I haven't seen anything from Trump about this, but I'd wager he'll say something along the likes of "he made a horrible deal for the Panama canal, and now I must fix it".
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are you a fan of Tom Petty? https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/tom-petty-death-biographer-warren-zanes-731414/
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Dotard and Carter...here's what they had in common. Both of them served as POTUS. Aside from that, they are as far apart as two people can be. Carter was intelligent, humble, dedicated to service, and devout in his faith. Trump...well, he's none of those things.
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