See ya!
The egregious Jen Ruben has left the Washington Post. Who cares if she fell or she was pushed; the woman has been insufferable for years. This is taken from the Donald Trump portion of her Wikipedia article:
Rubin denounced Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement as “a dog whistle to the far right”, and designed to please his “climate change denial, right-wing base that revels in scientific illiteracy.” Previously, after Barack Obama had approved the agreement, Rubin characterized it as “nonsense” and argued that it would not achieve anything.
Rubin described Trump’s 2017 decision to not implement parts of the Iran nuclear deal as the “emotional temper tantrum of an unhinged president.” She had previously said that “if you examine the Iran deal in any detail, you will be horrified as to what is in there.”
Rubin strongly supported the United States officially recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Early in his presidency, she criticized Trump for not doing so, saying that it was indicative of his tendency to “never keep his word.” She concluded that Trump “looks buffoonish in his hasty retreat”. In December 2017, after Trump announced that he would move the embassy, she said it was “a foreign policy move without purpose.”
See, it’s one thing to have a policy opinion, it’s another to have a different opinion because you don’t like the guy who said it. Jen and the Never Trumpers are so screwed. They convinced the left they were useful. Now it turns out they were a tiny, feeble constituency that appeals to no-one, right or left. Where will they go?
Jen’s new gig is a substack called The Contrarian. It will feature news, opinions, podcasts, recipes, pets. No, I didn’t make those last two up. They really think they’re going to make a brand.
Go watch the introductory video, if you can bear the cringe. Seriously, go watch it – Jen is looking absolutely ghastly. I poked around Google to see if she’s been ill, but it would seem not. I looked her up to see how old she was – thinking mid to high seventies – and folks she’s two years younger than me!
I went straight out and learned a skin care routine.
January 14, 2025 — 5:39 pm
Comments: 12
Bonus Karter Kontent
Jimmy Carter had four children, three older boys and a daughter, Amy. She was the only one young enough to live in the White House. Unlike many presidential children, she was in the limelight a fair bit.
After Jimmy’s term was over, Amy was an activist for a while, then went on to get a masters degree in art. This is an illustration she did for her father’s children’s book, The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer. As you can see from the illustration, degrees in art are not helpful.
More from last week’s book (last excerpt, I promise):
In recent memory, according to agents, the brattiest offspring of a president was Amy Carter, who was ten when her father became president. “Amy was spoiled rotten,” an agent on her detail says. “Amy Carter was a mess,” says Brad Wells, an Air Force One steward. “She would look at me and pick up a package of [open] soda crackers and crush them and throw them on the floor. She did it purposely. We had to clean it up. That was our job.”
Secret Service agents guarding Amy — code-named Dynamo — at school often found themselves in the middle when Amy wanted to play with friends after school instead of going home to the White House to do her homework, as she was supposed to do. When agents told her she had to go home, “Amy would call her father and hand the phone to the agents,” Dennis Chomicki, who was on her detail, remembers.
“The president would say to take Amy anywhere she wants to go. Amy just had her father wrapped up.” Since Amy would often stay at a friend’s house through the evening, agents wound up working longer hours than if they had taken her directly to the White House. As a result, says Chomicki, “the detail would always try to get Mrs. Carter, the first lady, on the phone, because she would say, ‘Nothing doing, she’s coming home. She’s got her homework to do.’ ”
Of all the presidential children guarded by the Secret Service, Carter’s second oldest son, James Earl “Chip” Carter III, was one of the least liked. Twenty-six when his father won the presidency, Chip had helped campaign for him in 1976 and again gave speeches on his behalf when Carter ran for reelection in 1980. “He was outrageous,” a Secret Service agent says. “Chip was out of control. Marijuana, liquor, chasing women.”
Separated from his wife, Chip would “pick up women in Georgetown and ask if they wanted to have sex in the White House. Most of them did. He did it as often as he could,” the agent says. At one point, Rosalynn Carter told the press that all three of her sons had experimented with marijuana. Their oldest son, John William “Jack” Carter, was discharged by the Navy for smoking weed.
When you visited tonight, did you get the message “Please wait while your request is being verified“? Yeah, me too. Huh.
