OLD AND BUSTED: President Ash Carter.

The New Hotness: President Lloyd Austin: Defense Secretary Revokes Plea Deal for Accused 9/11 Mastermind, Accomplices.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday revoked a plea agreement made days earlier with the accused mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and two alleged accomplices.

The plea agreement, announced Wednesday, would have spared the three men from receiving the death penalty.

Instead, Austin relieved the overseer of the war court at Guantanamo Bay on Friday and announced in a memo that he had assumed control as the convening authority for military commissions.

“I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the above-referenced case, responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority under the Military Commissions Act of 2009,” Austin wrote in the memo addressed to retired Brigadeer General Susan K. Escallier.

“Effective immediately, I hereby withdraw your authority in the above-referenced case to enter into a pre-trial agreement and reserve such authority to myself,” he said. “Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024 in the above-referenced case.”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is believed to be the main conspirator in al-Qaeda’s 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, and two co-conspirators had agreed to plead guilty with the U.S. military justice system.

In more news from President Austin: US sending aircraft carrier, warships and fighter squadron to Middle East as region braces for Iranian retaliation.

On Friday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group to replace the USS Theodore Roosevelt strike group, which is currently operating in the Gulf of Oman, according to a statement from Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh.

In addition, destroyers and cruisers capable of ballistic missile defense will also be sent to the Middle East and the Mediterranean Sea. The statement does not say which warships have been sent, but two US destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean Sea took part in intercepting the barrage of strikes Iran launched against Israel in April.

Austin also ordered the deployment of a fighter squadron to the region, Singh said.

President Austin jokes aside, who is running the show in DC with Biden being non compos mentis? Because otherwise:

How it started: How Joe Biden Is Positioning Himself as a Modern FDR.

—Time magazine, October 28th, 2020.

How it’s going: “Jill Biden is becoming the Edith Wilson of America.”

—The Boston Herald, July 6th, 2024.

RIP: Former President Ash Carter Dead at 68.

(Classical reference in headline.)

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER: I don’t support commuting Chelsea Manning’s sentence.

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER SAYS U.S. AND ALLIES NEED TO REMAIN IN IRAQ AFTER ISIS DEFEAT: Semi-retired president Barack Obama was unavailable for comment. (Carter’s video interview with Bret Baier is worth the look.)

I’M GLAD TO SEE PRESIDENT ASH CARTER ON THE JOB: Carter suspends Pentagon’s demand of the return of cash bonuses to California soldiers.

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER: Raqqa Offensive Against ISIS to Begin Within Weeks.

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER: Russia has a ‘clear ambition’ to degrade world order with military, cyber campaigns.

WHILE OTHERS IN HIS ADMINISTRATION PLAY THE DILETTANTE, PRESIDENT ASH CARTER STAYS RESOLUTE.

Shot: Ash Carter Calls on Turkey to ‘Stay Focused’ on Islamic State.

—Voice of America, August 29th.

Chaser: Obama To Host White House Festival Called ‘South by South Lawn.’

—The Wrap, September 3rd.

(Classical reference in headline.)

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER: Turkey and Syrian Kurdish forces ‘should stop fighting’

“We have called upon Turkey … to stay focused on the fight against ISIL and not to engage Syrian Defence Forces (SDF), and we have had a number of contacts over the last several days,” Carter said.

“We have called on both sides to not fight with one another, to continue to focus the fight on ISIL … That is the basis of our cooperation with both of them – specifically not to engage.”

The SDF is a group of fighters formed to fight against ISIL and is led by the YPG.

Turkey said on Monday it would continue to target the YPG if it failed to retreat east of the Euphrates River.

ISIS is a problem for Ankara, but the Kurds are the enemy.

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER GETS SERIOUS: U.S. ‘Actively Targeting’ ISIS Chemical Weapons Threat.

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER DISAGREES WITH RETIRED PREDECESSOR OBAMA, Says ISIS Fight ‘Far From Over.’

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER: Coalition Vows to Build up Further Against Islamic State.

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER ISSUES STERN WARNING TO PUTIN: US ready to ‘defend our allies’

“We do not seek to make Russia an enemy. But make no mistake – we will defend our allies, the rules-based international order, and the positive future it affords us,” Carter said at the U.S. military’s European Command in Stuttgart, Germany.

Carter expressed a desire not to start a new Cold War with Russia – or a “hot” one.

But he said Russia seeks to “erode” the peaceful order Europe and the rest of the West have enjoyed since the end of the Cold War.

It’s nice to have a grownup like President Ash Carter running things again.

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER DEMANDS A KINDER, GENTLER MILITARY: “Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told sailors aboard the USS Blue Ridge that ‘the American approach to things’ is ‘not to carve things up, it’s not to intimidate people or to coerce people to exclude people.’”

