House of Eratosthenes

Carter's Projection We learn via Cox and Forkum, via our friends at The Saloon that former President Jimmy Carter has broken rank with his fellow high-profile hardcore left-winger America-bashers and tyrant-appeasers…in that the pressure in this bubbling stewpot his poorly-advised ramblings have landed him in, have forced him to walk the flaky-man walk and start backpedaling.

Former President Jimmy Carter backed off Monday from harshly critical comments he made of President Bush over the weekend after the White House offered a biting rebuke to the former president by calling him “increasingly irrelevant.”

“My remarks were maybe careless or misinterpreted but I wasn’t comparing the overall administration and certainly not talking about anyone personally,” Carter said in an interview Monday when asked to explain.

The comments “were interpreted as comparing this whole administration to all other administrations when what I was actually doing was responding to a question about foreign policy between [President Richard] Nixon and this administration, and I think that this administration’s foreign policy compared to Nixon’s was much worse. … I wasn’t comparing this administration with other administrations throughout history but just with President Nixon’s,” he told NBC’s “The Today Show.”

Carter, whose administration was plagued by sky-high inflation and a 444-day American hostage crisis in Iran, was filling in a quote Saturday in which he said, “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.”

You know, we’ve got much more important things to talk about than which administration was the worst in…well, I dunno what. It’s pretty clear that when Carter says “the worst in history” he doesn’t want his words to be interpreted that way. I mean, y’know, just because that’s exactly what he’s saying. And anyway, if that’s what we’re trying to settle — as James Taranto pointed out yesterday, this would reflect more poorly on the man from Plains, than perhaps he’s expecting — what with the Kamikaze Bunny administration finishing in 34th place compared to the current administration’s 19th.

But let’s just leave that alone. Nobody seems to be terribly concerned about it. Instead, if I were to name one single issue that has aroused the most passion all across the fruited plane, from sea to shining sea, it would have to be — to what extent, exactly, does each noted personality hate President Bush, who is going home no matter what happens in 2009?

That’s the number one issue. Don’t ask me to explain why. But it is.

And isn’t it odd that nobody wants to settle it. Monday Wednesday and Friday, our left-wingers are out there having their little contest about who hates George W. Bush the most. Tuesday Thursday and weekends, after others have taken note of what they’ve said, they’re clarifying themselves, placing careful limits on this hatred as it is to be perceived by the public…more often than not, getting righteously indignant about so-and-so questioning their patriotism. You know, the “don’t put words in my mouth” thing.

Give Carter some credit here. He’s not coming out swinging, grandstanding, showing off with phony outrage which has come to be a customary part of the act. Maybe that page fell out of his copy of the playbook.

But it’s mighty interesting. There’s a right way and a wrong way to read what he said…if you took his words literally, you were doing it wrong. The correct interpretation, that Bush is better than some of the other 42 administrations, but worse than Nixon — doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with what Carter said the first time.

I’m just taking it as a given that the context bears little relevance here. I mean, in my lifetime I’ve heard Nixon called a lot of things. But “history” is not one of those things.

Speaking of history…as a figure of it, Carter teaches us something very important, and it has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. Carter is a representation of the hero who will rise out of the ashes, when a large institution is rocked by scandal. In his own way, he is a genuinely good man, I think…or he wants to be one. In the White House, he was also the very picture of a man who was wrong for the job. You hear about how that office ages people. Poor Carter, between 1977 and 1981, managed to etch more lines in his face than anyone who served in that capacity in my lifetime, or anyone about whom I’ve managed to read. Ever have a boss who just wasn’t right for the job? They aren’t very happy day-to-day, are they?

So every generation or so we seem to get a reminder that when a just-past scandal figures prominently in the reasons for choosing someone, that someone is going to have an inglorious tenure in whatever responsibility it is with which they’re about to be entrusted. We’re seeing it now, with our “Mark Foley Congress.” Trouble is, it takes thirty years or so for this to happen.

And you might have noticed yesterday if you happened to see my ruminations about that FARK thread — the question under consideration was whether you’d swap President Bush for President Carter, on September 11, 2001. A lot of FARKers had some grandiose and bumptious answers in the affirmative. If you managed to click their profiles and read-up, you’d see a lot of them were in their lower thirties, or below. Hey, that makes you five-and-under when Carter was actually serving.

So the folks who would have Carter serving again, are the ones who are too young to know how bad he was.

That’s the problem. To apply the lesson, you have to be middle-aged or thereabouts, because it takes thirty years to see incompetence elevated by scandal again. And the thirty-and-under crowd, is the loudest crowd.

I’m not going to go the next step and condescend to them with a paragraph about “they talk when they should listen.” Perhaps that’s true, but it’s clear I’m not the one to do the lecturing. But I will say this; people with opinions, who want their opinions to be worth something, ought to be able to figure out for themselves when to shut up and listen. If we’re talking about some guy who was President when I was still crapping my pants…and in my case, I guess that would be Lynden Johnson, who was controversial in his own way…why, it just seems silly to try to shout down other folks who were actually paying attention to what was going on in the world, when the subject under discussion was actually in office. Look at the thread again. I kept my silence, here and there you’ll see some other folks with good sense, try to draw attention to what a spectacular failure Carter really was. Those folks, by & large, are over forty. They could read news when Carter was President. They know he was a bad seed. This does nothing to phase the young people who want to intone, ignorantly, how much better-off we would be with another Carter era.

Not good.

Or at least, do some reading and gather some facts about what life was like back then, with a failed President. All these problems…no solution in sight. Foreign policy. Hostages. Interest rates. Gas prices. Energy crisis. All of it bad, and getting worse, with light at the end of the tunnel.

Bad leadership, or bad luck? Well, embarrassingly, we got our answer in 1981. Hostages released, energy crisis over, inflation solved. Think it was all coincidence?

Turns out — and we tend to forget this, it’s a hard thing to remember — there are worse things than scandal. Incompetence is worse. Maybe if the thirty-and-under crowd did a little more reading and a little less talking-over-people, then as a whole, we’d remember lessons like this a little bit better. And millions would be the better-off for it.

But of course Carter himself isn’t under thirty. And if we’re trying to improve our lot in life, he’s the first one I’d like to see stick a cork in it. Seems like all the more of a good idea, if he just has to backpedal later on anyway.

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What I Meant To Say Was…Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007

What I Meant To Say Was…
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007