Tag: Jimmy Carter

‘Our long national nightmare. …’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
The Wolf Moon. What a howler.

… is not over.

It wasn’t over on Aug. 9, 1974, when Gerald R. Ford trotted out that boogeyman-be-gone bullshit upon assuming the presidency vacated by Richard M. Nixon, a rat fleeing the ship of state he did his best to sink.

And Ford went on to be even more stunningly full of shit when he added:

Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. 

A month later, Ford finally achieved escape-velocity, bullshit-wise, when he granted “a full, free and absolute pardon” to his predecessor, a man whom Hunter S. Thompson called “so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.”

Some of us thought that was as bad as it was ever going to get.

Ho, ho, as the Good Doktor would say. We were wrong.

We have elevated some remarkably stupid, ineffectual, and/or venal hombres to the presidency since then. Not Ford, though. Nobody voted him into the gig, but he certainly got voted out in ’76 when the nation decided, well, fuck it, they’d rather have a Georgia peanut farmer in the Oval Office than the knucklehead who waved Tricky Dicky off to San Clemency with nothing but his pension and related benefits to keep him warm in retirement.

And even now, when we appear to have reached our political nadir, the creaky national machinery in the tiny palsied handsies of a senile, shambling, burger-gobbling narcoleptic, a convicted felon with a mean streak a mile wide and an unquenchable thirst for wealth, power, and vengeance, who apparently has a joy buzzer installed in his diapers so an aide can shock him awake, however briefly, to unleash a torrent of non sequiturs to be dutifully chronicled, analyzed, and excreted by the press corpse, well … I’m not about to tell you that this is as bad as it’s ever going to get.

Pogo — himself a candidate for the presidency in 1952 and ’56 — hit the nail on the head back in 1971, when Tricky Dicky was still kneewalking drunk around the White House, arguing with the paintings and looking for an exit that didn’t involve a perp walk in cuffs. Had we insisted upon it, we might have been spared some of what was to come.

But we didn’t. And so it goes.

“We have met the enemy and he is us,” said Pogo. Truer words, etc.

R.I.P., Jimmy Carter

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
President Jimmy Carter. Photo: LBJ Library and Museum

Jimmy Carter went west on Sunday. He was 100.

It seems appropriate for him to pass on the Lord’s day off. I expect the Big Fella wanted to supervise the welcome wagon Himself.

Jimmy had a rough ride in the White House, but he may have been our best ex-president ever. George Washington is right up there for refusing to let a grateful nation king him. But ol’ Jimmy just kept on doing the people’s business, often with his own two hands, well into his 90s. The New York Times has an extensive obituary.

And he hung on long enough to vote against the pestilence-elect. It wasn’t enough, but we must consider it his last full measure of devotion.

I never voted for him. I went for Peter Camejo (Socialist Workers Party) in 1976, though Hunter S. Thompson had pronounced himself impressed by Jimmy in a lengthy screed in Rolling Stone that was republished in his collection “Gonzo Papers Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt.” Four years later, I voted for independent John Anderson in an Arizona newsroom full of young Reagan Republicans, and then fled the joint like a rat out of a garbage fire.

But damme if I don’t wish I had voted for Jimmy, at least once. Peace to him, his family, and friends.