Carter’s Racism Charge Sparks War of Words

Former President Jimmy Carter’s view that some of the recent protests against President Obama, including the “You Lie!” outburst by Representative Joe Wilson last week, are “based on racism,” has fueled a new war of words over this already charged issue.

The former president first weighed in on Tuesday during a question-and-answer session at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Mr. Carter responded to a question about Mr. Wilson’s eruption by saying that he did believe it was laced with racism. Coupling the Wilson remark with the images in recent weeks of angry demonstrators wielding signs depicting Mr. Obama as a Nazi or as Adolf Hitler, Mr. Carter said: “There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.”

He lamented the tone of disrespect toward the current president, adding: “Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care. It’s deeper than that.”

Mr. Carter’s criticisms drew a sharp response from Michael Steele, the African-American chairman of the Republican party, who called the remarks an “outrage.” In a statement, Mr. Steele said: “President Carter is flat out wrong. This isn’t about race. It is about policy. This is a pathetic distraction by Democrats to shift attention away from the president’s wildly unpopular government-run health care plan that the American people simply oppose.

How many over 50s here voted for Carter?

I did I confess. I was 22.

I had just begun my transformation from idealistic libertinian with some leftist leanings and a big dose of counter culture hangover..

the issues were much different then than now...

abortion though just made legal had yet to ignite, Baake had yet to challenge race preference which was just about to really get going, no thug culture...blacks still liked white folks more often than not and were not as angry as now...that was great, no homosexual crap, no strong gun control garbage, you could vote and drink at 18 as it should be...I could go on....

we had no clue Carter would turn out to be so effed up...we just thought he was an alternative to Ford and all that

Caddell, Powell (rip), Jordan....these guys weren't maniacs...Andrew Young was though and he got canned eventually

I think Carter got more radicalized later...the canal being his JTS moment

“How many over 50s here voted for Carter?”
__________________________________

I was too young to vote....but I sure do remember how my parents voted.

My father, a life-long Republican, of course voted for Ford.
My mother on the other hand decided to jump ship this one election to vote for the peanut farmer. (He was promising some kind of tax rebate and my mother wanted to turn the garage into a den. LOL.)

My father was soooo pissed off. He tried to explain to her that the so called “rebate” was just our money anyway.
She was stubborn and wouldn’t budge. (kool-aid was rampant in the 70’s I remember)

Anyway, he didn’t talk to her for about a week.
It drove her crazy.

Of course my mother woke up from her kool-aid haze just a few months into the Carter nightmare.
She regretted that vote till the day she died.

Moral of this long story? think long and hard about each and every vote you cast. They have consequences.

"the Nation's hemorrhoid" is probably projecting his own feeeeeelings ......

No, I don't think he was ever a real racist, but I think he came to the conclusion a long time ago that all white Southerners are.

There is a disconnect in his thinking somewhere, though -- and his brilliance in nuclear engineering, which was good enough to get him into Admiral Rickover's nuclear surface-ship program (where the second-string went who didn't go into the submarine service), doesn't translate to people smarts and people skills. People with an IQ of 150 in academic subjects can act as if they've got IQ's south of 90 when it comes to dealing with people, that's a pretty conventional insight.

So I think Carter's breaking off another really astute non-insight with his maunderings about people.

One, if all whites are racist, based on Carter's observation of them in the 1950's, then why aren't all blacks, who used to manage whites' perceptions of them by playing dumb-as-a-stump "Sambo" games for about 300 years and speaking as if they had room-temperature IQ's, equally immutably limited?

He ought to ask Henry Louis Gates that one, some time.

Two, if a bunch of Okies are willing to vote for J.C. Watts and a lot of other Republicans would be happy to see Tom Sowell or Clarence Thomas or Condi Rice on a national ticket, then why isn't Carter overdue for a reappraisal of his old opinion about his fellow southern whites? Or is somebody's egotism and pride a little bit in the way? Has Carter been patting himself on the back all these years for not being a dumb hick racist, perhaps? Like Slick Willie, the smartest boy in class like Carter before him?

Maybe what we have here is a couple of boys who have been wearing their arms out patting themselves on the back at the expense of their neighbors for so long, they've neglected to reappraise often enough to keep from embarrassing themselves on a national stage.

I think Carter got more radicalized later...the canal being his JTS moment .....

Bingo. Carter running for president was a lot more conservative than the left-wing neo-Stalinists who'd grabbed control of the Democratic Party during the "reforms" bushwah they engineered after the 1968 Chicago Convention Alinsky Moment. After all, the neo-Stalinists had nominated George McGovern, who'd been a delegate to the rump pro-Soviet convention of "progressives" who nominated Stalin tool Henry Wallace in 1948.

Carter was a blue dog before there were blue dogs. He was an old-fashioned (by then) conventional 40's liberal in a party dominated by tools and traitors. Sen. John Tunney sat in on Carter's California campaign-organizing meetings sizing up Carter and his people in confidential memoranda that wound up in KGB files -- Tunney was a real, live traitor.

Out of office, Carter sucked up to all the people who'd voted for Ted Kennedy in the 1980 primaries. He's been kissing up to them ever since. The $64 question is, why? They aren't worth it. So why does he cater to them?

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