It’s common these days for people to say that while Jimmy Carter might have been a poor President, he’s a “good” or “decent” man.  What garbage.  Carter wasn’t only a bad President; he was one of the worst in the entire history of the country.  He says that America’s credibility has been “shattered” by how President Bush has let a handful of subhuman Islamist savages hold fifty-two Americans hostage for four hundred and forty-four days and then how President Bush botched his sole attempt to rescue them, leading to the death of eight American servicemen and further shame and humiliation for the United States.  Oh, wait: that was all Jimmy Carter’s doing.

In my opinion the only real contender for the title of “worst President” is James Buchanan who (not coincidentally) is widely believed to have been a homosexual.  All James Buchanan did was to sit and twiddle his thumbs as the secessionist disease spread across the land, in so doing he gave up all chance to avoid the Civil War and, in all probability, made the war much worse than it otherwise needed to be.  This should give you a good idea of the scale of the folly of James Earl Carter. 

In his speech to the Convention, Bill Clinton declared that, “strength and wisdom are not conflicting values.”  This is certainly true.  However, wisdom without strength- without the will to act- typically manifests itself as a sort of worldly cowardice.  Democrats like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and John Kerry have exactly enough wisdom to convince themselves that inaction in the face of danger is strength after all.

Jimmy Carter wants to act an aged wise man who knows exactly what those who have come after him must do.  Yet, for all his intelligence, what were the results of Carter’s wisdom?  It was the Carter years which saw the Soviet Union reach the zenith of its strength.  The USSR built up its armed forces and spread its evil creed while the Carter Administration busied itself with making trouble for American allies that the white flag liberals of the Carter Administration found to be ideologically distasteful.  One of those allies was the Shah of Iran, as stalwart a friend as America ever had in the Middle East.  The Shah, while occasionally brutal, was also a modernizer who was dragging Iran into the modern world.  When the Iranian Revolution came, Carter foolishly refused to support him or otherwise intervene, thus setting in motion the events which have brought us to our present crisis.
In that moment, the moment in which Jimmy Carter sat in the Oval Office and decided that, for whatever noble and high-sounding reason he could dream up, the Shah would be allowed to go, our time of troubles began.  Can you imagine how different our world would be if we’d supported the Shah and saw to it that Khomeini and the rest of his fanatics ended up swinging from every lamppost and tree in Iran?  Two decades of evil might have been stopped by some mild violence right then and there.  No Beirut Bombing.  No Iraq-Iran War.  No Gulf War.  No 9-11.  All of it might have been stopped, had Jimmy Carter been a strong man, rather than merely a “wise” one.

 
How can Jimmy Carter, the man who told Americans that they had an, “inordinate fear of communism,” now claim that the Cold War was won based on, “sustained bipartisan support”?  Does Mr. Carter, the man who sent pro-communist businessman Armand Hammer to ask for Soviet help in his re-election effort, really believe the words that he speaks?  The Cold War was won not because of him and his ilk but in spite of them.  During the Carter years communism was allowed to advance on every single front.  We were saved, not by “bipartisan cooperation” but by the providential ascent of Ronald Wilson Reagan to the Presidency.  How dare Jimmy Carter, a man who was willing to ask the sworn enemies of all decent men to help him retain his power, now stand there and have the nerve to lecture us about morality. 

When Jimmy Carter stands there, before the American people and the world, and claims that the nuclear weapons possessed by North Korea are a threat that we should have acted against rather than Iraq, does he really expect everyone to forget that he is the one who, in 1994, brokered the deal which gave the North Koreans the time to build nuclear weapons without interruption?  Ought we forget that Carter was so desperate to appease the North Koreans that he flew to Pyongyang and then, acting without authority, brokered a deal in which we offered the DPRK over $4 billion in exchange for their vague assurances that they would stop trying to build nuclear weapons sometime after we handed them the loot? 

In any case, there’s only one way to actually “deal” with North Korea now and Jimmy Carter, who was too weak to even seriously contemplate spilling Iranian blood when a band of savages held Americans hostage for more than a year, would never consent to it.  When Jimmy Carter calls for something to be done about North Korea, he’s saying that we should write Kim Jong Il another cheque and kick the problem forward ten years, at which point the ninety-year old Mr. Carter will be awarded a second Nobel Peace Prize for his strenuous efforts to build homes for the survivors of Honolulu.  When the day comes that a North Korean nuke is used to kill millions, I want you to remember who did it, go to Georgia, and spit on his grave.

Carter also attempted to argue that John Kerry’s four months of service in the Vietnam War somehow gave him the requisite military experience to be President.  Leaving aside the very real issues which surround the true circumstances of Kerry’s service, let’s (for the moment) accept all the assertions of his supposed bravery at face value.  Even if all that were true how would that, in any way, qualify him for the Presidency?  The logic which holds that “John Kerry served gallantly for four months in Vietnam so he’s qualified to be President” makes us much sense as my asserting that because I worked for Safeway at two years (and received Safeway awards!) I’m therefore obviously qualified to be the CEO of the company.

Yes, John Kerry is Jimmy Carter’s man.  I believe that much.  Jimmy Carter didn’t ever stand up for America during his four years in office, unless you count his decision to boycott the Moscow Olympics, an act of supreme personal courage and patriotism which should, in and of itself, qualify Carter for a retroactive place amongst the Founders.  Why should we expect President Carter to try and stand up for America now?

If you long for a return to Carterism then, by all means, vote for John Kerry.  Hell, if you lock in your mortgage for five years now, you might even be able to make a handsome profit off of the whole thing.