Jimmy Carter Using Abortion to Split Support for Republicans? (Two-faced Jimmah ALERT!!)

WASHINGTON, November 7, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Former US President Jimmy Carter knows how to play his audiences. Last week Carter appeared on MSNBC's Hardball slamming President George W. Bush in a fashion perhaps never before seen from an ex-President, but also last week Carter spoke to the conservative Washington Times newspaper, revealing his apparently new-found strong pro-life views. Not surprisingly, Carter did not mention his anti-abortion stand with Hardball's Chris Matthews.

Stephen F. Hayward, PhD., who last year wrote a book on Carter noted Carter's political exploitation of abortion in the past. In an interview with National Review, Hayward recalled of Carter's abortion stand: "The 1976 campaign was the first national election after the Roe decision, and the politics of the issue were still sorting themselves out. Remember that Gerald Ford was pro-abortion, while many Democrats, including Sargent Shriver, one of Carter's rivals, were pro-life. In the Iowa caucuses, which Carter put on the map for the first time, Carter told Catholic audiences (and a gathering of bishops) that he opposed abortion and supported legislation to restrict it, thus cutting into Shriver's support. But he told feminist groups at the same time that he supported abortion rights (indeed, he had done so as governor of Georgia)."

The impetus for his round of press meetings, the newly released book, "Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis" slams the Bush administration particularly in those areas the administration is most open to criticism from moral conservatives, namely Iraq.

However the Washington Times interview he did not touch on the anti-Bush nature of the book. Instead, Carter said, "I've never been convinced, if you let me inject my Christianity into it, that Jesus Christ would approve abortion."

Carter emphasized that using the pro-abortion yardstick as a measure to test the reliability of a judicial candidate does not accurately reflect American views. "I have always thought it was not in the mainstream of the American public to be extremely liberal on many issues," Carter said. "I think our party's leaders - some of them - are overemphasizing the abortion issue."

Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute said Carter's new stand was "astonishing". Knight told LifeSiteNews.com, "Whether it is a true change of heart or a calculated political risk, only Mr. Carter knows."

However, Knight said, "his remarks on abortion are welcome." It shows, said Knight, "that the Democrats understand that the rigid pro-abortion stance is a loser and that the American people are not with them."

In his new book, Carter slams Bush for "fundamentalism" and criticizes the Bush administration for "an unprecedented and overt ... merger of the church and state, of religion and politics."

In 2000, LifeSiteNews.com reported that Carter left the Southern Baptist Convention. Carter said the Southern Baptist Convention, which has almost 16 million members, has adopted policies "that violate the basic premises of my Christian faith," including a denominational statement that prohibits women from being pastors and tells wives to be submissive to their husbands.

However, Morris H. Chapman, chairman of the SBC Executive Committee, noted that Carter, who was originally embraced by Baptist conservatives in 1976 when he publicly described himself as a born-again Christian, lost favour with conservative Christians after such actions as appointing Sarah Weddington - the lead attorney in the landmark 1973 abortion case, Roe v. Wade - to the White House position when he was assistant to the president.

Carter has distinguished himself, following his short stint as leader of the United States, through his charitable initiatives, prime among them Habitat for Humanity. Conservatives, however, continue to be wary of him because in 1992, for example, he agreed to serve as honorary co-chair of a fund-raising dinner for one of the nation's leading homosexual advocacy groups, the Human Rights Campaign. In doing so, Carter became the first president of the United States to associate himself with a fund-raising effort in the homosexual "community".

Knight hopes, that if Carter has altered his views on the culture of death he will also change his view on the associated cultural woes of the homosexual agenda and the porn culture.

Hayward's book about Carter was excellent.

Carter told his biographer, Douglas Brinkley, that American foreign policy restrictions "did not apply to me." That is, of course, not correct. When he went to the Middle East in 1986, he sent the State Department a false itinerary that omitted mention of his planned trip to Damascus to see Assad.

Saudi $$ funded Carter's library; it's a matter of public record, but naturally the Old Media types don't think it's important to mention.

Douglas Brinkley wrote that Carter involved himself in fund raising operations for the PLO. Arafat lost millions in support from Arab nations because they did NOT support Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and Arafat did support it. Carter directly appealed to Saudi Arabia to restore funds to the PLO after the Kuwait matter, even as it became evident through Freedom of Information Act requests that Arafat personally ordered the assassination of two American diplomats in 1973. Arafat also sponsored the Black September militants who hijacked and blew up several passenger airliners in the desert that same year. This obviously did not matter to Carter.

Carter injected himself in the Somalia mess during Clinton's term. When the White House nixed Carter's ambition to get involved, Carter simply invited a Somalian delegation representing the wanted warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid to visit him at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Aidid was the warlord US Army Rangers were hunting in 1993 during the Black Hawk Down incident and his goons killed 17 American soldiers. Carter criticized UN attempts to capture Aidid as "regrettable."

Despite opposition in the State Department and National Security Council, Clinton gave Carter permission to negotiate in the Haiti mess in 1994. The only thing Carter was authorized to negotiate was the departure of Cedras from Haiti and how that would come about. Carter immediately began negotiating his own policy when he arrived in Port-au-Prince and drafted an agreement promising the lifting of US trade embargo and made no mention about restoring Aristide.

Carter called CNN and arranged a live p ress conference to give details of the deal before even informing the White House. It infuriated the Clinton administration, naturally, and was against all protocol and policy.

In the matter of Bosnia and ethnic cleansing, Carter complained that the American public was only getting one side of the story and he actually sided with the chief architect of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Radovan Karadzic. This was too much for even the liberal media and the New Republic editorialized that Carter was a menace, an indecent farce and suggested that a "statue of the vain, meddling, amoral American fool should stand in every ethnically cleansed square."

There is an entire large section of the book about how Carter undermined the Clinton administration in the North Korea matter and we now find ourselves facing a nuclear armed North Korea as a direct result of Carter's intervention and Clinton's inattention to the matter. Carter personally dropped demands that UN inspections resume and that N. Korea surrender its fuel rods. Kim agreed to Carter's proposal, naturally. In addition, Carter never mentioned Kim's human rights violations in the last century. It's an astounding section of the book and condemns Carter in the strongest words possible.

In 1995 Carter phoned Castro which infuriated Clinton and drew an enraged phone call from Gore. Contacting Castro without the approval of the US government was a big no no.

Carter gave four prime time televised speeches to the Cuban people while there and embarrassed both the US government AND Castro ( a double whammy). The details are too long to go into here.

All of the above prompted a Time magazine columnist to write that some of Carter's Lone Ranger work has taken him dangerously close to the neighborhood of what we used to call treason.

Carter also made direct contact with Soviet officials and tried to subvert Reagan's anti-communist policies.

There are numerous instances of when Carter was running for Governor and then President that he used race baiting tactics...on both sides of the fence. At times he seemed to be appealing to racists and at other times he seemed to be calling his opponents racists. There are numerous instances of this from both commercials he ran and flyers he distributed. At the time, he was called the meanest politician in American history. He has since, of course, changed his image with the help of a PR firm.

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