Former John McCain presidential campaign advisor Steve Schmidt pushed back against Chris Matthews on tonight's Hardball when the latter whipped out his tired Bush-caused-ISIS talking point.
Jimmy Carter
By Mark Finkelstein | December 11, 2015 | 7:38 AM EST
Jon Meacham is no conservative. The Pulitzer-winning historian is, after all, a former editor of Time and Newsweek. Which makes his declaration about President Obama that much more damning.
Asked on today's Morning Joe for a historical analogy to Barack Obama, Meacham harkened back to Jimmy Carter: "three years into his administration, [Carter] giving a speech about this very subject, saying that there was a crisis of the American spirit . . . And a lot of people thought that there wasn't a crisis in the American spirit, there was a crisis in the American presidency. And I think that's the analogy that comes to my mind."
By Tom Blumer | November 16, 2015 | 4:22 PM EST
The obvious pull quote of the day from President Obama's contentious press conference in Antalya, Turkey is this statement: "What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with ..." Obama then claimed that any ideas coming from those who believe in such a notion have "no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people and to protect the people in the region."
Ed Driscoll at PJ Media believes that these words are "the president’s equivalent of Carter’s malaise speech" in the 1970s. Just in case he's right, related stories at the Associated Press and the New York Times have not mentioned Obama's statement, a clear indicator of his lack of genuine resolve, in their coverage.
New 'Hardball' Promo Voiced By Chris Matthews Celebrates Ted Kennedy As 'Lion' That Roared; He 'Keep[s] Me Going Non-Stop'
By Ken Shepherd | November 10, 2015 | 4:44 PM EST Chris Matthews has voiced over a new MSNBC Hardball promo which, among other things, hails the late Ted Kennedy as a paragon of statesmanship, a "great" "leader" a "lion" who "keep[s] me going non-stop."
By Tom Johnson | November 3, 2015 | 9:41 PM EST
Wednesday is the thirty-sixth anniversary of the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran. Moreover, it is the thirty-fifth anniversary of what D.R. Tucker calls “one of the great tragedies in American history”: the election of Ronald Reagan as president. (The two events are, of course, related.)
Tucker asserted in a Sunday post that “Reagan’s election nearly destroyed this country” and commented, “Sometimes you have to wonder if the folks who cast their ballot for Reagan…really knew what they were doing. Did they realize what sort of ideology they would inflict upon this country and world over the course of the next thirty-five years? Did they understand that they were, in effect, voting to hold back the hopes and diminish the dreams of their children and grandchildren?”
By Curtis Houck | August 21, 2015 | 12:56 PM EDT
During a segment on Thursday’s The Last Word about Jimmy Carter’s cancer diagnosis, MSNBC national correspondent Joy Reid complained that voters rejected “Carter’s decency and goodness” in the 1980 presidential election in favor of the “bluster” possessed by “cowboy” Ronald Reagan.
By Kyle Drennen | August 20, 2015 | 12:48 PM EDT
After former President Jimmy Carter criticized “the government of Israel” during a Thursday press conference for having “no desire for a two-state solution” with the Palestinians, MSNBC Hardball host and former Carter speechwriter Chris Matthews hailed his old boss: “...he stuck it to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. Why not?...He might as well stick it to the guys who’ve caused him trouble, as he’s seen it, especially Netanyahu. Why not stick it to Netanyahu? He deserves it.”
By Sarah Stites | July 24, 2015 | 2:04 PM EDT
It’s old news that Jimmy Carter believes Jesus would support gay marriage and some abortion. But Fox News? Well, Carter doesn’t like that.
Earlier this week, NY Times reporter Philip Galanes sat down for lunch with the former president and black author Jacqueline Woodson to discuss issues of race and religion, including the confederate flag, black-white relations and same-sex marriage.
By Brent Baker | July 18, 2015 | 6:04 PM EDT
Watching the latest installment of CNN’s The Seventies documentary series, I learned President Gerald Ford was a “conservative” and President Jimmy Carter was a victim the misperception that he made mistakes, endured bad luck and inherited an “unmanageable” nation and world.
By Andrew Miller | July 7, 2015 | 2:33 PM EDT
Liberals love to define the bible the way they want. This time it was the 39th U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
About half way through the interview on Huffington Post Live, Carter was asked his opinion of gay marriage, to which he gave the obligatory, “That’s no problem with me. You know, I think everybody should have the right to get married regardless of their sex.”
By Mark Finkelstein | July 7, 2015 | 8:47 AM EDT
From the man who brought you malaise, now an even more depressingly negative view of America . . . On today's Morning Joe, Jimmy Carter declared that America is in "inevitable decline."
But no finger-pointing at President Obama, please: Carter declared that the decline is "not because of any defect or fault on the part of the President of the United States." Cue the Cole Porter: it's just one of those things.
Blogger Jonathan Chait: Thanks to Reagan’s Moderation and Bush’s Unpopularity, GOP Has No ‘Usable Past’
By Tom Johnson | May 14, 2015 | 2:26 PM EDT There’s been plenty of mockery of the three actual or potential Republican presidential candidates who named Ronald Reagan as the greatest living president, but New York magazine's Chait feels their pain, sort of.
Chait observed in a Wednesday post that GOPers are in a bind when choosing the best living POTUS given that 1) for obvious reasons, they wouldn’t pick Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton; 2) George H. W. Bush “betrayed Reaganism”; and 3) George W. Bush suffered a “second-term collapse into deep unpopularity” despite “govern[ing] in a more consistently conservative fashion than Reagan had.”