...accompanied, no doubt, by a wave of sentimental treacle in the press. Bruce Bawer exhorts us to remember the man and the politician as he really was: "Jimmy Carter’s Last Hurrah".
I was nineteen years old during most of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign. You might have expected me to support him. Three years earlier, after all, I’d been every bit as addicted to the Watergate hearings on afternoon TV as my mother was to As the World Turns. I was besotted by the movie All the President’s Men, released a few months before the 1976 election. At the time of the election, I was a student on a college campus dominated by lefties who, purportedly jaded and alienated by politics in those post-Watergate days, embraced Carter as a breath of fresh air, a magnanimous soul uniquely equipped to make America, once again, a City on a Hill, noble in its character and great in its deeds. As Carter put it himself, “I can give you a government that’s honest and that’s filled with love, competence, and compassion.”
I didn’t trust the son of a bitch as far as I could throw him.
I voted for Ford, but Carter won anyway. He was an absolutely horrible Commander in Chief. At home, he gave us high inflation, high unemployment, and an energy crisis that led to long lines at gas stations. And abroad? He treated allies shabbily. His posture toward adversaries was one of reflexive appeasement. He seemed to equate passivity in the face of provocation with Christian virtue.
ReplyDeleteDitto. I was in college when Carter was elected; I voted for Ford.
I served under Carter AND Reagan, and the difference was night and day.
Never could stand the man, especially when Carter opened his pie hole about foreign affairs. His stance on Israel enraged me.
All the platitudes about his "humanity" sicken me. I do not wish ill upon him, but often I think some people live too long.
If that rabbit had left him alone, he may have had a good chance of living past 100!
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that scared a few years off his life.
That article was quite the education. I don't remember much about the Carter years except the disastrous attempt to free the Iranian hostages.
ReplyDeleteWe can only hope that Joe doesn't linger as long in his post-Presidential phase.
Imagine the grand send-off he'll be given.
ReplyDeleteit's good that it's early in the leave year, I almost lost some use or lose leave because of the day we got off to mourn Gerald Ford's december death...
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