January 13, 2025 — 5:44 pm
Comments: 6
And tomorrow we dance on the grave
I always had him pegged as a petty and spiteful man. Not sure why, but some news must have trickled out to youthful me to create that impression.
While he publicly denied it, Carter would personally schedule the times when aides could play on the White House tennis courts. “Carter said, ‘I’m in charge,’ ” a former Secret Service agent says. “ ‘Everything is my way.’ He tried to micromanage everything. You had to go to him about playing on the tennis court. It was ridiculous.”
Agents were convinced that Carter as president was in over his head and that Rosalynn was the smarter one. She had a loving relationship with her husband and acted as an advisor, sometimes firmly correcting what he said. Unlike her husband, she treated agents with respect.
“Rosalynn really was the brains of the outfit,” says former agent Repasky. “She kept him in line and constantly advised him. She was very pragmatic and organized. He would make an ultra-liberal comment, and she would ground him and tell him he had to be more centrist. If he didn’t listen, she could get cold and steely.”
“I think the presidency was too big for Carter to comprehend,” says former agent Ramon Dunlap.
Oh, and stupid. I forgot stupid.
After he left the presidency, Jimmy Carter often went skiing and fishing with Rosalynn in Colorado. “He’d go skiing, and he’d take lessons, and his wife would take lessons, too,” a former agent says. “But he wouldn’t listen to his instructor. He thought he was an expert. He’d go skiing, and she’d go skiing, and he’d keep falling down or not doing things right, and she would do everything right the way the instructors taught her. He’d get pissed off because she was a better skier than he was.”
The same pattern played out when the couple went fishing. “She’d go out there in the middle of the stream and go fishing, and he’d be out there thinking he was the best fisherman in the world,” the former agent says. “He’d be tossing that line out there, and she’d be catching fish, and he’d get just furious because he couldn’t catch a fish and she could.”
Picture is the Jimmy Carter rabbit incident, if you don’t recall. Dead Pool tomorrow!
January 9, 2025 — 5:22 pm
Comments: 4
Carterpaloozala continues
Elsewhere in the book, it went into some detail about the rules governing the nuclear football, which explains why making his agent stay 15 minutes away was such a serious breach (Biden as Vice President was careless about it, too).
Personally, I never thought the football itself mattered. If you’ve got to retaliate, you’re already screwed. But it was an important deterrent for other nations to know there was a football and a system in place to shoot back.
Carter would regularly make a show of arriving early at the Oval Office to call attention to how hard he was working for the American people. “He would walk into the Oval Office at 6 A.M., do a little work for half an hour, then close the curtains and take a nap,” says Robert B. Sulliman Jr., who was on Carter’s detail.
“His staff would tell the press he was working.” Another agent says that at other times, he could see Carter through the Oval Office windows dozing off in his desk chair while he was ostensibly working.
“Carter was a phony, an absolute phony,” an agent says. “When he was in a bad mood, you didn’t want to bring him anything,” a former Secret Service agent says. “It was this hunkered-down attitude: ‘I’m running the show.’ It was as if he didn’t trust anyone around him. He had that big smile, but when he was in the White House, it was a different story.”
“The only time I saw a smile on Carter’s face was when the cameras were going,” says former agent George Schmalhofer, who was assigned periodically to the Carter detail. Perhaps because of his aversion to the military, Carter refused to let the military aide with the nuclear football stay in a nearby trailer when Carter was visiting his home in Plains, Georgia. “Carter did not want the nuclear football at Plains,” a former agent says.
“There was no place to stay in Plains. The military wanted a trailer there. He didn’t want that so the military aide had to stay in Americus.” The town was a fifteen-minute drive from Carter’s home. “Carter didn’t want anyone bothering him on his property,” the former agent explains.
“He wanted his privacy.” Terrence Adamson, Carter’s lawyer, denied that Carter refused to let the military aide stay near his residence. But Bill Gulley, who was in charge of the operation as director of the White House Military Office, confirmed it.
This book was written in 2014 and he spends a lot of time talking about how terrible conditions are at the Secret Service. Grossly incompetent management, overworked agents, regular breaches of the rules for political reasons (John Hinkley could never have gotten close to Reagan if aides hadn’t overruled rules for crowd control).
