Hitting the nail on the head (Jimmy Carter's World)

By all appearances, former President Jimmy Carter is a thoroughly decent man who couldn't hurt a fly and doesn't have a mean bone in his body.

The decision to award him the Nobel Peace Prize would not necessarily call for a comment; the roster of more recent laureates has long stripped the once-coveted honor of being an honor. Rather, it is his acceptance of the explanatory notes attached to the prize that must not pass without notice.

Excerpted from Hillary Clinton and the Racial Left****The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity-often without even realizing that they are. Because they also lie to themselves. It is the political lie that gives their cause its life.

Why, for example, if you were one of them, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role in humanity's vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that you were certain would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth that they could not "understand" and that would hold them back?

If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.

If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?***

More from LINK at Post #9:

***And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your "reactionary" commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.

Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left-by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints.

Conservatives are caught by surprise because they see progressives as merely misguided, when in fact they are fundamentally misdirected. They are the messianists of a religious faith. But it is a false faith and a self-serving religion. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them. ***

Jimmy Carter´s Ignoble Prize
Jeff Jacoby
18 October 2002

As a patriot and a man of honor, Jimmy Carter should refuse the Nobel Peace Prize. Such an act of integrity would win him more respect and admiration from his countrymen than anything he has done since he left the White House in 1981.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee has sometimes shown disturbingly bad judgment -- above all in 1994, when it bestowed the prize on an unrepentant Yasser Arafat -- but never before has it awarded the peace prize with the explicit purpose of castigating the United States. That new low was achieved last week, when Nobel Committee Chairman Gunnar Berge emphasized that the award was meant as a denunciation of American policy toward Iraq.

"It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken," Berge said. "It´s a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States."

Gunnar Staalsett, another committee member, confirmed that the award was intended as a condemnation of US policy. But surely that was obvious to anyone who read the citation: "In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power," it said, "Carter has stood by the principle that conflicts must, as far as possible, be resolved through mediation and international cooperation." Remarked the Nobel Committee secretary: "There can´t be much doubt about the intention of that."

No, there can´t: A smug little group of Norwegian politicians chose Carter for the Nobel Peace Prize in order to take a slap at a superpower willing to go to war, if necessary, to depose a vicious tyrant. Carter should be livid at this attempt to use him to discredit his country and embarrass President Bush. To show that he cares more for the honor of the United States than for personal glory, he ought to turn the prize down.

But he won´t. There are many things of which Carter disapproves, but slaps at the United States and digs at other presidents are not among them. On the contrary, they are something of a Carter specialty.

Consider, for example, his first meeting with Arafat in 1990, an event described by historian Douglas Brinkley in his admiring biography of Carter, ´The Unfinished Presidency´.

*PAY PARTICULAR ATTENTION TO THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH.

"There was no world leader Jimmy Carter was more eager to know," Brinkley wrote. Carter "felt certain affinities with the Palestinian" and seemed to want badly for that affinity to be reciprocated. When Arafat complained about the "betrayals" of the Reagan administration, Rosalyn Carter (who was taking notes on the meeting), exclaimed, "You don´t have to convince us!" This, Brinkley reported, "elicited gales of laughter all around." Carter sympathetically "agreed that the Reagan administration was not renowned as promise keepers."

It is safe to say that Ronald Reagan would never have attempted to curry favor with an odious terrorist by mocking and deriding his successor. Or, for that matter, his predecessor.

Bad enough that Carter would run down another president in a private conversation with the head of the PLO. Worse was his behavior last May, when he went to Cuba and openly implied that the US government was lying.

A few days before Carter´s trip, Undersecretary of State John Bolton had warned of Cuban involvement in developing biological weapons. "The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort," he said, and "has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states."

But during a visit to a Cuban biotech facility, Carter claimed that US briefers had repeatedly assured him that there was no evidence of Cuba´s doing any such thing. Secretary of State Colin Powell reiterated Bolton´s warning and said that Carter was mistaken, but the damage had been done: To lend support to Castro´s dictatorship, Carter had purposely undermined US policy and labeled the administration dishonest.

Yet even that isn´t the worst instance of Carter´s willingness to undercut his successors.

During the run-up to the Gulf War in 1990, in what even Brinkley calls "the low moment" of his post-presidency, Carter actively tried to sabotage President George H.W. Bush´s efforts to win UN Security Council approval for armed action to liberate Kuwait. Without notifying Bush, Carter wrote to the heads of state of each member of the Security Council, urging them to vote against the US-drafted resolution.

"In his letter," Brinkley discovered, "Carter urged these influential world leaders to abandon US leadership and instead give ´unequivocal support to an Arab League effort´ " to link the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait with the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Lobbying foreign governments to subvert the diplomatic efforts of a sitting president is something ex-presidents simply do not do. But Carter not only did it, he (later) even boasted of it.

Lately, the former president has been harshly denouncing the current president´s policy toward Iraq. America is in no danger from Baghdad, he declares, and war talk from the administration´s "belligerent and divisive voices" must be resisted. Naturally he has no intention of muffling his own belligerent and divisive voice. But then, why would he? It has just won him a Nobel Prize -- which he fully intends to keep.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, where this article first appeared. Reprinted with permission.
www.JeffJacoby.com

There is no doubt in my mind that we would NEVER be involved in this hideousness had it not been for the irrational ineptitude, or perhaps deliberate covering up of a different agenda by the perception of ineptitude, of Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter who were avid Reagan haters for all their show of Bible thumping, love they neighbor stuff.

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