For as long as any of us can recall, the wire services that report celebrity deaths have raced to be ready to make such announcements, usually by having pre-written obituaries on file, ready for use, when the word finally comes down and a death is confirmed.
This goes double for aging ex-presidents and similarly high-profile politicians; the lion’s share of the obit is in place and they just need to add the time and place of death, along with perhaps whatever his most recent accomplishments were.
When the old man has held on all the way to the age of 100, having long since stopped writing, speaking, teaching or fundraising, there’s nothing much to add except the line “after spending a long period in hospice care” and filling in the age.
So it wasn’t surprising, on Sunday, December 29, when former President Jimmy Carter died, that all the news reports hit the internet within minutes. They’d been written decades ago; all the reporters needed to do was blow the dust off this pre-written copy.
What’s different in this case, however, is that our understanding of Jimmy Carter’s story has changed over the years.
People voted for him, way back in 1976, believing that he was a conservative southern Democrat. This fiction is how he defeated more talented leftist rivals in the Democratic primaries, such as Mo Udall, Jerry Brown, and Frank Church, and it’s certainly how he defeated the more talented moderate Republican, incumbent President Gerald Ford, in November.
He spent the World War II years in college, and was graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1946, spending the next seven years on active duty in the Navy, working in its fledgling nuclear program at the end.
When he left the Navy, he returned home to Plains, GA, building his agricultural business. In the 1960s, he served on his local school board, then the Georgia State Senate, and was elected Georgia’s governor in 1970.
Carter always claimed to be anything but a pure leftist; he said he was impossible to categorize, conservative on some things and liberal on others. Such a claim will always be a winning approach for some voters, and as it turned out, it was enough to just make it over the finish line in 1976.
As president, however, he was now in the big leagues; the job was a far cry from the relatively undemanding role of a southern governor. In the south, in those days especially, state governments still subscribed to our Founding Fathers’ vision of limited government. VERY limited government.
And Washington, DC, forty years into the massive expansions of the New Deal, and a decade into the further expansions of LBJ’s Great Society, was anything but limited.
Suddenly, Jimmy Carter found himself foundering, and while he put forth a good front for the first year or two, the fact that he was woefully out of his element was soon impossible to hide. He became famous for very culturally unamerican ideas, like telling us that Americans have been living too high on the hog, and we need to learn to live with slower speeds on the highways, less furnace use in the winter, and less air conditioning in the summer.
He thought that walking around the White House in a sweater would make him look more relatable; all it did was remind us of his insistence on lowering our energy usage.
As the economy collapsed around him, with high inflation, high interest rates, and high unemployment, he announced that America had entered a general “malaise,” as if the multiple failures of his administration were our fault, as Americans with an unhelpful attitude, rather than his fault, as the leader of a misguided administration that made every problem worse by the hour.
When the 1980 election finally came around, he was deservedly trounced by two-term California Governor Ronald Reagan, carrying only six states plus Washington, DC.
The American people were happy to see him go.
In his post-presidency, Carter became active in Habitat for Humanity, a charity that builds houses for the poor. He also became something of a goodwill ambassador for fair elections, traveling around the third world pretending to supervise the voting process in countries doomed to become examples of the presidencies-for-life commonly known as “one man, one vote, one time” – giving his imprimatur to suspicious votes in Rhodesia, Venezuela, and others. And he wrote books, calling for Israel to give more, and more, and more to its arab enemies, always blaming Israel for all the troubles that its many arab enemies cause it.
In those early years of his post-presidency, the general agreement was that Carter meant well, and was just the poster child of the Peter Principle, having been promoted infinitely beyond his limited ability.
As the years went on, however, and as Carter continued his post-presidential activism, it became more and more difficult to make this argument.
During his presidency, the American people didn’t see a general worldview from Jimmy Carter. His support of nuclear weapons parity (favoring plans allowing Russia to build more while requiring the USA to reduce our stock), his support of giving away the Panama Canal that we built and paid for, his support of a new education bureaucracy at the federal level, and his capitulation to OPEC, are all just a few examples of the countless issues that may look like unrelated issues at first.
It is only with the advantage of hindsight that we see that, in fact, Jimmy Carter did have a coherent worldview: he worked constantly and intentionally toward increasing the general weakness of the United States of America and our allies.
Americans didn’t want to admit this, at the time. Many of us still don’t.
Americans are not a vindictive people; we were happy to see him out of the White House, and we preferred to give them the benefit of the doubt and just call him a dummy, for years and years.
But we can no longer deceive ourselves.
Between his writing, his speeches, and his endorsement of blatantly corrupt global elections, it has become undeniable that Carter long supported the prevailing Leftist theory, more commonly associated with Barack Obama today, that Americans and the West need to be brought down a few pegs.
Nowhere is this more evident than in his mishandling of the middle east.
As president, he convinced Israel to give a huge amount of land – the Sinai Peninsula – to Egypt, in return for nothing but a peace treaty. Israel has so little land, they could hardly spare so much; they should have demanded a solution to the problem of the arabs in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. But Carter talked them into giving up the Sinai for nothing, and now, here we are, 45 years later, and Israel still suffers from this problem.
Also as president, he refused to support our solid ally, Iran, when its Shah was sick, enabling the mullahs to take over the country and enslave what had been the happiest, most modern, most westernized country in the muslim world.
It is therefore undeniable today, with the advantage of hindsight, that Carter is responsible for most of the jihadist terrorism of the past 40 years. He supported the PLO over Israel, and he supported the mullahs over the Shah.
As Jimmy Carter’s activist post-presidency droned on – for an unprecedented 44 years – it finally became clear that he was really the first president of this new breed of Democrat, a political character who believed America and our allies should have a lower standard of living, with less security, less prosperity, less happiness than we had enjoyed in the former “glory days” of American world leadership.
This one-time Sunday school teacher became a supporter of abortion. This one-time Naval officer supervised the downgrading of our military preparedness and materiel. This one-time southern politician supported the massive expansion of federal bureaucracy. And this once-noble veteran supported the growth and empowerment of numerous foreign terrorist organizations, from the PLO on.
Now that the old man has finally passed away, his chapter in American history is completely closed at last. The question before us must be, how generous should we be, how kind can we afford to be, in writing and teaching about the Carter legacy?
The Left controls the schools, the press, and the pop culture; they are uniformly proclaiming Carter’s “goodness,” his “charity,” his “peacemaking.”
It is left to the American Right to tell the truth: that Jimmy Carter may have looked incompetent, but he was far worse than that. He advocated for the weakness of America, for an end to the American Century, for the American people to live more like the third world does.
And it’s that worldview that’s unforgiveable.
Jimmy Carter wasn’t just a failed American President, he was in fact an unamerican President.
And as hard as it may be to speak ill of the dead before the body is cold, it is critical for our country’s future that we learn the truth, in order that the truth can better inform our future political choices.
We desperately want to believe that every candidate for public office wants the best for our country; we want to believe that they all just have different approaches, different visions to get us there.
The lesson of the Carter presidency is that not all candidates really do want the best for America. Some of them – far too many of them, in fact – actively want the worst for us.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
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