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The press are fawning over Jimmy Carter in an attempt to rewrite history
and transform him into a deity of sorts.
Here is the truth, the uncensored truth, about Jimmy Carter.

'Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former
President'

<https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/jimmy-carter-was-a-terrible-president-and-an-even-worse-former-president/>

'The truth is that historians have not been harsh enough.
Apopular narrative surrounding the legacy of Jimmy Carter is that as
president he was a victim of unlucky timing that impeded him politically
but that he excelled during his long post-presidential career. The
reality is that he was a terrible president but an even worse former
president.

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Carter’s true legacy is one of economic misery at home and embarrassment
on the world stage. He left the country in its weakest position of the post–World War II era. After being booted out of office in landslide
fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United
States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as
treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only
he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and
lash out at American Jews who criticized him.

A former governor of Georgia who had little charisma and national name recognition when he began campaigning for president, Carter ended up in
the White House as a fluke. He presented an image as an honest,
moderate, and humble southern Evangelical Christian outsider — an
antidote to the corruption of the Watergate era. He also benefited from
the vulnerabilities of the sitting president, Gerald Ford.

Once in office as an unlikely president, Carter spent his one and only
term showing the American people, and the rest of the world, that he was
not up to the job.

When he took the presidential oath in January 1977, the unemployment
rate was a high 7.5 percent; when he left office in January 1981, it was
just as high. Meanwhile, inflation, which was already elevated at 5.7
percent in 1976, the year he was elected, went up in each of his years
in office — and reached a staggering 13.5 percent in 1980, the year he
was booted out. The only year in the post–World War II period in which inflation was higher was 1947, when the economy was booming and
unemployment was minuscule. Put another way, to maintain the buying
power that $100 had on the month Carter was sworn into office, you’d
need $150 by the time he left the White House just four years later.
Under Carter, gas prices doubled, and the supply became so scarce that Americans had to endure long lines at stations to fill up their tanks.

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On the international stage, Carter showed weakness, and America’s
enemies took notice. Rather than recognize the true nature of the Soviet threat, he preached the defeatist ideology of “peaceful coexistence,”
and the USSR steamrolled into Afghanistan. Also under his watch, radical Islamic revolutionaries took over Iran, holding Americans hostage for
the last 444 days of his presidency.

It is telling that the defining speech of his presidency was known as
the “malaise speech,” in which he spoke not as a leader but as an
essayist writing on the “crisis of confidence” in America. He observed: “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our
people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.” As he built a legacy of scarcity, he criticized Americans for
wanting plenty, lamenting that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

It should be no surprise that Ronald Reagan’s message of strength and optimism turned 1980 into a complete rout. Carter not only lost 489
electoral votes to 49, but he got trounced by ten points in the popular
vote — even though an independent candidate, John Anderson, drew 7
percent.

Carter, who performatively carried his own luggage as president, tried
to present himself as humble. But somebody actually humble would have
taken the hint by the magnitude of his defeat. The real Jimmy Carter was stubborn and arrogant. He had plans for a second term, and he wanted to
see them through despite the overwhelming rejection by the American
people. So instead of stepping away, he spent the rest of his life
simply pretending that he was still president and pursuing foreign
policy goals even when it meant undermining the actual president.

The two most egregious examples of this came in his efforts to stop the
first Iraq War and his freelance nuclear diplomacy with North Korea.

In his mostly sycophantic 1998 book on Carter’s post–White House career, The Unfinished Presidency, Douglas Brinkley gave a startling account of Carter’s behavior in the run-up to the 1990–91 Persian Gulf conflict.

Concerned by the looming threat of war after Saddam Hussein’s invasion
of Kuwait, Carter pulled out all the stops — and then some — to try to thwart the president, George H. W. Bush. Carter’s efforts started off
within the realm of acceptable opposition for a former president. He
wrote op-eds, hosted conferences, gave speeches — all urging peace talks
as an alternative to repelling Saddam with the use of military force.

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But when that failed, he took things to an extraordinary level. Carter
wrote a letter to the leaders of every country on the U.N. Security
Council, as well as a dozen other world leaders, Brinkley recounted,
making “a direct appeal to hold ‘good faith’ negotiations with Saddam Hussein before entering upon a war. Carter implied that mature nations
should not act like lemmings, blindly following George Bush’s
inflammatory ‘line in the sand rhetoric.’”

