Jimmy Carter - A Brain in Neutral

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of Jimmy Carter. Even Mencken would have been astonished at just how much Carter lowered the crap threshold of the American people - which subsequently coagulated into the infamous Clinton Administration.

Early on, Jimmy's brain slid into Neutral and has been idling there ever since. Carter is as quick-witted as an anvil. His world view is flakier than an apple strudel, and his absence of grasp is exceeded only by his capacity for misconception. One might describe his intellect as chronic run-of-the-mill. His is a mentality in a state of alertness bordering on coma. When he speaks extemporaneously he sounds like Tommy Smothers on Qualuudes. Most politicians' speeches are taped on Memorex. Carter's are taped on Sominex. He needs the Auto Club to show up with jumper cables to get his frontal lobe to turn over in the morning. Someone must have slipped some valium into his grits.

As long as forty years ago, associates began to describe him as prematurely dense. This is a mind totally at rest inside a skull that should be in a garage up on blocks. His brain is rarely used, and, at age seventy eight, it still has the original paint.

Currently, Jimmy is sounding the alarm that war will be catastrophic - although the more appropriate word would be Carterstrophic. What's holding up Armageddon is Clinton having sold our nuclear missiles to China which will be returned in the downward arc of the parabola any day now.

Carter is just a simple country boy determined to save the world in his spare time. He nurtures the idea that forgiveness is within his province, not God's, and has offered to gather the world's terrorists together for a gang absolution. His politics are middle-of-the-road, and in his rural home town of Plaines, Georgia, it is hardly necessary to tell folks what you find in the middle of the road. Early on, he adopted Neville Chamberlain's suicidal kiss of death approach to diplomacy. In fact, Carter was the only farmer in Georgia to name his mule Neville.

Jimmy's Goody Two Shoes Styrofoam humanitarianism motivated him to found Hovels for Humanity, a group dedicated to erecting precisely what the nation does not need - more middle income slums. Carter has built so many outhouses the flies refer to him as a colleague. (Like bugs, Democrats are no longer a political party, but an infestation.) Despite his self-proclaimed expertise, professional carpenters say Jimmy Carter doesn't know a shed from Shinola. It is not known where he got the inspiration that an outhouse needs a front porch. Despite his reputation for hammering up these bowel bungalows, two weeks after he finishes one, the only thing holding it together is the cobwebs.

Nobody in his home town of Plaines, Georgia anticipated that Jimmy would one day grow up to be America's first Sharecropper-in-Chief and the only President to be sworn into office with his hand on a feed catalogue. When a carnival fortuneteller predicted he would end up in Washington D.C., Jimmy asked her, "What big city is that near?" (The only other famous person from Plaines was a local prizefighter named Mohammad Yokum, who is remembered for the saying, "Float like a butterfly, smell like a barn.")

His aversion to violence inspired Carter to talk to officials of the Southeast Conference into letting him settle the football championship of the Conference by allowing him to negotiate the outcome. The result was twofold: 1. Nobody lost. 2. Everyone went home feeling like s**t. Sports buffs still refer to that game as "The Wuss Bowl." His motivation is explained when you realize he was the Captain of the Hopscotch team of his high school called the Georgia Geldings.

Jimmy will go out of his way to avoid bloodshed. He made no effort to resist when he had his pocket picked by an ATM machine - and in an effort to duck any violence during a holdup in an antique store, he surrendered to a cuckoo clock. Some folks think of him as the Fredo Corleone of the South. His pacifist inclination makes it conceivable, if Jimmy had been around to defend Dixie, Sherman would not have marched through Georgia - he would have skipped through.

Jimmy attended Annapolis, where, after hearing his obsequious mewlings, the other Midshipmen were tempted to scuttle the Naval Academy. Carter still has his ceremonial sword, which he plans to surrender as soon as the right dictator comes along.

As an Ensign, Carter, a sanctimonious preachy sort of officer, was unpopular with the crew who managed to avoid him - which is not easy to do aboard a submarine. Presumably, the first time he ever saw indoor plumbing was aboard the sub, where he managed to make the quantum leap from an outhouse to a nuclear commode. (The Navy rejected his idea of putting a screen door on the sub.) To this day, wherever Carter served is still specified on naval maps as hick-infested waters.

