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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

And is thus reviled in retrospect by the US public for being too smart.

Carter isn't generally reviled for being too smart. The number one thing that he's reviled for (maybe unfairly) is planning and botching a hostage rescue attempt that turned out to be pointless later when the hostages were freed by their captors.

In the West he's also disliked for being viewed as being anti-dam building during the biggest dam building spree in history.

> The number one thing that he's reviled for (maybe unfairly) is planning and botching a hostage rescue attempt that turned out to be pointless later when the hostages were freed by their captors.

Strictly speaking, I think he was reviled because the rescue attempt came late and didn't work. He made a joke within the last year - when announcing his cancer diagnosis, I think - about how he'd have been reelected if he had sent a few more helicopters on that mission, and that that would have been a mixed blessing for him personally. Both points were true, I think.

(no idea why you were downvoted)

I think I'm politically on pretty much the opposite side of Carter's "official position", but I would squarely put Carter in the top quarter of American Presidents (for reference, he beats out Polk, whom I appreciate quite a bit, I put Obama hovering about 50% and FDR and Wilson competing for the very bottom). Obviously, the whole affair was botched on many levels, but in the grand scheme of the Carter presidency it wasn't that big of a deal, I don't think the authority to take action was misplaced, and much of the grousing about it is monday-morning quarterbacking.

Wow! FDR at the bottom, below Buchanan, Harding, Fillmore, Pierce, and GW Bush. I shudder to think what your political views are.

FDR was a tyrant. He jailed thousands of american citizens for no reason other than their ethnic heritage (over the objecting counsel of his wife) , tried to swing his dick and pack the supreme Court, and at one point, closed the banks for several days and at the end of it, everyone came out poorer (screwing over the poor the hardest even though ostensibly it was for their sake). In all his actions Roosevelt was the epitome of hubris, never stopping to think as president, "should I really be doing this?". Don't worry, gwb is not that much higher than FDR - FDR is the worst because of the magnitude and unprecedented nature of his executive overreach and the fact that it served as inspiration to future presidents.

One of the better presidents was William Henry Harrison; didn't last long enough to mess things up.

The fact that Reagan (or his election people) negotiated with the enemy to keep the American hostages until literally the second he was president, I don't know how that's not treason. At least Carter tried.

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