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Editor’s note: With the recent passing of Jimmy Carter, Frontpage Editors have deemed it fit to run, below, Bruce Bawer’s article on the former U.S. president from our issue. Make sure to also visit our DTN profile on Jimmy Carter: HERE.
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And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.
– Matthew 6:5
When word came that Jimmy Carter, age 98, was entering hospice care, the predictable plaudits began to pour in. Calling Carter “an inspiration,” Maria Shriver gushed that he “moves humanity forward every single day.” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) described Carter as having always “walked with God.” Rocker Nils Lofgren called him “[a]s fine a man and soul as I’ve ever seen.” And Steve Martin tweeted: “We’ve seen few humans this devoted and humble….Quietly continuing his mission,which was to do good. If you must leave us go gently . Leave your heart and bravery so we might learn.”
All of which is testimony to the power of hype.
I was nineteen years old during most of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign. You might have expected me to support him. Three years earlier, after all, I’d been every bit as addicted to the Watergate hearings on afternoon TV as my mother was to As the World Turns. I was besotted by the movie All the President’s Men, released a few months before the 1976 election. At the time of the election, I was a student on a college campus dominated by lefties who, purportedly jaded and alienated by politics in those post-Watergate days, embraced Carter as a breath of fresh air, a magnanimous soul uniquely equipped to make America, once again, a City on a Hill, noble in its character and great in its deeds. As Carter put it himself, “I can give you a government that’s honest and that’s filled with love, competence, and compassion.”
I didn’t trust the son of a bitch as far as I could throw him.
Yes, Nixon, aside from being a brilliant statesman, had been a wily character. The Watergate tapes had revealed his salty side. He was no saint, but then again he didn’t sell himself as a saint. What politician is a saint? What mattered was that Nixon was brilliant. He was a terrific president. He knew his stuff cold. He loved America. He hated Communism. Yes, he was often characterized as being awkward in his own body and very uncomfortable about interacting with voters on the campaign trail – which to me meant that, well, at least he wasn’t slick.
Carter was slick. Boy, was he slick. His big, toothy smile was the phoniest thing I’d ever seen. He insisted that his name appear on the ballot as “Jimmy,” not “James.” And he talked a lot more about his religion than any other presidential candidate in my lifetime had ever done. I’d never heard such sanctimony from a politician. It was while listening to him that I heard the term “born again” for the first time. Although plainly trolling for evangelical votes, he acted as if he was far too virtuous to think of doing such a thing.
I voted for Ford, but Carter won anyway. He was an absolutely horrible Commander in Chief. At home, he gave us high inflation, high unemployment, and an energy crisis that led to long lines at gas stations. And abroad? He treated allies shabbily. His posture toward adversaries was one of reflexive appeasement. He seemed to equate passivity in the face of provocation with Christian virtue.
Oh, and he banned liquor from the White House. Though Trump has never taken a drop –because he fears becoming an alcoholic like his late brother – he wouldn’t dream of denying a guest a drink. But when you’re morally opposed to evil rum, as Carter was, the real fun is denying it to others.
After Carter left office, Daniel Patrick Moynihan summed up his presidency. For Carter, wrote Moynihan, the sole impediment to world peace was – incredibly fatuous though it may seem – American aggression. Presumably thinking he was serving the cause of peace, Carter halted aid to anti-Communists in El Salvador while funding the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; to the same apparent end, he cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan and began official relations with Red China.
And just as Biden’s weakness on the world stage would encourage Putin, decades later, to invade Ukraine, Carter’s weakness led to the Iranian hostage crisis.
“I will never lie to you,” Carter promised. But he didn’t just lie, as all politicians lie – he proved to be one of the most duplicitous men ever to sit in the Oval Office. And one of the most opportunistic, too, with precious few core convictions. Long a hard-core segregationist, he’d turned on a dime to become the face of the liberal “New South”; running for president as an anti-Communist who promised to invite Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the White House, he congratulated his fellow Americans, after he took office, for overcoming their “inordinate fear of Communism”; until 1976 he showed little interest in “human rights,” but when he decided it would be a winning platform, he made it the core of his campaign, and indeed of his personal identity.
His utter incompetence in the White House handed Reagan a spectacular landslide victory.
Leaving office at the age of 66, he spent 32 years as an ex-president. Yes, he picked up hammers and nails and built houses for poor people. He also taught Sunday school. He should have stuck to that. Unfortunately, he also involved himself in international affairs – often through the Carter Center, which over the years received millions of dollars in support from Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. They got their money’s worth. For decades, as the disaster of his presidency faded into history and a compliant worldwide media helped burnish his image as a good and simple carpenter – like Jesus! – those countries’ corrupt leaders benefited immensely from their coziness with him.
Sometimes, to be sure, those relations were too cozy. Indeed, more than a few of his post-presidential dealings with foreign governments amounted to outright treason. If he’d been a Republican, he’d – well, but he wasn’t a Republican, was he?
