House of Eratosthenes

In 1976 I was just turning ten. I did not understand Watergate, which was a primary reason for electing Carter, but if the debate was between helping poor people & not helping them, why, I couldn’t see any reason not to help them. Alas, I was too young to vote. Thank God.

Toward the end of Mr. Carter’s presidency, I had simply run out of ammunition I could use to defend him. There’s an unwritten tradition in our presidency that if you screw things up pretty badly with the economy, you should score a victory or two in foreign relations, and if you’re a walking disaster in foreign relations, you should have a few things to brag about with the economy. Poor Carter managed to piss in his boot everywhere he could. A fourteen-year-old understands this. A freshman in high school understands gas lines, double-digit inflation rates, and hostage crises. President Carter had four years to show me what his policies could do.

He did more to make me into a Republican than any Republican ever did.

So from 1980 until about, oh, I don’t know…somewhere in the last three years or so…maybe yesterday…I saw Jimmy Carter the way most of us see him. I thought he was a thoroughly likable man, with impeccable morals, unimpeachable character, a man who served his country with honor in the United States Navy, a bright man, a nuclear engineer, the one man out of a million you could count on to not cheat on his wife. The kind of guy you might not want to go out drinking with, but you’d leave him babysitting your kids in a heartbeat. That probably sums it up nicely. You’d trust Carter with your house, car and kids, and go drinking with Bill Clinton, and when Clinton offered to pay for the first round you’d never believe him.

So I’ve thought, until recently, that Jimmy Carter was a reliable man you could believe and trust, but one who was simply thrust into an office for which he had next-to-no-talent to offer.

I don’t take delight in writing this, but I don’t see him that way anymore.

The man is a liar. A cheat. A thief. A charlatan. A scumbag.

I’m inspired to say this, to conclude this, because of a story that appeared this morning about our former President. A bipartisan commission, led by former President Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, has called for a number of common-sense measures on electronic voting, including paper trials.

Reform panel urges paper trail on votes

WASHINGTON � Electronic voting machines should leave a paper trail of ballots, and the government should provide free photo IDs to nondrivers to help check eligibility, a commission on reform recommends.

The private commission, created to suggest ways to improve the electoral process, also favors four regional primaries to be held after the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary.

Also, states should develop registration systems that allow easy checks of voters from one state to another, according to the report by the bipartisan panel led by former President Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker.

The report, which makes 87 recommendations, is to be presentated [sic] today to President Bush.

That’s not the real story here. The list of recommendations isn’t the real story. The real story isn’t that the report is to be presented to President Bush today.

No, the real story is that a commission co-chaired by Former President Carter can be called “bipartisan” if you just put James Baker on the same commission.

Excuse me, but who decided this? How does it make sense? Who in the hell has James Baker been criticizing lately? What has he been calling “unnecessary and unjust”? Which current elected-or-appointed official has he been hobbling with poorly-thought-out, irresponsible, self-centered remarks on the national stage? This is the Jimmy Carter who broke tradition and spoke out against the current administration’s policies at a critical time, immeasurably complicating our foreign relations with Iraq and with the United Nations. After President Bush made his famous “you guys are about as useful as a waterproof teabag” speech to the United Nations on September 12, 2002, former President Carter did it again. Carter attacked the “Road to Peace” on the day before Saddam Hussein was captured, and after the race between Bush and Sen. John Kerry heated up, Carter took to the podium and parrotted kooky filmmaker Michael Moore’s talking points about the war being “based on lies.” Just to make sure he had given Sen. Kerry as much of a leg-up as he possibly could, in the last week before the election he accused the President of exploiting the 9/11 tragedy, again echoing the ravings of Michael Moore and the kooky far-left. This summer, he again attacked the policies of the current administration, calling the Guantanamo Bay imprisonments “unnecessary and unjust.”

I don’t think it’s necessary to dismiss President Carter from this bipartisan commission — and that’s saying something because, rest assured, if it was my butt in President Carter’s seat on that commission, he’d surely be calling for my head to roll before I did or said much of anything. But if the object of the exercise is “bipartisanship” instead of “nonpartisanship,” by all means let us acknowledge that everyone human has a bias. Carter can stay on; every “yin” has a “yang.” But that theory makes it impossible to keep Former Secretary Baker. It’s not that Baker is too reckless or too irresponsible, it’s the opposite. He simply doesn’t provide an adequate counterweight. He should be replaced.

