Our Worst Ex-President

Joshua Muravchik has a must-read essay chroncling the many hypocrises and lies of Jimmy Carter. Just to break with Jewish media tradition, I'll leave aside the paragraphs dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict and instead highlight Carter's warm regard for despotic rulers of slave states:

Accommodating contrary views was not Carter’s problem, at least when it came to the North Koreans. The real obstacle, as he saw it, was President Clinton’s strong declaratory stance against North Korean nuclear weapons, which he believed was counterproductive. Still worse was the stance of IAEA chief Hans Blix, who was insisting on upholding the rules of the NPT and on getting Pyongyang to account for plutonium it might have already recovered. To overcome these irritants, which only played into the hands of “hard-liners” in North Korea, Carter determined “to build a personal relationship involving trust” with Kim Il Sung. This he did by telling Kim it was “tragic” that the IAEA had “brought to the UN Security Council a report saying that North Korea has violated its agreements.” Then he added, in a direct attack on U.S. policy, “I think this sanctions effort is a serious mistake.” Having thus built trust, he went on to assure Kim that “The U.S. desires to live in peace and harmony with North Korea. We don’t believe our different government systems should be an obstacle to full cooperation and friendship.” For Carter, indeed, there appears to have been a solid basis for such friendship. Far from being the hive of fear and deprivation that other visitors had described—and from which masses had fled illegally into China at great peril—North Korea was just like home. He found the shops in Pyongyang to be similar to the “Wal-Mart in Americus, Georgia,” and the neon lights of the capital reminded him of Times Square. Not only were the people “friendly and open,” but the regime reflected their popular will, which he discovered to be “homogeneous.”

North Korea makes is quite easy to show under what kind of suffocating thrall the regime holds its people. So for Carter to claim that love of the Kims is "homogeneous" is too stupid even for him.

Let's see, now:

1. Encourages Iraq to attack Iran in 1980;

2. Condones Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, instructing, on his own initiative, American allies Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia to veto any U.N. authorization for war to halt this invasion;

3. Opposes the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in 2002, for which he wins the Nobel Peace Prize;

4. Defends the Stalinist thug ruling Poland, Edward Gierek;

5. Calls Joseph Broz Tito a "man who believes in human rights;"

6. Says of Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu: "We believe that we should enhance, as independent nations, the freedom of our own people;"

He's yet another example of a messianic religious zealot paying credence to cultists and megalomaniacs who act as if on divine orders.

OK, I rescind my kybosh on Arab-Israeli talk: Carter's beef with the Jewish state is that it isn't governed by Solomonic laws. This is evidence of his regard for the unbending strictures of monotheism that well accounts for his sympathy for Islamist reactionaries.

Tell me why, again, we're still worried about this doddering old fool and his books?