Posted on 01/04/2009 3:54:37 PM PST by melt
He suffers from an egregiously unfair reputation. His record, though, shows he was quite a good president
Oakton, Va. - In this season of new resolutions, Americans would do well to rethink their perceptions of Jimmy Carter. President Carter has suffered the misfortune of having his legacy almost entirely shaped by his political enemies rather than by objective reality or a basic sense of American fairness.
Today, Carter is caricatured as a weak-kneed, sweater-wearing puritan who struggled with lust in his heart, presided over a malaised America, and micromanaged even the scheduling of the White House tennis courts. More recently, he's taken heat for his blunt portrayal of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
What an egregiously undeserved reputation. Carter wasn't just a "good man who got in over his head," as critics say. He was in fact quite a good president.
He kept us out of endless wars. He protected the Alaskan wilderness (Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D) of Wisconsin once told me that "Carter was the greatest environmental president the country ever had.") He promoted a visionary energy policy. He countered the Soviet military threat. And since he left office, he has persistently promoted the cause of peace around the world. The landmark Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty he fashioned remains in force today.
Against the backdrop of an unnecessary trillion-dollar war in Iraq, it is instructive to recall how Carter avoided a similar morass when he negotiated the Panama Canal treaties, for which he was excoriated by Ronald Reagan's Republicans. When he left office, he was able to say with Thomas Jefferson "[D]uring the period of my administration not a drop of the blood of a single citizen was shed by the sword of war."
In the public mind, Carter continues to be judged as "ineffectual."
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Good grief. Talk about revisionism!
What happened to the CSMonitor? I thought it was a “center-right” paper.
Anyway, I understand it will soon stop printing and go completely online sometime this year.
Only a democrat could be so clueless to post this thread..
Anyone want to go in on a bulk order of Jimmy Carter toilet paper?
Jimmy Carter, dumbest of the dumb. Of course we haven’t seen Odummer do anything yet, except vote present, so the slot may still be open.
Jimmah was the worst president in my memory, which is quite significant given that the field included Bill Clinton and LBJ.
I’ll say something nice about him.
He lowered the bunny population.
“How else can his article be explained??”
I’m going with the keywords: sarcasm, humor
Otherwise, mental derangement
Worst president ever.
The only thing that has changed is this: for years people have believed he was a bad president but a good man. In the last decade he has shown himself to be also a very bad man. He never met a dictator he didn’t grovel before.
Don't forget his masterstroke--he made our Olympic athletes stay home from Moscow. That really hit the USSR were it hurts--they won an extra forty or fifty medals they wouldn't have had otherwise.
Yeah, that Jimmuh--he sure was tough on them commies.
Who are they trying to kid???
Any “American” who would accept a Nobel prize after having IT CLEARLY EXPLAINED that he was getting it to mock the President of the United States is a skunk and a loathsome scumbag. Any questions?
Walter Rodgers sounds like a Jimmy Carter fan.
and don’t forget he boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics.
This must be one of those bizarro columns where everything is opposite. That is the only possible explanation.
Misery index
The real estate ads in the Carter years featured one word that would appear in ALL CAPS. That word was ASSUMABLE!
Explanation accepted my FRiend.
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