Jimmy Carter was never a good man – opinion

The worst thing about Carter was the way he presented his crimes as virtues.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

Outgoing President Joe Biden urged incoming President Donald Trump to learn “decency” from permanently outgoing former president President Jimmy Carter. Biden once set his sights high by trying to compare himself to FDR and JFK, now has to settle for being the second Carter.

On his way out the door, the media continues to insist that Biden is a good man. And that Carter, despite presiding over one of the worst administrations in history, was a good man.

Biden and Carter had many things in common, record unpopularity, crooked brothers, and empowering Islamic terrorists, but decency was never one of them.

Joe Biden was not a good man. Neither was Jimmy Carter.

Carter ran for office promising an administration “that’s turned away from scandal and corruption and official cynicism and is once again as decent and competent as our people.” That was a lie.

That “new morality” turned out to be a corrupt triangle between Billy Carter, Jimmy’s version of ‘Hunter’, a drunk who peddled foreign influence and mismanaged the family business, only to be bailed out by the National Bank of Georgia, whose president Bert Lance, was a Carter appointee, adviser and head of the Office of Management and the Budget.

Lance was forced to resign and was indicted on charges of bank fraud in a trial that required testimony from Carter’s mother and involved accusations of improper loans to family members.

Peanuts from the Carter warehouse were being used as collateral for loans from the bank complete with forged documents allowing the family business to sell the ‘collateral’ and a special counsel was appointed to investigate whether the dirty money found its way into the Carter campaign funds.

The media argued that the actions of his brother and OMB director had nothing to do with Jimmy Carter. Even when Carter expressed his support and pride for Lance.

When Billy Carter shilled for Libya, the media also claimed it had nothing to do with his brother. And then Jimmy left office and began shilling for so many dictators that the full list would run for pages.

Over the course of his long retirement, Jimmy Carter not only met with Gaddafi, who had paid his brother $220,000, but with Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, Kim Il Sung of North Korea, Venezuela’s Maduro and Hugo Chavez, Syria’s Assad and Fidel Castro in Cuba.

And Carter not only met with them, he loved them and covered up for them.

He claimed that he “never doubted Hugo Chávez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen” and on Castro’s death remembered “fondly our visits with him in Cuba and his love of his country.”

The more people Jimmy’s tyrants killed, the harder he hugged them. Jimmy Carter loved terrorists and so he not only embraced Arafat, but also Hamas.

In April 2008, Jimmy Carter met with Hamas and claimed that the Islamic terrorists wanted to live in peace with Israel. The next month, as a peaceful gesture Hamas fired a rocket at an Israeli shopping mall, wounding 90 including a mother and her 3-year-old daughter.

But the more tyrants and terrorists Jimmy Carter met with, the more he built up his reputation as a good man just trying to fix the world. But Carter wasn’t fixing the world by empowering some of the worst mass murderers in the world, he was continuing to break it and make it worse.

Carter met with mass murderers responsible for starving half a million people to death and then with terrorists aspiring to take over countries like Israel not because he wanted to stop the violence, but because he wanted to dial it up further by providing them with legitimacy.

Jimmy’s ‘Carter Center’ claimed to monitor foreign elections while sanctioning corrupt leftist takeovers like the one in Venezuela which led to protests, starvation and mass migration to America.

His activities on behalf of enemies like Saddam Hussein and North Korea went well beyond lobbying or even violations of the Logan Act and into a territory of outright treason.

That included contacting world leaders and urging them to oppose the United States and making announcements in America’s name at meetings with foreign leaders.

A normal D.C. lobbyist would have gone to prison for half the things that Carter did. And no one except a former president wearing the media mantle of sainthood could have gotten away with it.

Why did Carter go to such trouble for Saddam Hussein and North Korea? Why did he go on a fundraising mission for the Islamic terrorists of the PLO?

While Carter claimed to be a peacenik, tens of millions of dollars were pouring into the Carter Center including from foreign governments.

Long before the Clinton Foundation, Jimmy Carter had built a massive foreign influence machine under the guise of a humanitarian operation that “came to him in a dream.”

Even Habitat for Humanity, a key element in the rebranding of Carter as a humanitarian, couldn’t escape the sleaze when he led efforts to cover up sexual harassment at the organization.

It wasn’t the first time that Carter let out the lust in his heart and protected sexual abusers.

Biden’s mass commutations for murderers and rapists shocked a nation, but before him Carter had pardoned Peter Yarrow, of the group, Peter, Paul & Mary, for sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl.

Jimmy Carter had covered for tyrants and terrorists who had murdered entire populations. Compared to that, what was the worth of the life and innocence of a single teenage girl?

The worst thing about Carter was the way presented his crimes as virtues.

Unrepentant until the day of his long-delayed death, Carter and his defenders always claimed that everything he did only came about because he was too trusting and forgiving.

Any other man with that the same political and family corruption, the cronies and associates who ripped off businesses and the country, the parade of terrorists and dictators, would have been denounced, but Jimmy Carter beatifically smiled, acting as if his ties to sinners made him that much more of a saint, and that embracing evil was evidence of his moral superiority.

The worse Jimmy’s monsters were, the more he acted like he was saving their souls.

Joe Biden could only dream of wearing that same fake religiosity that Jimmy wore through the White House and to Havana, Pyongyang and Caracas, or of a post-presidency redeeming himself by courting the world’s monsters.

Biden may have been the second coming of Carter, but the stars aligned so that the first coming concluded weeks before the second coming was done.

dictatorsJimmy CarterTerrorism