Maybe the rule only counts with elected presidents, not supreme court apointed ones…Maybe it would be wrong if Carter publically disagreed with Gore…
Um, hello, Camp David accord?
And post-presidency, Habitat for Humanity, working tirelessly for humanitarian causes?
:rolleyes:
Oh, and didn’t Teddy Roosevelt criticize both Taft and Wilson?
:: Astounded yet again at Duckie’s search skills ::
Damn, girl! Google needs to take your last name, the way you’ve turned it into your bitch. People would pay you to do that for them.
And when Duck Duck Goose Corp. needs legal representation, you know who to call. 
Okay, december, I’ve heard bad things about you, how extreme you are, etc. I kinda just blew it off and ignored you for the most part. But this time you’ve gone too far. No one bashes my man Jimmy Carter.
Wait a second, everyone bashes him.
I love you Pres. Carter! I don’t care what they say!
Anyway, you’re mad because he isn’t in agreement with Bush? Those of you who are pro Iraq, let me ask you this: What has Iraq done that we haven’t?
They have weapons of mass destruction.
So do we!!
They ignore the UN
ahem…
They are ruled by a non-elected power…Wait, that’s us!!
Crimes against their own people…
Oh wait.
What about Ford? Seems like a nice guy. He was a collegiate football player, might be a good guy to toss back a beer with and catch a game. He didn’t do anything shady. Pardoning Nixon was something he felt he had to do to put the whole incident behind us, so we could move on.
I’d let Clinton into my house, but I don’t have a wife or daughters, so it wouldn’t be a huge risk.
I don’t think the elder Bush would come into my house, since I went to a public university, so I’m beneath him. The younger Bush seems like a fun guy, we could party…I’d definitely tell him to come if he brought his daughters 
Reagan would never remember the directions to my house, so it wouldn’t come up.
I guess I’m just not as bitter, I don’t hold people to very high standards. I think most people are nice and kind, and I could be friends with just about anyone. I don’t really hold anything against someone unless they did it to me personally or a close friend of mine.
DDG, I am certainly aware of other presidential “scandals”, including Teapot Dome, and the shady dealing with Johnson over the end of Reconstruction. I was a history major, I have a degree in it, I had to take plenty of American history. I just think of those corrupt presidents as brief exceptions along the way. I think most presidents were honest and well-intentioned. My personal opinion regarding Iran-Contra and the Clinton scandals is that there isn’t much there. The people who grew up in the Watergate era are predisposed to suspect wrongdoing in the White House, so the media ends up digging and digging for scraps to feed the willing public.
Consider the possibility that you’ve grown up under a deluge of media information about scandals, so that when a real one comes along, you’re burned out?
If the Clinton scandals–plural–were “not much there”, why was he impeached? Rex, there was an actual trial.
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/resources/1998/lewinsky/
How old were you in 1998? How much of that do you remember?
Iran-Contra–look at all these people who were lined up and charged with felonies. You don’t thing it’s a big deal for government officials to be convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury?
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/summpros.htm
“Desensitized”, that’s the word I was looking for. You’re so used to hearing about scandals in Washington that you’re desensitized.
It’s just a convention, December, it doesn’t have to be codified. Decent men, when they hand over the keys to their successors, have always understood that they’re supposed to get offstage and stay out of the way. When your turn is over, you go home. It doesn’t need to be written down somewhere.
Everybody seemed to understand it instinctively, from George Washington on down.
Make a list for me of the specific things that Jimmy Carter did or said since January 1981 that you would consider “not going home”.
RexDart: Well, OK. Maybe Ford, but I’d have to hide all the breakables first. But if Ronald Reagan showed up at my front door, I’d greet him with a shotgun. Okay, first I’d have to have him wait while I ran out and bought a shotgun, but then… No, first I’d ask him how he cured himself of Alzheimers, then I’d ask him to wait while I bought a shotgun, and then I’d greet him at the door with it. Anyway. Reagan bad. I was, what, fourteen when he left office? And I still bear a considerable grudge. Nixon I’d let into my house before Ronald Reagan. I’ve got nothing but mild comtempt for the two Bushes, and I’m still bitter about Clinton lying to the American people. Not about the sex thing, I don’t blame him for that. I’m pissed at him for lying about being a Democrat.
I don’t really think that we’ve just had a bad run of presidents lately. I think they’re fairly good exemplars of the breed. Maybe it was different in the earliest days of our country, when we were still a minor, jumped-up bunch of colonials, but with very few exceptions, I think the nature of the office is to attract either the power-hungry or the easily manipulated. The genius of the American political system is that you get so many villains pulling in opposite directions, the end result is a tolerable middle ground.
Let me add…And we’ve used ours twice!!
The point is just what my question asks; seems simple enough to comprehend. Your OP seems to imply that Carter cannot and should not speak against the policies of a sitting president. You gave no reason in the OP as to why you believe this to be so. In later responses, you talk vaguely about some “tradition” of former presidents not criticising current presidents. I am simply trying to determine what your position really is. Should only former presidents be gagged from public dissent, or do you peresonally feel that no citizen should criticize the policies of a sitting president? If that question is too difficult for you to understand, I’ll propose a simpler one: does your OP have anything at all to do with the fact that the sitting president is Republican and the former president a Democrat? Take all the time you need.
Especially as one as smart and experinced as Bush.
:rolleyes:
december that has to be the lamest post you have done in w hile (which is saying something). You are no Fox News, that’s for sure.
Am I understanding this correctly? Is december saying that Carter should forfeit his civil right to freedom of speech because of some “tradition”?
Big mistake. Zombie ex-presidents make a horrible mess, and that deadbeat made 3 long distance phone calls from my house. I was ready to impeach his non-living ass myself when that phone bill came. . . .
The only instance here of anyone saying that anyone else does not have a right to a public expression of opinion is december’s denial of that right to President Carter. There’s no fool like an old fool, apparently.
But we can still support our troops without supporting the President, right, Trent?
An entire list? I’ll start with one.
In 1994, Carter was President Clinton’s representative, negotiating with North Korea, who was trying to develop nuclear arms. A recall columnist who recently opined that Carter took considerable initiative, first in pushing himself forward to “help” and later in moving the US toward the agreement that Clinton and North Korea eventually signed.
Of course, this agreement resulted in a mad dictator acquiring nuclear weapons, a bad result for not only the United States and potentialy other countries as well.
El_Kabong, note that Clinton and Carter are both Democrats.
Trion – No. No.
From what I’ve read on the subject (here’s a Wikipedia synopsis for the history impaired), North Korea was on track with it’s plutonium bomb production long before the 1994 crisis. If you’re going to blame anyone for that cockup it should be Bush the greater, or Ronald before him, not the poor bastards who got stuck with trying to clean up the results of someone else’s foreign policy blunders.
Squink, your cite says,
So, you’re back to Carter again.
Seriously, whatever blame you want to assess President Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr., there’s no doubt that the 1994 Carter-Clinton agreement failed in its effort to prevent NK from getting nukes.
There certainly is a precedent for ex-presidents to refrain from criticizing sitting presidents, but it has often been ingnored. Pretty much every campaign cycle. As noted above T. Roosevelt was always good for a sound bite.
BUT
Here is what Carter said:
Carter did not directly criticize the Bush administration, saying instead, for example, that his views on Iraq were “completely compatible, at least at this point” with those of the White House
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32620-2002Dec9.html
As noted later in the article, he walked a fine line and it good be argued that his comments were in way of advice to the president, something for which there is a great deal of precedent.