All the while he postured as an uncompromising hero of human rights – and as a plain-spoken man driven by a deep Christian belief. (Two of his many books are entitled Living Faith and Sources of Strength: Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith.) But while he loved to hold forth piously about the oppression of people living in right-wing dictatorships, he repeatedly acted as an apologist for the Chinese Communist Party. Decades later, Trump might boast about getting along famously with Xi and Kim, but Carter went far beyond that, extolling any number of left-wing tyrants in terms that sounded thoroughly sincere.
He heaped praise, for example, on Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Shortly before the ayatollah’s revolution, he said that Iran was an “island of stability” because of its people’s “love” for the shah. He parroted Castro’s ludicrous claim that Cuba’s education and health services were superior to America’s, and in 2011 referred to the dictator as an “old friend.”
He apologized to the Haitian dictator Raoul Cédras for America’s treatment of his country; he celebrated Tito and Ceausescu as heroes of human rights; he commended the Saudi royals for preserving their people’s “religious commitment.” Lauding Kim Il Sung as “vigorous” and “intelligent,” he rejected the proposition that North Korea was “an outlaw nation” and denied that its people were starving. When Hugo Chávez died in 2013, Carter spoke warmly of the caudillo’s “commitment” to his people’s welfare.
Perhaps most appalling of all, Carter didn’t just applaud the bloodthirsty hate-filled embezzler Yasir Arafat; they became close chums. Carter actually saw this war-crazy monster as a peace-lover. When they first met in 1990, Jimmy and Rosalynn laughed it up with Yasir, bonding obscenely over their contempt for Ronald Reagan. Carter even sat down at his computer afterwards and wrote up some helpful pointers for a speech in which Arafat would bash the Israelis as child-killers and present himself as a protector of children.
Indeed, it wasn’t until his post-presidency that it became entirely clear just how much Carter hated Jews and was prepared to act as an apologist for Islam – even Islam at its very worst. He vilified Israel as an apartheid state – even worse than South Africa, mind you – and blamed it entirely for the continued lack of peace in the Mideast. Meanwhile he cozied up to – and repeatedly whitewashed – Hamas, despite its charter’s call for Jewish genocide.
In 2006-7, Ken Stein, the first director of the Carter Center, and fourteen members of its board, resigned in response to Carter’s vicious and mendacious stance on Israel, as spelled out in his reprehensible book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. In it, he presented Arafat as having disavowed terrorism and claimed that the purpose of Israel’s separation barrier wasn’t to protect its people from suicide bombers but to grab territory. The book, charged Stein, “is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments.”
Over the years, if anything, Carter just got worse. In 2014, Alan Dershowitz called him “an all-out cheerleader for Hamas.” In 2016, he wrote a supremely dishonest New York Times op-ed calling for the U.S. to recognize Palestine. In 2018, the Carter Center was accused of funneling taxpayer money to Hamas and other terrorist groups.
Yes, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. As with Obama seven years later, the GOP-hating Norwegian elites gave it to him for one reason and one reason alone: he wasn’t George W. Bush.
The best Job Carter had and should have Kept was with Habitat for Humanity He was better at refurbishing old homes for the Homeless then he was running the Nation
When I lived near Greenfield, MA in Western MA in the 90’s. Habitat spent a year building a NEW house for a welfare mother with a brood of baby-daddy children. They organized elaborate work schedules and supply donations and fund raisers ad nauseum to build a NEW house in an area that a large, aging housing stock in need of repair with no shortage of available housing. It was SHEER MADNESS. Here in St. Louis local church groups go around helping poor and elderly people by making needed repairs, fixing roofs, moving junk, weather-stripping etc. By the way, the house was, in a few years borrowed on to the hilt, trashed and the family it was built for moved on.
I recall that in a 1976 Time Magazine article the reporter reported on the then candidate Carter teaching a Sunday school class at a Plains, GA, church. He asked the class “And who killed Jesus?” and then answered with his young students, “The Jews.”. As for the Sandinista he liked so much, I live across from a couple from Nicaragua. The husband’s mother stayed and the son moved here. She had a small farm. It caught the eye of one of the commandantes who asked her to give it to him. She refused. He had her murdered and took the farm. Oh, the wonderful people Carter supported.
Finally…..an article where the phrase “He was a good man” is not uttered like all of the idiot liberals and ancient RINOs seem compelled to do.
Carter was a horrible human being. But the left always has a habit of whitewashing history.
The hostage crisis
Over the top inflation
High gas prices
Ass kissing of every jerk Muslim terrorist dictator on the planet
Hated Jews and Israel
Degraded our military to the point where they couldn’t even do a rescue mission for the hostages in Iran
Boyc0tted the Olympics (Mr. Tough Guy’s big move)
Gave away the Panama Canal.
Did I forget anything?
The slick P 0 $ gave the Panama Canal THAT WE built to Panama & the CCP.
Take it from the horse’s mouth
https://joeland7.wordpress.com/category/charles-stanly/
(the 5 minute video, ignore the rest)
Note the hostility…and the stupidity (Ruanda)
Regarding Jimmy Carter and Israel. Carter had said that he’s” a Christian,” but just saying a statement does not necessary make that claim true. For Carter could not have been a real Christian.
