Tag Archives: President Jimmy Carter

It’s Only Okay When They Do It

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Night two of the Republican National Convention was good television. It moved quickly and changed the subject often enough to keep the audience interested. Some of it was very touching. Therefore it is no surprise that the mainstream media and the political left (actually they are the same people) are very upset. They are looking for any way to counter the message that is getting out–that America is good and America is open to anyone who wants to come here legally and succeed.

Breitbart posted an article about some of the reaction yesterday. I sense desperation.

The article reports:

The left fumed over a naturalization ceremony aired during the Republican National Convention’s (RNC) second night that featured President Trump and Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf welcoming five new citizens to America.

Former Obama administration official Wendy Sherman tweeted that the ceremony was a “horror”:

These are two of the tweets:

I can honestly say that I do not understand their gripe. The people involved told their stories and took their oath. New legal citizens should be something celebrated by all Americans under any circumstances.

The article continues and concludes:

However, Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty — a critic of Trump — wrote that Trump would not be the first president to partake in political activities in the White House, citing former Presidents Jimmy Carter and President Ronald Reagan. She wrote:

With the Republican convention all but canceled because of the covid-19 pandemic, President Trump has been toying with the idea of formally accepting his party’s nomination from the White House — a prospect that has brought howls of outrage from Democrats.

…

But while Trump has shown little respect for norms, he would not be the first president to use the White House — or even the Oval Office — as the backdrop for a signature campaign event.
In December 1979, Jimmy Carter deemed that a more lavish announcement would not be appropriate amid a crisis in which 50 Americans were being held hostage in Tehran — so he declared that he was running for reelection in a somber nine-minute ceremony in the East Room. ‘As president and as a candidate, I will continue to ask you to join me in looking squarely at the truth,’ he said. ‘Only by facing up to the world as it is can we lift ourselves towards a better future.’

Carter’s campaign even made ads from the Oval Office. In the fall of 1980, during an intense race against former California governor Ronald Reagan, Carter’s campaign broadcast a four-minute spot that showed him in a darkened presidential office. A beam of overhead light angled onto Carter’s face as he warned about the dangers of nuclear war. “In this office, I’ve worked in the arms-control tradition of seven presidents, Democrat and Republican,” he said. “Before you vote, please look carefully into this deep chasm that divides Governor Reagan and myself on this issue.”

Tumulty also wrote that Reagan also used the Oval Office as a backdrop for his reelection announcement on January 29, 1984.

“So would it be all that much of a break with precedent for Trump to accept his party’s nomination somewhere on the White House grounds? I, for one, think the White House makes more sense than anywhere else and would nod to the fact that caution should be keeping everyone at home during the covid-19 pandemic,” she added.

I know this is the silly season in politics, but sometimes the pettiness amazes me.

Calling His Bluff

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Jim Acosta has been very vocal during the President’s briefings on the coronavirus. At one point when President Trump stated that he thought that voting by mail is an invitation to fraud, Jim Acosta demanded evidence. Well, the President obliged.

Breitbart posted an article yesterday with some examples.

The article reports:

Trump replied, “I think there’s a lot of evidence, but we’ll provide you with some, okay?”

The president’s re-election campaign responded quickly to Acosta’s request, noting there were nine people charged in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas with “vote harvesting” and mail ballots, a political operative in New York stealing and submitting absentee ballots, and a resident in Pennsylvania receiving seven separate ballots in the mail.

The campaign also shared a Heritage Foundation document of over 1,000 proven cases of vote fraud.

“Democrats and the mainstream media always scoff at claims of voter fraud, but then completely ignore evidence from across the country,” Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement. “The obvious reason is that Democrats are just fine with the possibility of voter fraud. And many in the media just see the world their way.”

The Trump campaign also quoted an election expert in the New York Times who said although election fraud was rare, “the most common type of such fraud in the United States involves absentee ballots” through the mail.

President Trump cited ongoing legal action from Judicial Watch forcing states to clear millions of ineligible voter registrations within 90 days as proof of voter fraud.