As if this weren’t enough, on January 10, 1991 — just five days before a deadline that had been set for Saddam to withdraw — Carter wrote to key
Arab leaders urging them to abandon their support for the U.S.,
undermining months of careful diplomacy by the Bush administration. “You
may have to forego approval from the White House, but you will find the
French, Soviets and others fully supportive,” Carter advised them.

It is one thing for a former president to express opposition to a policy
of the sitting president, but by actively working to get foreign leaders
to withdraw support for the U.S. days before troops were to be in the
cross fire, Carter was taking actions that were closer to treason than
they were to legitimate peace activism.

Carter’s meddling was not limited to the first Iraq War or to Republican administrations. In 1994, there was a standoff between the U.S., its
allies, and North Korea over the communist country’s nuclear program.
The U.S. was floating the idea of sanctions at the United Nations. Over
the years, Carter had received multiple invitations to visit North Korea
from Kim Il-sung and was eager to fly over and defuse the situation with
an ultimate goal of convening a North–South peace summit and unifying
the peninsula. Begrudgingly, the Clinton administration agreed to let
Carter meet with Kim as long as Carter made clear that he was a private
citizen and that he was merely gathering information on the North Korean perspective, which he would then report back to the Clinton
administration.

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Without telling the Clinton administration, however, Carter flew to
North Korea with a CNN film crew and proceeded to negotiate the
framework of an agreement. He then informed the Clinton team after the
fact, with little warning, that he was about to go on CNN to announce
the deal. This infuriated the Clinton administration, and according to Brinkley’s account, one cabinet member called the former president a “treasonous prick.” To make matters worse, Carter then accepted a dinner invitation from Kim, at which point Carter claimed on camera that the
U.S. had stopped pursuing sanctions at the U.N., which was untrue. Nevertheless, once Carter went on television to announce all this,
Clinton felt completely boxed in, and he was forced to accept the deal
and abandon sanction efforts.

Over time, it became clear that Kim had just used Carter to take the
heat off, get economic relief, and buy time while still continuing to
enrich uranium in violation of the agreement, which it withdrew from in
2002 after being called out for cheating. Within a few years, North
Korea had built a nuclear arsenal. Carter’s effort at freelance
diplomacy, in addition to advancing a foreign policy at odds with the administration, squandered a crucial window to stop North Korea from
going nuclear.

When it came to unrealized ambitions, nothing frustrated Carter more
than the Middle East. He was convinced that, had he been reelected, he
would have been able to build on the peace agreement between Israel and
Egypt and resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians — even though there were significant differences between the two conflicts. In
2003, he boasted to the New York Times, “Had I been elected to a second
term, with the prestige and authority and influence and reputation I had
in the region, we could have moved to a final solution.” It was quite a choice of words.

During the pro-Israel Reagan administration, Carter saw little
opportunity to advance his agenda, but he perceived an opening when Bush
took over. In 1990, he befriended PLO terrorist leader Yasser Arafat,
and, Brinkley writes, “Carter began coaching Arafat on how to not
frighten democracies by using inflammatory rhetoric: it was a strategy
that would eventually lead to the Oslo Agreements of September 1993.”

Throughout the 1990s, Arafat pursued a strategy of talking peace to the
world at large while working behind the scenes to continue terrorist
attacks against Israeli civilians. He was infamous for appearing
moderate when speaking in English while fuming radically and inciting
violence in Arabic. Throughout this time, he was being mentored by
Carter, who not only advised him but even personally wrote a sample
speech for him suggesting language to use that would allow him to more effectively gain sympathy from Western audiences. At one point, he went
on a Saudi fundraising mission for the PLO at Arafat’s behest. Of
course, Arafat had no interest in peace, which became crystal clear in
2000 when he rejected an offer of Palestinian statehood and launched a
campaign of terror known as the Second Intifada instead.