So much for the notion of “peace through strength” and “We win, they lose.” But hey, better dead than rude, right?

(Classical reference in headline.)

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER IS RESOLUTE ON FIGHT WITH ISIS: ‘We Need to Get This Over With.’

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER ANNOUNCES ISIS ‘SENIOR LEADER’ KILLED IN RAID.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Millennial West Point Cadet Asks President Ash Carter* About ‘Less Hierarchal,’ More ‘Casual’ Work Environment.

Earlier: “What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace?”

* Well, for all intents and purposes, until January.

UNSCAM UPDATE:

WASHINGTON — Former President Jimmy Carter was a target of the clandestine lobby campaign launched by an Iraqi-American businessman who admitted he was paid millions of dollars to undermine U.S. policy toward Iraq, it was revealed yesterday. . . .

Among Vincent’s American contacts was former GOP vice-presidential nominee and ex-New York Rep. Jack Kemp, who acknowledged working with him on a proposal to ease the economic sanctions if Iraq would readmit U.N. weapons inspectors.

In 1999, Kemp took those proposals to then-Defense Secretary William Cohen — and again in 2001, to Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell, said Washington lawyer Lanny Davis, who was speaking for Kemp.

In his discussions with Powell and Cheney, Kemp said he wanted to go to Baghdad to pitch his plan with the younger Graham, who is an associate of Carter, Davis said.

Kemp was rebuffed.

Call me crazy, but a lobbying plan that revolves around Jimmy Carter and Jack Kemp isn’t exactly top-drawer. No wonder it was rebuffed.

More on Samir Vincent here.

PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Jimmy Carter Says He’s Hanging On to Vote for Kamala Harris.

As his 100^th birthday nears, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has revealed his ultimate birthday wish—to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

Carter, who has been in hospice care since Feb. 2023, could make history on Oct. 1 as the first president to reach their [sic–Ed] 100^th birthday. But he told his family a bigger goal for him would be to see the defeat of Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

His grandson Jason Carter said he told his son Chip a few days ago, when asked whether he was trying to make it to his 100^th birthday, that he is “only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris.”

No need to worry, he’ll make it — one way or another:

Last month, Howie Carr wrote that Joe Biden has finally supplanted Carter as “the worst president, ever.” Both men may be looking to Kamala to best them in the Red Queen’s Race for that ignominious title. However, as Carr wrote:

The biggest difference between Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden was that Carter was at least trying to do the right thing by the United States of America.

Everything Biden’s handlers conspired to accomplish was designed to subvert not just American society, but western civilization in general.

That’s Kamala’s goal as well.

Flashback: “I see the contrast coming into view. Joe Biden is making Jimmy Carter look like a good president.”

Was this the moment when everything went pear-shaped?

WELCOME BACK, CARTER! Biden’s physician uttered the dreaded M-word in his covid diagnosis last night:

Dr. Kevin O’Connor, the president’s physician, said in a note that Biden, 81, “presented this afternoon with upper respiratory symptoms, to include rhinorhea (runny nose) and non-productive cough, with general malaise.”

At Commentary, John Podhoretz responded:

In the most pregnant turn of phrase in 45 years, his own press office presented us with a letter from Biden’s doctor explaining that the president had taken the test because of his symptoms, which included a feeling of “malaise.”

That word was, of course, the takeaway from the speech that unofficially announced the futility of the Jimmy Carter reelection effort 14 months before Carter faced Ronald Reagan—and Carter never even said “malaise”! It was just what emanated from his discussion of what was ailing the country, which was not his bad leadership but a “crisis of confidence.” Carter’s effort to shift blame to the American people’s own spiritual condition was the marker of his doom. Its use again in 2024 suggests an unseen Straussian hand at work in the levers of the universe, planting esoteric messages about the end of Joe Biden’s career in his own press statements.

Since an economic malaise tends to go hand-in-hand with a leftist in the White House, as I wrote in 2011: Welcome Back My Friends, to the Malaise that Never Ends.

1979 was also the year of Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech. As [Steve] Hayward wrote in volume one of The Age of Reagan:

The New Republic [called] the speech “pop sociology stew” filled with “servile flatteries.” “Carter seems to think that teaching us to sing ‘Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella’ can be a substitute for leading us in out of the rain. Fortunately, he utterly lacks the rhetorical skill for such a con job.”This represented a striking turnabout for The New Republic. When Carter first declared the energy crisis to be the “moral equivalent of war” in the spring of 1977, The New Republic editorialized in a vein that anticipated the Carter of July 1979: “To us, whatever contraction of affluence this country may suffer over the next few years appears no more than a byproduct of the contraction of the spirit we are already suffering.” A labor leader who had supported Carter in 1976 complained that “The fault is his, not ours, and asking us to say something nice about America is like Gerald Ford telling us to pin on little lapel buttons and ‘Whip Inflation Now.’” And naturally Carter’s message rubbed Reagan the wrong way: “People who talk about an age of limits,” Reagan said, “are really talking about their own limitations, not America’s.”

