Home » Carter/Obama, Tehran/Benghazi, 1980/2012

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Carter/Obama, Tehran/Benghazi, 1980/2012 — 17 Comments

  1. One bit of often forgotten information is that the hostages were taken November 4, 1979. The importance of this is that election day 1980 fell on the one year anniversary of the hostage taking (November 4, 1980), so it was hard not to notice the Carter presidency’s failure when on election day itself the media was reporting that American diplomats had been held one full year.

    Today, I guess, they would ingore the anniversary entirely. Hostages, what hostages? Benghazi attack, what Benghazi attack?

  2. Maybe this is a stretch, but isn’t there also a parallel between our current administration’s intentional misrepresentation of the Benghazi attack and the Spain’s 2004 national election?

  3. Carter wanted to avoid killing Iranians, so he had insisted that if a hostile crowd formed during the raid, Delta should attempt to control it without shooting people

    Proof positive that Carter was a bedwetter. Most Americans wanted to shoot the place up.

    Coexist, indeed.

  4. I have nothing positive to say about Carter’s presidency, but he now looks magnanimous and competent when compared to BHO’s pettiness and ineptitude.

    “Most Americans wanted to shoot the place up.”

    I favored extracting the hostages and bombing until the rubble jumped.

  5. I have nothing positive to say about Carter’s presidency, but he now looks magnanimous and competent when compared to BHO’s pettiness and ineptitude.

    Carter was a bumbling fool, but no one ever doubted his patriotism. His competence, and his judgment, sure, but not his patriotism.

    I’d take Carter in a heartbeat over Obama.

  6. “I’d take Carter in a heartbeat over 0bama”.

    As would I. I even voted for the putz once, in 1976, before I knew what an assclown he was. First and last time I voted for a Democrat for prez, incidentally.

    What Carter, 0bama, et al. don’t grasp, as Chamberlain didn’t before, is that our enemies will hate us regardless of how much we may try to appease them. If we try to spare their lives or feelings, they’ll despise us as well. Far better that they fear us, and live in dread that the next moment may be their last. But that’s not happening right now.

  7. Occam’s Beard writes, “Most Americans wanted to shoot the place up.” That isn’t entirely correct.

    After the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran, a large poster appeared in the Ready Room for VT-10, the US Navy’s NFO aviation training squadron at Naval Air Station Pensacola, FL.

    It read: “REVIVE AMERICA’S GLASS MAKING INDUSTRY. USE THE SILVER BULLET ON IRAN.”

    I think that the sentiment was very common among both the students and the instructors.

  8. Carter turned me from a liberal to a conservative. He was living proof, the classroom demonstration, the prima facie evidence, the QED that liberal ideas are failed ideas. For that I thank Carter endlessly. Without him I might have been a fool my whole life. So despite being an assclown, fool and bedwetter himself, he still did some good for somebody. I am pondering what Obama is teaching me now and it’s really scary.

  9. The basic problem here is that the post-1968 Democrats have bought almost entirely to the view of America as having been a brutal oppressor in the 3rd world. They believe we can only change that image by rolling over and showing our bellies. The believe that any use of force will always be worse than not using it even if that means Americans must die.

    The problem with this is that our enemies don’t think like leftwing liberal-arts college professors. Our enemies rise to power by killing and oppressing their own and they develop a brutal morality to justify their actions. Since they only back down and show compassion when they are weak, they assume that we do as well. They interpret any hesitation to kill the innocent as signs of degeneration, internal division, cowardice and overall weakness.

    Carter and Obama simply cannot understand or relate to anyone not of their own Western subculture. They can’t understand cultures, ideologies or movements that venerate ruthlessness so when confronted by them, they don’t know what to do.

  10. I heard one rumor many years ago that one of the options presented for Teheran involved daisy cuttersto isolate tharea around the embassy and open LZs in a bit of a protos shock and awe, with fullscale air assault into the city.

  11. No argument with any of the points raised. Point of history though, the hostages were held for 444 days.

  12. “Point of history though, the hostages were held for 444 days.”

    This is true. The hostages were released on the day of Reagan’s inauguration – January 20, 1981.

  13. neo, another reason to think this might have turned out badly had they made it to Tehran is that this mission’s failure is one of the reasons we have our current Special Ops organizational structure. We can do thing now, thirty some years later, because it is thirty years later, and there have been many, many lessons well learned in that tme.

  14. I knew one of those who died in the desert leaving one son and his wife pregnant with twins. It was all so political and wrong.

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