[Note: In the nuclear Navy, Carter learned to use the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator in which charged subatomic particles generated at a central source are accelerated spirally outward in a plane perpendicular to a fixed magnetic field by an alternating electric field - capable of generating particle energies between a few million and several tens of millions of electron volts. Carter brought one back to his farm to see if it could shell peanuts.]

In the Oval Office, Jimmy Carter evolved from The Little Man Who Wasn't There, into The Little Man Who Might as Well Not Have Been There. His efforts in government gave failure a bad name. The high interest and uncontrolled inflation he brought about came to be called "The Misery Index." His disastrous economy prevented him from getting his picture on the cover of Time, but he did get it on Proctologists Quarterly - appropriately enough on the back cover.

Jimmy could only do business in the Oval Office each day until four o'clock, because he had to be back at "the home" by five. His reputation as Commander-in-Chief was discredited by a helicopter traffic jam he choreographed in the Iranian desert. After that fiasco, his reproach to aggressors has been confined to saying "tsk tsk."

Just as Arabs trek to Mecca, it has become obligatory for craven Democrat politicians to make a pilgrimage up Fidel Castro's descending colon where they get "castro-ated." (These days the traffic to Havana is heavy with Democrat liberals eager to sit in Fidel Castro's lap, so they snort rainbows and pound sunshine up each other's asses.) After five minutes of conversation, one might say Fidel had the credulous Carter by the scruples.

Carter's altruism prompted him to give the Panama Canal to the Chinese without even getting a campaign contribution or an egg roll in exchange.

He is lobbying the Bush White House to establish a National Give a Canal to a Communist Week.

In his effort to ingratiate himself with the Iranians (who had humiliated his Administration in the hostage crisis) Jimmy has asked Hallmark to design a greeting card that says Happy Mullahs' Day. He proclaimed his brotherly affection for Syrian despot, Hafez Assad who is, happily, no longer with us, and has proven to be, to quote Oscar Wilde, "... one of those people who is immeasurably improved by death."

Carter is like a eunuch who keeps trying to show everyone he meets the scar from his operation. His meek and submissive posture earned him little respect around the world. When he traveled to foreign capitals aboard Air Force One, crowds rushed out onto the tarmac to moon him while his plane was still in the glide path.

Carter probably still believes the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was unintentional, never forgave America for winning WW 2, and considers our military a bunch of sore winners. Carter's oddball logic instructs him that everyone has human rights - but loses them the moment he decides they are worth fighting for. Carter is not a peace-nik. He's a surrender-nik. Forget about Al Qaeda terrorists. Butterflies can flutter him into submission. (Anticipating her husband's plan for capitulation to come to fruition, Rosalynn Carter is always busy rinsing out a few white flags.)

Jimmy is currently urging that America disarm. Apparently, he does not realize that the nation already had a program of disarmament. It was called the Clinton Administration.

It is the measure of Carter's gullibility that he believes that Satan and Clinton mean well. We can humor him about that. He also naively believes that treason and pregnancy are always unintentional. This was after innumerable state dinners at which he thought he heard Clinton raise his glass and offer his favorite toast - "Ladies and Gentlemen, here's wishing aid and comfort to the enemy."

Carter missed his vocation as a holy roller where that wellspring of piety would not have gone to waste. His solution to the problems of the Middle East is to add priggishness to the dialogue. It is his mission to clog the public discourse with mealy chunks of sanctimony. His speeches exude a gummy residue that obstructs drains. Mop-up squads in moon suits from Roto Rooter are ready to "snake" the public address system after he's through talking. In Washington, addressing The Million Appeaser March, he advanced his theme that the well-being of the world depends on the survival of all the nations - except the civilized ones.

Carter's intellectual vacancy proved no barrier to his being given a Nobel Prize for Peace, an award established by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. It is ironic that its most recent recipient should be Jimmy Carter, the inventor of the damp fuse. Since he returned from Norway with the award, Oslo has become just another four letter word. It is still said by Norwegians that Carter is up the fjord without a paddle.