Imagine adding 10 years and DEI to that mix. That’s how you get an Agent Cindy.
January 8, 2025 — 4:00 pm
Comments: 4
Carter was the chief executive most detested by Secret Service agents
I did a lot of reading over the holidays. One of the books was this one: First Family Detail, by Ronald Kessler. I won’t link to it because my link would go to the UK Amazon page (okay, I could get around that, but it’s effort and I’m lazy).
“Carter was just very short and rude most of the time,” an agent recalls. “With agents, he’d just pretend like you were not around. You’d say hello, and he’d just look at you, like you weren’t there, like you were bothering him.” Carter actually told Secret Service agents and uniformed officers he did not want them to greet him on his way to the Oval Office. It was apparently too much bother for him to have to say hello back to another human being.
Nor did Carter have much use for the military. Even though he was a Naval Academy graduate, Carter “talked down to the military, just talked like they didn’t know what they were talking about,” a former agent says. “Carter didn’t want military aides to wear uniforms,” former agent Cliff Baranowski recalls. Not surprisingly, of all the presidents in recent memory, Carter was the chief executive most detested by Secret Service agents.
Agent John Piasecky was on Carter’s detail for three and a half years. That included seven months of driving him in the presidential limousine. Aside from giving directions, Carter never spoke to him, he says. Carter tried to project an image of himself as man of the people by carrying his own luggage when traveling. But that was another charade. When he was a candidate in 1976, Carter would carry his own bags when the press was around but would ask the Secret Service to carry them the rest of the time. As president, Carter — code-named Deacon — orchestrated more ruses involving his luggage.
“When he was traveling, he would get on the helicopter and fly to Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base,” says former Secret Service agent Baranowski. “He would roll up his sleeves and carry his bag over his shoulder, but it was empty. He wanted people to think he was carrying his own bag.”
“Carter made a big show about taking a hang-up carryon out of the trunk of the limo when he’d go someplace, and there was nothing in it,” says another agent who was on his detail. “It was empty. It was just all show.”
It’s a series of anecdotes, if you’re into that. Hillary’s chapter was fun, though. And hoo boy was Bill a horndog!
January 7, 2025 — 4:45 pm
Comments: 14
Well, here we are again…
Happy New Year, everyone! As I type, Justin Trudeau has stepped down and the election of Donald Trump has been certified. I watched them both live. They were boring. A massive snowball fight has erupted in DC on the anniversary of the fedsurrection.
It is a time of signs and wonders.
I’m sorry to have done so much Jack Chick to you. I needed something easy to queue up in advance. It’s the first time in the eighteen years(!) of this blog that I’ve taken a solid chunk of time away. Off work, too. I feel positively reset.
We’ve had a lovely two weeks and hope you did too, Jack Chick not withstanding. I shall now go and read the posts from everyone I didn’t scare away.
p.s. I know! I know! Jimmy Carter at last!
January 6, 2025 — 6:41 pm
Comments: 6
Last one
This one is unremarkable, except everyone in it was black. There was a black Adam and Eve and a black angel and I had all kinds of hopes, but no – it was the same old Anglo Jesus.
That’s it!
January 3, 2025 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 5
Tee-hee!
One of many on the topic of homosexuality. They’re all about what you’d expect, but I thought the art for this one was funny. It’s got Chick’s copyright on it, but no way is this his work.
January 2, 2025 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 8
Name this band
Gates, Schwab, Soros and the Swedish Doom Goblin. Lookit Chick getting all 21st Century! The illustrator is the dude who likes to draw cats. He does a pretty good job with these four, not so great with the little girl who had to listen to her daddy explain Revelations to her.
Chick himself (I think) did a very passable Al Gore in a pamphlet on global warming that is honestly based.
Happy new year!
January 1, 2025 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 2
I think this dude just likes to draw cats
This is Chick’s most recent. It’s a sweet, pointless story about a cat named Jenny, then it switches to a totally different illustrator for the last eight pages (old Jack Chick art, I think) and a YOU DON’T WANT TO GO TO HELL, DO YOU? message.
December 31, 2024 — 5:00 pm
Comments: 1