The more things change. . . [View all]

We seem to be plagued by short memories around here.

Somehow many of us have managed to forget that our current president did not don a flight suit and land on an aircraft carrier to declare "mission accomplished" in a war that should never have been waged.

Somehow many of us have managed to forget that Osama bin Laden was finally dealt with by this current president, just as many have forgotten that Libya did not turn out, in spite of their fiery prognostications otherwise, to be another Iraq.

Too damned many, who not so long ago railed against the shoot-from-the-hip-bring-it-on mentality of George Bush, now look at a president who has a solid reputation for not behaving in such fashion and accuse him of doing exactly that anyway.

Today, President Obama is caught in the swirling mess that is Syria. People here are either castigating him as an unprincipled warmonger or a cold-hearted bastard willing to let innocents die in order to preserve his own legacy. People who damned well should know better are laying at his feet the threat of crumbling national credibility.

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Somewhere in my files there’s a letter from a member of Jimmy Carter’s White House staff. It’s a simple note thanking me for writing, and letting me know that the President appreciated the kind words.

This was long before the internet and I didn’t own a typewriter, so my letter to President Carter had been written longhand on lined notebook paper. I’d written to express my thoughts following the helicopter crash in the failed attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran.

The news was full of sound bytes from outraged politicos who were loudly rebuking the President for the episode and pretty much blaming him for everything under the sun. So, I began my letter by introducing myself as a Republican who had not voted for him (true at that time). Then I told him how disgusted I was by all those politicians who were using the tragedy of the failed rescue as an excuse to berate him, that it was my opinion that, had the rescue succeeded, they would have made just as much noise trying to claim the credit.


Today I've been thinking about that long-ago correspondence. And I'm thinking that, had DU been around at the time, there would have been those determined, under many guises, to be relentlessly vicious toward Jimmy Carter.