To his credit though, last year, an Insta-commenter noted, “Carter didn’t give a speech soon after his (honest) election in front of a national monument back-lit blood red with two Marines flanking either side describing his political opponents as traitors.”

Last night, Biden’s doctor inadvertently channeled Jimmy Carter. Today, one of Biden’s supporters is channeling his opponent:

When you order the Trump campaign on Temu https://t.co/1tCupK4JKf

— Siraj Hashmi (@SirajAHashmi) July 18, 2024

Exit question: Was this the moment when everything went pear-shaped?

OUT ON A LIMB: Joe Biden is Jimmy Carter 2.0.

The Democrats have a Hamas problem. It is an alliance of the sick, of the ill, as explained by my friend Charles Lipson in his essay “The Sick Alliance between the Left and Muslim Extremists” here.

“The virulent anti-Israel protests across America and Europe throw a glaring light on the bizarre alliance between left-wing activists and militant Muslims,” Lipson writes. “That odd combination has been the bedrock of political activism at universities and in the streets for years. It began in universities, where it now dominates political discourse, threatens Jewish students, and intimidates anyone brave enough to voice their dissent. We can now see how it has spread far beyond the campus.”

Some readers have already sent messages warning me against making  any Biden Carter comparison. If there was a cage match of today’s Biden now, the president who high steps it across short cut grass, and Carter then, only Carter would walk out on his own two feet. Biden is little more than a meat puppet. He will not debate anyone with a brain and lips to speak, let alone sit for hard-ball news interviews. That scripted puff piece by 60 Minutes shouldn’t count. America watched, horrified as he played Israel for campaign photo ops and could barely recite the lines provided to him by his puppet masters. He could barely focus his gaze.

But Biden is too far gone to be actually running the show. Which means, his current and former boss likely is, and as Glenn noted in 2011 in the Washington Examiner: When Jimmy Carter Is your best-case scenario, you’re in trouble. “Meanwhile, on foreign policy — another Carter weak point — Obama also looks worse. Carter blew it with Iran, encouraging the Iranian armed forces to stay in their barracks, while Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s radical Islamists (whom Carter thought of as ‘reformers’) took power, and then approved the ill-conceived hostage rescue mission that ended with ignominious failure in the desert. Obama, by contrast, could only wish for such success.”

JEFFREY CARTER: Sick of it.

I read several daily emails on venture capital and startups. Virtually all of them cheer against Elon Musk and his leadership on Twitter. All of them. Buried deep down in one today was how a rival, Mastodon, is full of child porn. Threads is totally failing. Other prior competitive efforts to Twitter (TruthSocial, Gab, Parler) are fails. Parler was mounting a challenge but was shut down by the Big Government/Big Tech Fascist alliance.

An entrepreneurship professor at NYU was chiding Elon on Twitter and worrying about wealth inequity in the United States. He tweets “When a private citizen can pay $44 billion for a media company — “the world’s town square” — and both crash the civility of the discourse and incinerate 17 years of brand equity within 10 months …. we have too much concentration of wealth in the hands of too few.”

Wait, I thought Elon built a series of tremendous blowout startup businesses to earn that wealth? Isn’t that what we are supposed to be doing? Prior to Elon, Twitter was a cesspool and worked hand in hand with the US Government to kill free speech. That’s called fascism. I bet the same professor isn’t upset with the way the Washington Post and New York Times operate. I don’t think taking class with him would be all that productive.

I saw an article about how the current US Presidential administration has turned the US military academies into woke factories instead of leadership factories designed to create career officers. Not really a surprise given what they have done everywhere else in the government.

If our leadership class had been suborned by a hostile power in order to destroy us, what would it do differently? Or maybe they’re just crazy. But really, at this point, what difference does it make?

JONATHAN S. TOBIN: Don’t believe the Jimmy Carter revisionists.

The stock of historical figures rises and falls with the changing times that follow them. That is especially true for presidents. Examples of these top leaders whose reputations have risen and fallen in succeeding generations abound. Some who exit office with low popularity ratings wind up being thought of with respect once the immediate political circumstances pass, and both historians and the public are able to judge their achievements with more dispassion.