The reason why this is so is because all genuine Christians who know the Bible should be very willing to declare the truth, which is that God had given all this land that now composes the State of Israel, including all of the West Bank, which in reality is Judah and Samaria ,to the Jewish people. This may be found in the Bible, as seen in, for example, Genesis 28:13-15. 35:10-12. Deuteronomy 32:48,49. Psalm 135:4.. 105:7-11.
In other words the Jews have tall this land by Divine Right. Furthermore, the Jewish people should have this land by historic rights as shown in First Kings 4:20,21, 24,25. 8:55, 56.
Jimmy Carter had said that he’s “a Christian” but he liked and approved of such a Joe Biden’s favoring “two state solution” for Israel .,meaning cutting of two parts that nation of Israel.
That fool idea contradicts the Wisdom of Jesus Who taught If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.” Mark 3:24. [N.I.V.]
Jimmy Carter may be ,rightly, compared to Joe Biden.
First, largely because of Carter’s incompetent international polices of folly and terrible judgement , especially regarding the Middle East , he paved the way for that demonic Islamic revolution that led to the establishment of that tyrannical sharia based oppressive anti- America and anti- Israel Islamic regime of Iran.
Second, because of Biden’s treachery against the America solders and other US service people and our Afghan friends, he deliberately gave away the land that is Afghanistan to the Taliban, who are the vicious enemies of America and the brutal cruel Sharia based tyranny.
Furthermore both Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden say that they are Christians ,but the above ,just described results of their actions while on the Office of the Presidency had the outcome of the advancement of that diabolical ant- Bible , anti-Christianity , anti- Christian false religion of Islam.
Therefore, the claim Carter and Biden had said that they are Christians has to be an bogus claim and empty spoken words because the fruits of their behavior in Office turn out to be in Iran and Afghanistan be evil fruits. As Jesus taught, “By their fruits you will recognize them. “ Matthew 7:20. [N.I.V.}
Yes, the late Jimmy Carter and feeble old Joe Biden have much in common. It’s no wonder then that horrible creepy Joe had spoken so praising of Carter.
And when Joe speaks at Carter’s funeral, Joe will eulogize himself.
Under Carter:
* The Soviets took Afghanistan and Nicaragua.
* Iran went from being our very strong ally to being one of our worst enemies and the biggest exporter of Islamic terrorism in the world.
* We gave away the Panama Canal, our most strategic resource.
* Gasoline shortages, high inflation.
Carter was probably an excellent Naval officer. It’s too bad he didn’t do 20 years in the Navy as a career.
Yes, but how did the son of a poor peanut farmer make it into Annapolis?
With all the praise for human rights being central to his administration why is it overlooked that National Security Advisor Zbiegnew Brezinsky encouraged China to support the Khmer Rouge? It clearly was meant to counter the USSR by weakening Vietnam but it was a humanitarian disaster
What we peasants know so far:
1. Islamists have wrecked Europe with full backing of Globalist government
leaders. They have nearly done the same to Israel. Globalists have damn
near destroyed America but have been beaten back for now with the
election of Trump.
2. Globalists Goal: A borderless, digitally-controlled one-world governance –
‘where you will own nothing and be happy.’ And where unelected elites will
run things.
3. Globalists main enemy is capitalism and private property. They aim to
wipe out free markets and rugged individualism of the middle class. Obviously!
Look at their ultimate no-cash digital goal – and how dangerously far they’ve
come towards that tyranny.
What We The Peasants may or may not know:
1. The Trilateral Commission (TC) is the Globalists #1 gang – followed by the UN
and WEF. The TC of global leaders is responsible for establishing the European
Union (EU).
2. TC was founded by Zbigniew Brzezinski – President Carter’s National Security
Advisor – and David Rockefeller. Carter was among the first to join it.
3. Fast forward 45 years to today and the Jimmy & Rosalyn Carter School of
Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University in Va. One only has
to listen to someone like Melvin Hardy at the Political Leadership Academy –
in that YUGE Carter school – and his convoluted rants on replacing markets and
the State with unelected technocrats (scientists and engineers). It is Globalism
at its underhanded finest.
This article is very funny and simultaneously serious. I learned a lot. There’s a
popular, catchy old song – ironically first released during the Carter administration –
“The Devil Went Down To Georgia”. He sure did but he was defeated in the song –
just as We The People must continue to learn and defeat the scourge of Globalism
and tyranny.
Carter also helped depose the shah and installed the dark force of Evil, the ayatollah khomeini in Iran. On 1 February 1979, Khomeini returned to turn Iran into a tyrannical Islamic state of terror.
In 2016, the BBC published a report which stated that the administration of United States President Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) had extensive contact with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his entourage in the prelude to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. According to the report, in turn, Carter and his administration helped Khomeini and made sure that the Imperial Iranian army would not launch a military coup.
Ponder this.
That in itself was a singular act of treason that plagues the world to this day. Yes, the Islamic Republic of Iran is Carter’s legacy as well.