[Note: Much is explained by the fact that The Nobel Prize is awarded by a committee which makes especially poignant the aphorism that a camel is a horse that was put together by a committee. The Nobel gang has been passing out so many of these Peace diplomas that they've given their Xerox machine a hernia.]

Considering their indiscriminate distribution, these days there seems to be a Nobel Peace Prize inside every box of Cracker Jacks. Jimmy received his at a drive-up window along with a side of French fries and a complimentary lobotomy (which is healing more slowly than was hoped.)

Carter claimed his Prize in his semi-official capacity as a Citizen of the World (a pompous, asinine assertion to start with) which means, instead of just being disloyal to one country at a time, he can be disloyal to all of them at once.

The Nobel Prize confirmed Carter, like Yasser Arafat and Nelson Mandela, as another cog in the Bill Clinton Diplomatic Road to Hell Machine. Thus credentialed, Carter, the inveterate do-gooder, once again off his leash, is offering to negotiate a peace agreement in the Middle East, though his track record instructs us that he doesn't know an Ayatollah from a pig's asshollah. The last time he negotiated peace in Islam, it provoked the assassination of Anwar Sadat.

Islamists keep telling Carter that America must surrender, but Carter keeps holding out for total capitulation. Carter is a mea culpa on his way to happen. Show me a despot and I'll show you a Jimmy Carter before him on his knees. Carter shouldn't have been given the Nobel Prize. He should have been given the NoBall Prize.

Looking back on his career, Jimmy Carter's only moment of genuine candor came during his interview with Playboy Magazine in which he confessed to once having had lust in his heart. It was later revealed it wasn't lust, but dust - and it wasn't in his heart, it was in his shorts.

I actually think Paul Wellstone was evil.

He wanted to neuter a free thinking people.

I think Carter was evil to, just by his "goodness", he started the give back of the Panama Canal, which Reagan should have stopped, he has given us the current Haiti (along with Powell and klintoon) and he has definitely given us the current little problem with Iran and North Korea.

Only an evil person or a very stupid nay idealistic person could do that in the space of twenty years.

I will give malaise one thing though he did order the construction of the Neutron Bomb and order the Pershing II's to Europe.

Just as Arabs trek to Mecca, it has become obligatory for craven Democrat politicians to make a pilgrimage up Fidel Castro's descending colon where they get "castroated."

18 USC 953, the Logan Act:

"Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both."

Meeting Castro without "authority" (Carter is a private citizen) would seem to meet the definition in the Act.

--Boris

Not stupid? I agree. But not evil? I don't know about that. Or do you think that he was just deluded?

It's a difficult question, mostly because "evil" is notoriously difficult to pin down. The first thing we have to realize is that nobody has ever done evil for the sake of doing evil, at any time in history - everyone is always firmly convinced that their actions are serving some good cause, no matter how objectively evil we all might think they are. Even Hitler thought this way - as objectively evil as his actions were, he truly believed that he was serving some higher good to do what he did.

This is not meant to excuse Hitler, of course, or to compare Wellstone to Hitler, really. But I think Wellstone was like every other person that has ever walked the face of the earth - he truly believed that he was acting for the greater good in doing what he did, and promoting the policies that he did.

Of course, being a clever person, you will probably immediately spot that a strict observance of that principle would lead to the conclusion that no one is ever really evil, even Hitler. And that's not quite where I want to go. It's something of a judgment call as to where "wrong" ends and "evil" begins, but one can make an argument that Wellstone's policies promoted more good than harm - it's not a very good argument, which is why I think it's completely wrong, but you can make a reasoned argument. On the other hand, it is rather more difficult to reasonably argue that more good than harm is brought about by the eradication of all Jews, for example.

Even if we find Wellstone's policies to be harmful on balance, labeling our political opponents as "evil" is someplace I am loathe to go. They've been playing that game for a long time, and I'm not in a hurry to imitate the left in that particular tactic. Hold the moral high ground, and patiently explain why your opponent is not evil, not cruel - just wrong. Let them do the fearmongering and demagoguing. If beating the left means using the same horrible tactics they've grown so fond of, it's not a victory worth having ;)

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