Posted on 02/24/2013 12:58:25 PM PST by Rennes Templar
Only a few weeks ago, Lincoln was assumed to be the surefire winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. Not since Gregory Peck in 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird has an actor performed with the unforgettable gravitas of Daniel Day-Lewis playing Abraham Lincoln in the months before his assassination. But a funny thing happened when the horses turned the bend at the Golden Globe Awards.
Argo, based on a CIA-led rescue mission in 1980 that smuggled six American diplomats out of Tehran at the tail end of Carter’s presidency, suddenly has all the Oscar momentum. And, in a serendipitous way, Hollywood is according some newfound respect to the Man from Plains. It is a happy coincidence that Argo came out within months of Carter’s grandson, James Carter IV, releasing Mitt Romney’s idiotic (and now infamous) 47 percent speech in Boca Raton. This political leak, combined with the release of the film, has turned the ex-president into a new cult favorite among many Democrats who had previously been disenchanted with him over some of his recent views on Middle Eastern affairs.
While it is true that there is no such thing as a Carter Democrat, historians are starting to see our 39th president as a flawed, yet visionary leader. Everyone knows he should have won a Nobel Peace Prize back in 1979 for negotiating the historic Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. And he has received a lifetime of kudos for injecting human rights into our diplomatic parlance. His post-presidential work with the Carter Center fighting guinea-worm disease, river blindness, and other plagues has likewise turned him into a global humanitarian folk hero. But a number of other aspects of Carter’s White House tenure are starting to likewise be favorably remembered.
In both his Second Inaugural Address and his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama evoked climate change as the ultimate challenge of the 21st century. But it was Carter who first crusaded for the U.S. to wean itself off of its dependence on oil. As president, he signed into law the National Energy Act and the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act (both of which championed conservation and domestic energy supply development). Long before it was trendy, Carter preached the gospel of alternative energy. He even created the U.S. Department of Energy, in part to inspire new wind-solar-fuel-cell alternatives to oil and coal. Stones were thrown his way in response. One of the first things Ronald Reagan did upon assuming the presidency in 1981 was to tear down the solar panels that Carter had installed on the White House’s roof. Carter – Mr. Clean Energy – had become the butt of innumerable jokes. But, in hindsight, he was right to worry fiercely about our dangerous addiction to fossil fuels.
What’s also making Carter’s rehabilitation interesting is the “I didn’t know that” factor. Carter, for example, almost doubled the size of the National Park Service as president. Only Theodore Roosevelt and FDR were his equal in the conservation realm. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 alone created or expanded 15 National Park Service sites, and 79.5 million protected acres. If it weren’t for Carter, wild Alaska today would be despoiled beyond recognition.
Carter also deserves credit for establishing Channel Islands National Park in Southern California, the favorite marine paradise of many in the movie industry, and for protecting the Dakota Badlands from ruin. Additionally, his Superfund law has led to the cleanup of dozens of toxic waste sites throughout the country. In my estimation, the greatest environmental speech ever delivered to Congress was Carter’s stunningly prescient May 23, 1977 message.
And Carter was the avatar of mass-transit. The railroad industry was collapsing from regulatory roadblocks, price controls and trucking lobby influence on Capital Hill when he became president. Carter's deregulation saved America's trains from bankruptcy. Perhaps, even more importantly, Carter deregulated the telecommunications world, spearheading the cable TV, cell phone and Internet revolutions.
~snip~
Douglas Brinkley is Professor of History at Rice University and CBS News Historian.
Wow what a bad piece. Having seen Argo it’s fairly agnostic on Carter. The rest of this piece is just garbage. Carter is a despicable human being. I don’t care how many houses he built.
The only thing they gave him credit for was negotiating until the end of his presidency. They studiously avoided saying his negotiations accomplished nothing. That’s the hard part about the Carter presidency for a lib, it’s hard to give him credit for anything since he never came close to accomplishing anything.
That is true on one level, but they can change history for the young and ignorant, and they do.
The RATO equipped Herk (Credible Sport) came after the Desert One fiasco, as part of a planned second rescue that would have seen the hostages assembled at a Tehran soccer stadium and taken out on the modified Herks.
I liked Argo, and apart from the petty self serving narration by Carter at the end ( which definitely detracted from the movie) it really does him no favors. To the point of showing his Administration as roadblocksto the actual extraction. Yes, I know that Argo is to the rescue what what U-571 was so the capture of an Enigma device, but it shows the CIA officer ignoring the political orders of the Carter White House and then his immediate superior havingto resort to tradecraft to circumvent the politics of the situation and get immediate approval from the WH Chief of Staff (ol’ Ham comes across as the WH hero, not his boss) to support an operation that is already in motion.
True. We have work to do.
Yes, it was an OK story.
The liberals are good at story-telling...that's why they're in the arts field.
I read their books, watch their movies and like to see how they're trying to skew things. And I do learn a lot of history while doing it...about places, time periods, etc. It's just that I always conclude the opposite of what they're trying to preach politically.
I know. One has to be a fugitive of pop culture. I like to keep a toe in just to see and also explain - have kids to educate. We have a strong American and western civ history around here, you do too I guess.
It’s resistance of brainwashing. Gives us a sense of what the kids are up against in college. It’s brutal.
All dramatizations of historical events have composite characters and add additional events for dramatic flourish.
Hew liberal is Ben Affleck? He never really struck me as anything other than a garden variety democrat. He never preaches about anything.
Argo took it way further than that.
Give me an example of a scripted drama that satisfies the veracity test?
embellishing the truth is different from an outright lie
embellishing the truth is different from an outright lie
lol I like that picture better.
Historical events depicted dramatically just about never shy away from what one could call lies. Shakespeare’s History plays, War and Peace, Amadeus...
Alan Arkin? I watched it last night how did I miss Alen Arkin?
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