Even if you never read anything else about Jimmy Carter, I urge you to take the time to read "Our Worst Ex-President" by Joshua Muravchik, just published in Commentary Magazine. It is lengthy (6 pages) but the careful argument and documentation (plus, of course, Cater's long and very weird record) requires this. Even so, you'll find Muravchik's piece anything but tedious. It is an excellent, disturbing and very important expose' and I recommend it as highly as anything I've suggested in weeks.Here are just a few excerpts:
...But just as he had once reversed himself dramatically on the subject of race, so now, upon his election as President, Carter began at once to lay the groundwork for foreign policies that were the opposite of those he had led the voters to believe he intended to pursue. This was made manifest even before his inauguration as he went about staffing his administration. George McGovern was quoted as saying that most of Carter’s State Department appointees were “quite close to those I would have made myself.” Meanwhile, Carter excluded the Scoop Jackson wing of the party almost entirely from his administration. His surprising tilt away from anti-Communism was made explicit in his first major foreign-policy address when he proclaimed: “we are now free of th[e] inordinate fear of Communism. . . . We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water...”
...The effect was exacerbated by one of Carter’s personality tics, strange in a man who boasted so often of his honesty: a compulsion to engage in flattery. At times, this could manifest itself toward a rightist ally like the Shah of Iran. Just months before the outbreak of the revolution that culminated in his toppling, Carter declared in a toast that Iran was an “island of stability” thanks to the “love which your people give you.” But the impulse expressed itself most strongly toward leftist strongmen. Carter hailed Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito as “a man who believes in human rights” and as a “great and courageous leader” who “has led his people and protected their freedom almost for the last forty years.” Visiting Poland, then ruled by the Stalinist hack Edward Gierek, he offered a toast to its “enlightened leaders” and declared that “our concept of human rights is preserved in Poland . . . much better than other European nations with which I am familiar.” He outdid himself in receiving Romania’s iron-fisted ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu, enthusing:
"Our goals are the same, to have a just system of economics and politics, to let the people of the world share in growth, in peace, in personal freedom, and in the benefits to be derived from the proper utilization of natural resources. We believe in enhancing human rights. We believe that we should enhance, as independent nations, the freedom of our own people."
Carter’s weakness for dictators and his courtship of America’s enemies not only clouded his human-rights policy, it also contributed to a flaccid approach to security issues, thus adding momentum to America’s strategic decline following defeat in Vietnam. In several corners of Africa, Asia, and the Western hemisphere, Communist or other radical regimes took power, spearheaded by revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua...
...America’s options in dealing with Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions were never attractive, but they are worse now than they were before Carter’s self-aggrandizing intervention. In 1994, a military strike against North Korean nuclear facilities would have been perilous, but it was an important option to have available and may have been our best choice, as some senior military and diplomatic figures argued at the time. Today, a strike against a nuclear-armed North Korea would be infinitely more perilous. In short, America is in more difficult straits and the world is more dangerous as a direct result of Carter’s actions...
...When it comes to Israel, it would take a book to catalogue all of Carter’s false or wildly misleading statements on matters historical, political, military, and diplomatic. Kenneth Stein, a Middle East expert at the Carter Center who had helped write The Blood of Abraham, resigned to protest the latest book. “It is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments,” Stein wrote. “Aside from the one-sided nature of the book . . . there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book.”
What is to explain Carter’s passion against Israel? This question is not easy to answer. A recent article in the online journal FrontPage enumerated some of the millions of dollars that the Carter Center receives from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Arab states, but it is hard to know whether this is inducement or merely a benefit of Carter’s position. It is also true that opposition to Israel fits seamlessly into the ex-President’s leftist/third-worldist outlook in general. But this too does not explain the blind intensity of his obsession...
...Ever since his presidency, there has been a wide gap between Carter’s estimation of himself and the esteem in which other Americans hold him. This has manifestly embittered him. For all his talk of “love,” the driving motives behind his post-presidential ventures seem, in fact, to be bitterness together with narcissism (as it happens, two prime ingredients of a martyr complex). But he has worked hard to earn the reputation he enjoys. In contravention of the elementary responsibilities of loyalty for one in his position, he has denigrated American policies and leaders in his public and private discussions in foreign lands. He has undertaken personal diplomacy to thwart the policies of the men elected to succeed him. And in doing so he has, at least in the case of North Korea, actively damaged our security.
At home, Carter’s criticisms of the policies of his successors are offered up with reckless abandon. For example, when the Patriot Act and related measures curtailed the rights of defendants accused of terrorism, Carter editorialized that “in many nations, defenders of human rights were the first to feel the consequences.” The charge was simply a concoction, and not a single example was offered to substantiate it. In this manner, Carter has made himself a willing hook on which foreigners can hang their anti-American feelings. When he was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the chairman of the committee allowed that the award “should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken. It’s a kick in the leg to all who follow the same line as the United States...”
...There is little doubt, in sum, that the electorate was right in 1980 when it judged Carter to be among our worst Presidents. It is even more certain that history will judge him to have been our very worst ex-President.