The most outstanding example of this phenomenon is Harry Truman, who was deeply unpopular when his presidency ended due to the inconclusive and bloody Korean War, a sagging economy and the nation’s weariness with the Democrats after 20 years of their rule in Washington. But within a few decades, Truman’s reputation would soar. He would come to be appreciated for his postwar leadership against Soviet expansionism and for his plain-spoken style that at the time was judged as something of a letdown after the patrician bearing and soaring style of Franklin Roosevelt, whom he had succeeded. The most recent C-SPAN poll of historians now ranks Truman as the sixth greatest president in history—a development that few but his closest associates would have believed possible when he left the White House in 1953.

Supporters of former President Jimmy Carter are hoping that posterity will treat him in a similar treatment. And with the 39th president now in hospice at his Georgia home and the world anticipating the sad news of the end of his life, the campaign to revive his reputation is already in full swing. In the last month since the news about his terminal illness was released, articles and opinion pieces boosting the 98-year-old and attempting to depict his single term in office as both underappreciated and unfairly attacked have proliferated.

And with the help of one of the men who gave us Rathergate in 2004, the spin has already begun! Malaise Memory Loss:

“Now, as far as whether the hostages would have been released before the election, whether Jimmy Carter would have won, that is unknowable.” And as the New York Times story concedes, “Confirming [Ben] Barnes’s account is problematic,” mostly because William Casey died in 1987 and John Connally passed away in 1993.

John B. Connally III, eldest son of the former governor, told Rolling Stone he disagreed with Barnes’ account. He accompanied his father to a meeting with Reagan and said there was no mention of any message to the Iranians. The hostage deal “doesn’t sound like my dad,” Connally said. “It’s not consistent with my memory of the trip.”

The story all hinges on the word of Barnes, a former Texas lieutenant governor and vice chairman of John Kerry’s 2004 election campaign. So, as Daniel McCarthy writes, “people less sophisticated than a Times White House correspondent might classify partisanship as an obvious motive.”

With Carter, 98, entering hospice care, Barnes set out to change the narrative of the Carter presidency—a rather tall order. As Alter concedes, “there were a number of other factors in 1980, including a wretched economy,” which is true. On Carter’s watch, the “misery index” a combination of inflation and unemployment, topped out at 21.98. Instead of his own inept presidency, the Georgia Democrat blamed the people.

“The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us,” Carter said on July 15, 1979. “For the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.”

And so on.

Ezra Klein, formerly of The American Prospect and now with the New York Times, began the Carter rehabilitation tour way back in 2009 by trying to explain how, ackchyually, his “Malaise Speech” really wasn’t such a bad moment after all.

STOP WITH THE HYPER CARTER TRIBUTES ALREADY: Andrew Ferguson, writing for the Washington Free Beacon, captures what many are thinking but reluctant to verbalize whenever another paean to Jimmy Carter is issued. Yes, it’s sad that any human being enters hospice, but, no, Carter was not a successful president and his post-White House years were hardly any better.

WELCOME BACK, CARTER! White House worried about Jimmy Carter parallels to Biden presidency as approval rating remains low: report.

The Biden White House is reportedly worried that the parallels to former President Jimmy Carter’s presidency are going to stick as gas prices and inflation continue to increase and the president’s approval rating remains low.

Politico reported on Sunday that President Biden and his aides were feeling defeated by their efforts to counteract the many challenges the Biden administration currently faces.

“Morale inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is plummeting amid growing fears that the parallels to Jimmy Carter, another first-term Democrat plagued by soaring prices and a foreign policy morass, will stick,” Politico’s Jonathan Lemire wrote.

The White House’s plan is to get Biden out on the road to talk about his progress, and they hope to pile on their attacks against the GOP and paint the party as too extreme, highlighting the issues of gun control and abortion.

Biden is reportedly very frustrated that his approval rating has dipped below former President Donald Trump’s, who Biden believes is the “worst president.”

The report says that the president “erupted” over not being kept up to speed about the baby formula shortage. The president reportedly went against his staffer’s advice when he declared the news of the shortage reached him.

So when does Biden do something about his staff? When Does Joe Biden Start Firing People?

Biden could put a stop to the public walkbacks immediately by firing one or more people for publicly contradicting him. There are two overlapping reasons why he hasn’t done that: He isn’t willing to stand up to his own staff, and at some level, he grasps that they keep walking back things that he should never have said in the first place. If you have spent much time around elderly men with declining faculties, you will recognize the all-too-common pattern of lashing out because they need help for things they could once do themselves, rather than being thankful for the help.

Earlier: “I see the contrast coming into view. Joe Biden is making Jimmy Carter look like a good president.”

Was this the moment when everything went pear-shaped?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I paid $5.19 for gasoline today. In Knoxville where it’s usually cheap.