Carter’s friendship with Arafat was part of a pattern in which he would chastise Israel in the most extreme terms while ignoring or minimizing
the actions of terrorists and dictators whose enemies happened to be
Israel. On a Middle East trip in 1990, he visited Syria to meet with
Hafez al-Assad and had nothing to say about the brutal dictator’s
violations of human rights, but then he went to Israel and blasted its
human rights record as it was trying to form a government. Carter met
with and embraced Hamas and, in 2015, the year after thousands of
rockets were fired indiscriminately at Israel civilians, claimed that
the group, which in its charter calls for the extermination of Israel,
was the party actually committed to peace and that Israel was not.

In 2007, Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which was not
only one-sided in its attacks on Israel but was filled with inaccuracies
and distortions. At one point in the book, he invoked the story of Jesus
to liken Israeli authorities to the Pharisees. In the first edition, he included a line in which he asserted that terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians were justified until Israel submits to demands: “It is
imperative that the general Arab community and all significant
Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings
and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate
goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel.” While he claimed
this line was a mistake, he defended the rest of his work and dismissed legitimate criticism as merely coming from Jews.

“Most of the condemnations of my book came from Jewish American organizations,” Carter said in an interview with Al Jazeera, in which he
also claimed that Palestinian rocket attacks on Israelis were not acts
of terrorism. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, he further advanced old
tropes of nefarious Jewish control. He complained that the pro-Israel
lobby made it “almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to
espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine” and lamented
that “book reviews in the mainstream media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations.” This wasn’t true, and,
further, it means that he described all Jewish writers (such as Jeffrey Goldberg, who reviewed the book for the Washington Post) as representing “Jewish organizations.”

In a speech at George Washington University on the same book tour, he
argued that the obstacle to peace was “a minority of the more
conservative [Israeli] leaders who have intruded into Palestine and who
are unfortunately supported by AIPAC and most of the vocal American
Jewish communities.”

At the event, one student asked about the fact that 14 members of the
Carter Center’s advisory board had resigned over the book, and Carter
had a familiar response: “They all happen to be Jewish Americans; I understand the tremendous pressures on them.”

One of the members to resign was a close associate, Ken Stein, an Emory University professor who had spent decades at the center — as its first permanent director, and then as the Middle East fellow, during which
time he traveled with Carter and took notes on their meetings with
foreign leaders. In a blistering review for the Middle East Quarterly,
Stein wrote, “While Carter says that he wrote the book to educate and
provoke debate, the narrative aims its attack toward Israel, Israeli politicians, and Israel’s supporters. It contains egregious errors of
both commission and omission. To suit his desired ends, he manipulates information, redefines facts, and exaggerates conclusions.”

Among the examples he gives is an account of a meeting Carter had with
Hafez al-Assad, in which Stein was the notetaker. Even though Stein
shared his notes from the meeting, Carter’s account of the same meeting
in the book was manipulated to make Assad seem more flexible than he
actually was.

Stein also included the revelation that “Carter’s distrust of the U.S. Jewish community and other supporters of Israel runs deep.” Stein
recalled an interview he once conducted for his 1991 book in which
Carter bitterly told him:

[Vice president] Fritz Mondale was much more deeply immersed in the
Jewish organization leadership than I was. That was an alien world to
me. They [American Jews] didn’t support me during the presidential
campaign [that] had been predicated greatly upon Jewish money. . . .
Almost all of them were supportive of Scoop Jackson — Scoop Jackson was
their spokesman . . . their hero. So I was looked upon as an alien
challenger to their own candidate. You know, I don’t mean unanimously
but . . . overwhelmingly. So I didn’t feel obligated to them or to labor unions and so forth. Fritz . . . was committed to Israel. . . . It was
an act just like breathing to him — it wasn’t like breathing to me. So I was willing to break the shell more than he was.

It probably didn’t help Carter’s mood that, in 1980, he received a lower share of the Jewish vote than any Democratic candidate since 1920.

In the coming days and weeks, there will be an effort to rewrite history
and claim that the 39th president was underappreciated and that people
have been too harsh on him. But the truth is that historians have not
been harsh enough. One of the few silver linings that can be offered
about Jimmy Carter is that, thankfully, he was too politically inept to
be given the opportunity do even more damage."

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