Pat Buchanan would be more fitting, but he still falls short. Striving to create a list of spicy, reckless Buchanan quotations appealing to the lunatic far-right, one is left wanting for material. Mr. Buchanan believes in an attack on Christianity, and he believes in a homosexual agenda. Some on the left call him homophobic. Try as I might, though, I can’t find a record of Buchanan cutting off a state leader at the knees, during the swelling of an oncoming international crisis. Certainly not with the authority of a former President.

How about Newt Gingrich? A former House Speaker could certainly forget about the size of the cudgel he’s swinging around and make some cocksure statements in public, should he choose to do so. Trouble is, since losing some Republican seats in the 1998 mid-term elections, shortly before his resignation from the House’s top office, Gingrich has not been choosing to do so. Even with his shoot-from-the-hip reputation, he has been very guarded, very restrained, and most of all very responsible. This places him in a completely different league from Jimmy Carter, and not in a different league suitable for the counterbalancing job at hand.

The long and the short of it is, there really aren’t too many public figures, on the right or on the left, as irresponsible as Carter.

There’s always me. I trust Democrats as much as Carter trusts Republicans, which is to say not by the hair of my chinny chin chin — it’s as if some Republican has been as much of a disappointment to Jimmy Carter, as Jimmy Carter has been to me. Lacking any public stature at all whatsoever, simply writing stuff for a blog nobody reads, I’m sure I lack the civility and decorum one finds in just about all famous people — minus Carter. If there’s a talking point that can be put out against Democrats, I’ll jump on it, just like Carter obviously has never met a talking point against Republicans that he didn’t like. Trouble is, I don’t really give a rat’s ass about Republicans winning and Democrats losing. I’m just tired of Democrats winning elections, taking my money away, and using it to buy huge projection TV sets for welfare queens and other people who think work is for suckers. The parties mean a lot less to me. I don’t send whiny letters to Republican senators bitching them out for supposed infidelity to the Republican Party, along the lines of the scolding screed Carter sent to Zell Miller last year. Bottom line is, I crusade for values; he crusades for a label. I oppose his values but I’m not on par with his militance. This eliminates me from the pool of candidates.

I regard it as proven, or nearly-proven, that you don’t approach Jimmy Carter’s level of militance and rigid lockstep with the liberal whacky chorus line, in the opposite direction, until you offset him with…Ann Coulter. That’s the only person I can think of. Just loudmouth Annie. Nobody else will do.

Except there is still one important, potentially disqualifying, difference. Ann Coulter, to a certain extent, is trusted. She says what she believes and believes what she says. She’s a pretty far cry from “bipartisan” — but — she has yet to hold herself out as that. You can’t say the same for our 39th President.

Carter got the gig on this middle-of-the-road commission. After peeling off against President Bush any time he inferred the headlines invited him to do so, scolding those in power as he saw fit so that His Favorite Party would not have to live with inconvenient, reasoned dissent within its big tent, Carter applied for the job of being half of a “bipartisan” leadership. Either he applied, or when the opportunity was presented to him, he endorsed his labelling as “bipartisan” by accepting the job. Like any job, when you accept this one, you’re making a statement. Carter said “if I, Jimmy Carter, were putting together a bipartisan commision like this one, I’d want a guy like me sitting on it, to bring some bipartisan credibility.” And that is a pre-meditated, calculated lie.

That’s why, as of now, Carter is off my “maybe I can trust them” list. I wouldn’t want him running my town. Sitting on my school board. Cutting my grass. Curbing my dog. He can pound nails for Habitat for Humanity until his arm falls out of its socket, and in my eyes he’s still a liar.

And that’s a sad thing.

Because for the last quarter century, Former President Carter’s personal integrity has been the one, and only, individual attribute about him that could have dragged a positive comment out of me.

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ScumbagMonday, September 19th, 2005

Scumbag
Monday, September 19th, 2005