JIMMY CARTER, THE MOST RESPECTED AMERICAN? Naaaaah!

Whatever your views left or right, you cannot deny, that Jimmy Carter is a great credit to the highest level ideals of humanity and to his country.

Well, not really. Think back to before he got this award. He is like my next-door-neighbor who is involved in a few charities and genuinely likes helping people out, and is an all around swell guy. But that alone doesn't make him qualified to have a louder voice in the national dialog about what the country's policies should be.

When he had powerful say-so, Carter led the nation to the edge of economic ruin and he got soldiers killed with his "feel-good" ideas and lack of proper use of the military.

Just because he is a do-gooder and means well, and the type of guy you'd invite over for tea doesn't mean he should continue to have a say in what the direction of the nation should be, any more than my nice neighbor.

I would feel very proud if he was English.

Well, I can see how that is possible. You guys need more positive leaders. Please do some research on your own greatness; I feel as fond of Thatcher and am eternally grateful to her contributions to my American safety and prosperity as you feel about our Jimmy. Just because some committee gave him a ribbon doesn't change the past.

I have trouble thinking that Churchill would've admired Jimmah. More likely, Churchill would've taken one look at the guy and realized what a danger he was.

Jimmy Carter took the reins of a shaky country in 1976, one that needed strong, firm leadership, and he damn near flew it into the ground. I remember it as four years of my childhood where the USA literally couldn't seem to get ANYTHING right.

Economic policy? 21% interest rates, 12% inflation, gas lines, "energy crises", "malaise." But no problem, we could all wear sweaters like Jimmy!

Iran? Let's back the Shah. Oops, hey, where'd that dude in the turban come from, let's backSTAB the Shah and then we can deal with the bearded guy! There ya go, Ayatollah, we got the Shah out of the way for you. Hey, that's our embassy, what are you doing? Give our people back, now, you big bully!

The Soviet Union? Nah, we can be friends with 'em, no sweat. Oops, they invaded someplace called, uh, Trashcanistan or something like that? Well, we'll, er, boycott their Olympics! Yeah, that'll show 'em! Hmm, they're still there...

Panama? Never mind that that big ditch is vital to our national security, let's just give it back to the dude with the pineapple face. It's their country!

Hostages? Let's rescue 'em, yeah, kick ass! Oops. Uh, that didn't work so good.

Fortunately for us and the rest of the free world, Carter got shown the door in 1980 and a *real* leader, Ronald Reagan, pulled us out of the tailspin we were in. And ever since, Carter has been trying to backstab every Republican president. Do yourself a favor, go back and do a search on "Carter", and read some of the threads over the past week about Jimmah and his Nobel Peace Prize. You'll get educated as to what a threat and near-traitor this guy is.

If he stuck to his charity work with Habitat for Humanity (which is excellent and I commend him for it) and was just content to be good ol' ex-President Jimmah from Plains, Georgia, the world would be much better off for it. But he's been sticking his nose in other presidents' business for 22 years now and shows no signs of backing off.

Oh, and Jimmy's "high level values"? Support for communists; liberal tax-and-spend economics that threw us into "stagflation"; dangerous weakening of our military; a weak and submissive foreign policy; an expansion of government power. If those are your high-level values, I don't want you anywhere near the corridors of power.

}:-)4

"...But... most respected, nah, just a teensy bit for him not being a total jerk like Clinton..."

The ONLY reason that carter wasn't just as much a degenerate as clinton proved to be is that he simply lacked to guts to do it.

'Ole jimmah' is a member of good standing in that dark, puritanical tradition which requires its member to close their eyes tightly and hurry it up when they indulge their carnal natures.

Billy Bob enjoys every second of it, laughing, smoking a cigar and chugging booze while he hits the sink with a three-pointer over Monica's shoulder.

jimmy carter?

There's nothing to respect here.

Appeasement isn't a high level value. Nor is reckless endangerment.

Jimmy Carter embodies both of these negative values.

Ah, the good-old days of the Carter administration:

- Motorists pushing their cars to long gasoline lines
- Appeasing ruthless dictators
- "Stagflation"
- High unemployment
- Non-existent foreign policy
- Rampant crime, deteriorating cities

Sigh.....

Jimmy Carter has very high level values.

Give me a freaking break. Carter has values similiar to a Georgia cockroach. Obviously you haven't lived under what I loosely refer to as his Presidency.

Jimmy Carter has very high level values...

of peanut molecules coursing through his veins??

Carter actively worked to undermine Reagan policy towards the USSR and Bush I's Gulf War coalition.

He is alo activley trying to undermine Bush II. He is nothing but a maggot (apologies to all the maggots out there).

There's a big difference between those who genuinely work from an idealist's perspective on acheiving a certain level of peace and understanding between nations and those who cozy up to known dictators and thereby lend support to the actions of those dictators. A true human rights activist, as Carter purports to be, would issue stern statements about the abuses of the citizens of Cuba, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Zimbabwe, ad nausem.

Anyone with half a brain would also see that the USA has spent over 500 billion dollars in foreign aid over the last 50 years, money given with no assumption that it will ever be paid back, and that America offers the best hope as an example of how true liberty is the way for people to prosper. Most of that money has not helped to solve the problem of dictatorial rule.

