Jimmy Carter, Failed Human Being

America's worst president and even worse ex-president, Jimmy Carter, was on Larry King last night, hawking his new book in which he aggressively slams the conservative movement in general and the Bush administration in particular. Carter was an awful president but is perhaps an even worse human being. Amazingly, his book attacks the very ideas that rescued us from his disastrous mismanagement of the country, a mismanagement that we will likely pay for with blood and treasure for the rest of our lives. And yet, the liberal media treat Carter with a sort of respect and veneration usually reserved for a pope or Dalai Lama (unless it is a conservative pope).

Consider what Carter’s policies did to the economy. At the time he left office, annual growth rates were roughly half of what they had been in the 1960’s. Inflation was at a staggering 13.3% in 1979, while mortgage rates had climbed to 20%. Unemployment had reached almost 8% in 1980, and the crime rate had increased 50% during the 1970’s. And yet, Carter famously blamed the nation's ills on our own selfishness, on a “moral problem” afflicting Americans, adding that we would just have to get used to the idea of a permanently lowered standard of living in the future. By the time he left office his approval rating was at 25%, lower than Nixon on the eve of his resignation. One can only wonder what, in the small reptilian brain of Larry King, disqualifies one from offering economic advice on national TV, and harshly criticizing a president presiding over an economy with better than average growth and historically low levels of inflation, interest rates and unemployment.

Carter’s abetting of the fall of the Shah of Iran represented the singular achievement of the Islamic terrorists we are fighting today. Carter didn’t lift a finger to assist the Shah, whom he considered a violator of human rights. And yet, the Khomeini regime murdered more people in its first year than the Shah’s secret service allegedly had in the previous twenty five (and don’t forget, the Shah was dealing with people like Khomeini; how we could benefit from his likes today).

Carter was openly ashamed of American history, even recently arguing that the Revolutionary War was unnecessary. To this day he proudly insists that he was the first American president in 50 years to avoid sending troops into combat, which is why he calls the failed effort to rescue the Iranian hostages a “humanitarian mission.” He said that our ownership of the Panama Canal “exemplified morally questionable aspects of past American foreign policy” for which we must humbly apologize, and named an ambassador to the U.N., Andrew Young, who deserves his own ignominious post.

Before being named ambassador, Young defended the Black Panthers, arguing that it may take the destruction of Western Civilization to achieve racial harmony in the world, and that perhaps God had ordained the Panthers to “destroy the whole thing.” As he disembarked the plane on his first official trip to Africa he raised a clenched fist in the air and gave the “black power” salute, and maintained that Cuban troops in Africa was a good idea because Cuba opposed racism because of its “shared sense of colonial oppression and domination.” Britain, on the other hand, “almost invented racism.” He defended the Soviet Union’s trial of dissident Anatoly Scharansky by suggesting that in America there were hundreds, if not thousands of political prisoners. And yet, Carter defended Young as “the best man I have ever known in public life.” But John Bolton is a controversial ambassador to the U.N.

Carter not only stood by idly as Islamic terrorists gained their first nation state in Iran, but openly rooted for the communist takeover of Nicaragua. Later, in the run-up to the first Gulf War, he wrote to members of the UN Security Council and even spoke privately to Arab leaders to encourage them to pull out of the coalition and block what President Bush was trying to do. He denied that Korea was an “outlaw nation,” and after one visit there said he admired the “reverence with which [North Koreans] look upon their leader.” He praised Syrian dictator Hafez Assad, and was personally responsible for elevating the status of Yasser Arafat from a genocidal terrorist thug to a respected world leader. How fitting that they are both Nobel laureates, while the man who replaced Carter and began the slow process of rescuing us from his follies is held in utter contempt by liberal elites both here and abroad.