If I'm not mistaken Bush Sr. was CIA Director under his watch. He's the conniving one. I view Carter and his Presidency as this. I think deep down he was a good man. I think he trusted people to a fault. I think Bush senior and the radical neo-libs like the Clintons and the Gores played him. I think the problems under his presidency were inevitable but also compounded by unscrupulous bureaucrats. I think Bush Sr. recognized that the US energy sector was vulnerable and he used his contacts in the middle east to exploit that. Carter is really the last Kennedy era Democrat to have power. He let the Neo-Libs walk all over him. It's possible he listened to them and let them in the party in an attempt to modernize the democratic party post-Watergate and win over disaffected Americans. To an extent I think the Dems had grown bloated after 35 years of hard power over the the welfare, banking, infrastructure in this country. The Dem party might have felt dejected after Eisenhower went Republican and people voted in Nixon twice in response to Vietnam and so this forced them to let the Neo-Libs in. Once in the Neo-Libs were co-opted by the CIA in a power grab to ensure the Military-Industrial complexed remained a functional part of the State. In fact it's possible that the Neo-Libs were a complete fabrication created by the CIA to control the anti-war left. I think people really miss what the riots at the DNC in 68 were all about. It gets cast off as just an anti-war demonstration. In reality it was the moderate left demanding the hardline Military-Industrial FDR-era Democrats to slow their roll. This probably scared the shit out of the Warhawks. They might have created the Neo-Libs to control the left and dumped it onto an unsuspecting Carter.