Charley’s Blog contains a memory from my teenage years about the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 1974.
No, this is not a joke but it started as one. Back in ‘74 when rationing and shortages were the standard of the day, thank you Jimmy Carter [actually 1974 was Nixon/Ford time] , Johnny Carson was making comment of this in his monologue on the Tonight Show. For those of you that are too young to remember, Johnny Carson was the king of late night back before David Letterman and Mr Big Chin, Jay Leno. At any rate, he was commenting on the shortages and then joked that a tp shortage was next. I guess we can tolerate food and gas shortages but not toilet paper…. and I’ll leave that comment alone. What commenced was a six week panic over, yes that’s right, toilet paper! Even when it was explained it was a joke and was demonstrated by several manufacturers that there was no shortage, people bought faster than could be supplied creating a shortage! Eventually the panic subsided and every one went back to normal levels of toilet paper consumption.
And in 2009:
The clean-up crews were probably still sweeping confetti from Grant Park, in fact, when the first wave of paranoiac Obama-reaction hit the press: A run on gun-shops by disaffected red-staters convinced that the 44th president would do to the Second Amendment what Bill Ayers tried to do to New York City Police Headquarters. “He wants to take our guns from us and create a socialist society policed by his own police force,” Jim Pruett, a Houston-based radio-personality-turned-gun-dealer, told the New York Times.
The nObama faction, of course, takes this irrational run on the gun shops as proof that the nation is in mortal fear of Obama.
“Back in 74 when rationing and shortages were the standard of the day, thank you Jimmy Carter, …’
Either that date is wrong or my understanding of American history is VERY wrong.
That is around the time of the Arab Oil Embargo, when gas stations were out of gas, and there was rationing in some areas.
But as you point out, Jimmy Carter wasn’t the president until 1977.