Jimmy Carter: Globalist, Failure, Nutter

I'm sick of this man. As if it's not bad enough that he's globe-trotting to hell holes around the world, certifying this election and that election, and beating on America as often as he can, he is now trying to make backroom deals at the United Nations. In short, this doddering fool is treading dangerously close to interfering with official United States business.

President Carter personally called Secretary of State Rice to try to convince her to reverse her U.N. ambassador's position on changes to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the former president recalled yesterday in a talk in which he also criticized President Bush's Christian bona fides and misstated past American policies on Israel.

Mr. Carter said he made a personal promise to ambassadors from Egypt, Pakistan, and Cuba on the U.N. change issue that was undermined by America's ambassador, John Bolton. "My hope is that when the vote is taken," he told the Council on Foreign Relations, "the other members will outvote the United States."

While other former presidents have tried to refrain from attacking the sitting chief executive, Mr. Carter's attacks on President Bush have increased. The episode he recounted yesterday showed how he tried to undermine officials at lower levels in an effort to influence policy.

The story, as Mr. Carter recalled, began with a recent dinner for 17 he attended in New York, where the guests included the president of the U.N. General Assembly, Jan Eliasson; an unidentified American representative, and other U.N. ambassadors from "powerful" countries at Turtle Bay, of which he mentioned only three: Cuba, Egypt, and Pakistan. The topic was the ongoing negotiations on an attempt to replace the widely discredited Geneva-based Human Rights Commission with a more accountable Human Rights Council.

"One of the things I assured them of was that the United States was not going to dominate all the other nations of the world in the Human Rights Council," Mr. Carter said. However, on the next day, Mr. Carter said, Mr. Bolton publicly "demanded" that the five permanent members of the Security Council will have permanent seats on the new council as well, "which subverted exactly what I have promised them," Mr. Carter said.

"So I called Condoleezza Rice and told her about the problem, and she said that that statement by our representative was not going to be honored," he said. But despite Mr. Carter's assessment that there are "a lot of people" in Washington who oppose Mr. Bolton on the Human Rights Council, Mr. Bolton's opposition to the proposed new structure became American policy.

Publications not known for their support of the Bush administration or Mr. Bolton, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, recently backed the ambassador's policy on the Human Rights Council, saying in editorials that the compromise hashed out by Mr. Eliasson is an inadequate fix for the existing structure.

Mr. Bolton's spokesman, Richard Grenell, told The New York Sun yesterday that it is "naive" to think that Mr. Bolton has "a different position than the rest of the United States government on this issue."

Asked yesterday about his views on religion, Mr. Carter said, "The essence of my faith is one of peace." In a clear swipe at Mr. Bush's faith, and to a round of applause, he then added, "We worship the prince of peace, not of pre-emptive war." Mr. Carter then went on to attack American Christians who support Israel.

He also reiterated his known view that most of the problems in the Israeli-Arab front derive from Israel's settlement policies and its building of a defensive barrier in what he insisted on calling "Palestine."

"From Dwight Eisenhower to the road map of George W. Bush, our policy has been that Israel's borders coincide with those of 1949," Mr. Carter said, adding, "All my predecessors have categorized each settlement as both illegal and an obstacle to peace."

On April 14, 2004, President Bush said in a speech, "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949." He later cemented that statement in a letter to Prime Minister Sharon, which became the stated American policy on Israeli settlements.

The host of yesterday's event, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, who has served several presidents in key Middle East roles, including most recently Mr. Bush, told the Sun yesterday that while American officials frequently defined settlements as an "obstacle to peace" they refrained from calling them "illegal."

I have no respect at all for former President Carter. I have more respect for former President Clinton. And believe me when I say that the respect I have for Clinton is a stretch. But Carter--a bungling buffoon that only the Party of Clouseua could love--has stuck his nose into US business all too often. Lately, it's become a detrimental habit for him. Rather than doing what most former presidents have done--staying out of the way of the successive administrations--he has perpetually attacked the Bush Administration, and attempted to undermine it at almost every turn.

His vaunted Nobel Peace Prize came after he attacked the administration for invading Iraq. He has certified Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez's "free election." He certified the Hamas election victory in Gaza, and has demanded that the US and EU give money to the known terrorist group. Now, he's attempting to undermine our efforts to reform the failed UN council on human rights; a council that is hypocritical in and of itself by allowing nations like Syria, Libya, and Cuba to sit on the council. And to top that off, he still believes in the United Nations despite it's problems that have gone unchecked. Among those problems are the Oil-For-Food scandal, the peacekeeper sex scandals, and the joke that is the UN Security Council. Jimmy Carter is also the man who's credit to Middle Eastern peace--the negotiations between Egypt and Israel--were overshadowed by his utter and complete ineptitude in the face of Islamic extremists in 1979 during Iran's Islamic Revolution; a revolt that overthrew the Shah (which we had promised would not happen) and led to the taking of the US Embassy and sixty hostages for 444 days.

Clearly, his track record for foreign policy is in dismal shambles. Yet, so many people still support this stumbling simpleton. As I stated from the start, I'm sick of him. This guy needs to go back home, and keep building the ramshackle homes for the poor. He had a good thing going with that. And despite that--a chance to simply fade into history--he keeps popping back up on the political radar screen. What really needs to happen is for the media to quit grabbing his buffonery around the world, and let him fade away. But they won't. They'll keep bringing him up, keep making him the lead news story, and try to twist his pathetic legacy. His legacy is simple: Because of his failure to deal with Islamic terror, we were forced to clean up the mess 20+ years later, after we watched 2801 people die in the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world. Thanks Jimmy. We sure do appreciate that.

Publius II