The only solution to ending the human misery caused by dictators of the past century was to use extreme force to end their rule. If you're old enough to remember your own 20th century history, then I'd advise you to review the words of Winston Churchill, a truly brilliant humanitarian.

No, Carter may think he has the right solutions to the world's problems, but he falls far short of any any idea of how to achieve his goals.

But you're right about one thing: Carter winning the Nobel Peace prize puts him right up there with other humanitarians, like Yassar Arafat, also a Nobel Laureate.

Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter. Oh yeah! I rememember him. He was President when I bought a used Toyota at 17% interest rates.

Good times. Good times.

THE NOBEL AFTER ARAFAT

Author: By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Staff

Date: Thursday, December 8, 1994 Page: 19 Section: OP-ED PAGE

Kare Kristiansen hasn't had new business cards printed yet, so he gave me one of his old ones. "Komitemedlem," it says. "Den Norske Nobelkomite." Member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

He was, but he's not anymore. On Oct. 14, the day the committee announced that the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize would be shared by Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, Kristiansen announced his resignation. By his lights, honoring Arafat -- a 30-year terrorist, a killer of civilians -- as a Nobel peace laureate would be a reckless moral error. Norwegian law requires that decisions of the committee be unanimous, and Kristiansen could not stifle his objections.

And so, he said -- a bit wistfully -- in Boston last week, "I had to leave the most interesting and important committee I had ever been a member of."

He has been a member of many. At 74, Kristiansen is one of Norway's elder statesmen, a longtime leader of its small Christian Democratic Party. He has been a Cabinet minister and a member of Parliament; he reached the pinnacle of his legislative career in 1986, when he was chosen speaker of the Odelsting, the Norwegian House of Commons.

But history will recall Kristiansen less for the groups he joined than for the one he quit; less for the issues on which he led than for the issue on which he dissented.

In Oslo two days hence, Arafat (along with Peres and Rabin) will appear before the King of Norway to receive his prize. Kristiansen will not be present. He has been invited to speak at Hebrew University in Jerusalem on the topic: "Why I Resigned From the Nobel Committee." Before two university audiences in Boston, Kristiansen gave his speech a pre-Jerusalem tryout.

It was a foregone conclusion, he said, that the 1994 prize would be awarded for the Israel-PLO peace accord. Not because the accord made peace a reality -- it hasn't -- but because it was negotiated in Norway, via the Oslo "back channel." For Norwegians, the Rabin-Arafat handshake at the White House generated tremendous pride, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee (whose members are all Norwegian politicians) never considered bestowing this year's prize for any other achievement.

But Arafat! That posed a problem. In the past, candidates for the prize had been judged on two key criteria: (1) whether peace had been accomplished, and (2) the degree to which the candidates were champions of peace. By neither standard could Yasser Arafat be deemed a Nobel laureate. So the committee members came up with a third test:

"Could the award of the prize in a decisive way" -- this is Kristiansen's paraphrase -- "stimulate the future peace process, and make it succeed in spite of the serious obstacles that were only too obvious?" On this basis, the other judges decided they could justify an award to Arafat.

Kristiansen couldn't. Alfred Nobel's will stipulates that the peace prize be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations." How could that description cover an Arafat, a criminal whose life has been spent arranging the murders of innocent human beings?

A Nobel Committee chairman once enumerated the classes into which peace laureates could be divided: statesmen negotiating around conference tables, defenders of human rights, interpreters of international law, rebels, humanists, pragmatists and dreamers.

"Even under such a vast definition," Kristiansen commented after listing the categories, "there was no room for terrorists. Until now."

By redefining the prize from a citation for past achievement into a spur for future good behavior, the Nobel Committee may have kicked out the moral struts that gave the award its towering authority.

"What consequences will result," Kristiansen wonders, "when a terrorist with such a background is awarded the world's most prestigious prize? . . . Can there be any doubt that this award is going to downgrade the prize and weaken respect for it? . . . What signal will the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to a prominent member of 'Terrorism Ltd.' give" to other terrorist groups? "Is it not likely that such an additional stimulant will break still more barriers between good and evil, between vice and virtue, between morality and immorality?"

On Dec. 10, 1964, when Martin Luther King Jr. received the Nobel Prize, he wrestled with the paradox of accepting a prize for peace when the US civil rights movement had obviously not yet achieved "the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize."

But upon reflection, said Dr. King, he realized that his Nobel stood for the proposition "that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time -- the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression."

This Saturday, 20 years later to the day, the same peace prize will go to one of the cruelest practitioners of violence and oppression and hatred that our generation has known. As Yasser Arafat, butcher of children, steps forward to receive his Nobel, Dr. King will turn over in his grave.

And Kare Kristiansen, whose moral strength outweighs his desire for glory, will be far from his beloved Norway, speaking to the people Arafat has so often tried to kill.

Vienna 1979 was appeasement and reckless endangerment.

America's image abroad is irrelevant. There wouldn't be an America or an abroad if Carter prevailed in 1980.

Agreed. And, like Sun Tzu, Carter's words will be quoted for thousands of years by the truly wise. What a rare privilege it has been to live on the planet at the same time as Carter.

I am a little disappointed that you didn't think to list Frank B. Kellogg. The Kellogg-Briand Pact was probably the most important treaty of the 20th Century, and arguably the most successful. There probably would have been a second World War had it not been for Kellogg and his wonderful efforts.