The White House also shared details of 2005 commission led by President Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush’s secretary of state James A. Baker III that concluded mail-in ballots “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

“Outside those in the establishment media who are more interested in attacking the President than the facts, there’s a clear consensus that universal mail-in voting would be vulnerable to fraud,” a White House source told Breitbart News in a statement.

Every fraudulent vote cancels the vote of an American citizen who has the right to vote. The examples above are only one of many reasons why instead of voting by mail, we need voter id laws that require photo identification to vote. That will not entirely solve the voter fraud problem, but it will go a long way in that direction.

I’m Grateful We Didn’t Know About This When It Happened

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On Tuesday The Daily Telegraph posted a story about some events in the White House during the Clinton presidency.

The article reports:

For several months during Bill Clinton’s administration, a former top military officer says the White House lost the card with a set of numbers for opening the briefcase containing the codes for a nuclear attack.

Gen Hugh Shelton, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, said in his new memoir, “Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior” that “the codes were actually missing for months. That’s a big deal – a gargantuan deal.”

…A similar claim was made by Lt Col Robert Patterson, a former aide, in a book published seven years ago. He was one of the men who carried the briefcase, known as the “football”, and he said that the morning after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke that he made a routine request of the president to present the card so that he could provide an updated version.

“He thought he just placed them upstairs,” Lt Col Patterson recalled.

“We called upstairs, we started a search around the White House for the codes, and he finally confessed that he in fact misplaced them. He couldn’t recall when he had last seen them.”

The article also notes:

Former president Jimmy Carter was rumoured to have once left the “biscuit” in a suit that was sent to the dry cleaners.

Please follow the link above to the article–there are some very interesting quotes at the end. Meanwhile, it seems as if the people concerned about Donald Trump having the nuclear codes might want to check the skeletons in their own closets.

We’ve Seen This Play Before

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We have seen this play before–only last time it was non-fiction and this time it is fiction.

Hopefully this will be the last article I write about the Russians affecting the Presidential election.

First of all, let’s review some of the information about the information that was leaked from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the election. There have been a number of articles quoting reliable sources saying the leaks came from inside the DNC and had nothing to do with the Russians. There are also stories that point out that if the Democrats had not rigged their primary election, there would have been nothing to leak. You can find articles here and here.

The second article, from WSB-TV in Atlanta states the following about another recent cyber attack:

But the claim by the Democrats that the Russians interfered with an American election is interesting from a historical perspective.

The Daily Signal posted an article today reminding us of some past events. The article reminds us:

Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy had “selfish political and ideological motives” when he made secret overtures to the Soviet Union’s spy agency during the Cold War to thwart then-President Ronald Reagan’s re-election, a Reagan biographer said in an interview with The Daily Signal.

When they came to light years later, Kennedy’s secret contacts with the Russians through their KGB spy agency in the early 1980s didn’t cause nearly the tizzy that Russia’s alleged interference with this year’s election has for President-elect Donald Trump among liberal activists and reporters.

…As this reporter wrote in 2010, the story focused on a 1983 document from the spy agency detailing Kennedy’s overtures to top officials in the former Soviet Union. The Massachusetts Democrat had challenged President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic primaries and was considering the possibility of running again for president.

In a letter addressed to then-Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov, dated May 14, 1983, KGB head Viktor Chebrikov explained that Kennedy was eager to “counter the militaristic policies” of Reagan, who defeated Carter as the Republican nominee, and to undermine his prospects for re-election in 1984.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. This story makes the Democratic charges that the Russians influenced the 2016 election laughable. It is also important to remember that while the Democrats are screaming about Russian involvement, they are ignoring the damaging content of the emails. Even if the Russians leaked the emails, they didn’t write them. What was in the emails was a problem–leaking them only exposed the problem–it didn’t create it. As the saying goes, “Never put anything in an email that you wouldn’t want your mother to read in the headline of The New York Times.”