NY Times Touts Jimmy Carter as Apostle of 'Racial Reconciliation' As He Trashes Racist Righties

May 24th, 2016 6:31 PM

The New York Times still treats Jimmy Carter like a world-class humanitarian...and never as an uncivil partisan scold. The headline on Tuesday was “Jimmy Carter, Seeing Resurgence of Racism, Plans Baptist Conference for Unity.” Religion reporter Laurie Goodstein began with the sugar:

Former President Jimmy Carter, who has long put religion and racial reconciliation at the center of his life, is on a mission to heal a racial divide among Baptists and help the country soothe rifts that he believes are getting worse.

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Carter spoke of a resurgence of open racism, saying, “I don’t feel good, except for one thing: I think the country has been reawakened the last two or three years to the fact that we haven’t resolved the race issue adequately.”

He said that Republican animosity toward President Obama had “a heavy racial overtone” and that Donald J. Trump’s surprisingly successful campaign for president had “tapped a waiting reservoir there of inherent racism.”

Question for Goodstein: How does this little Jimmy jeremiad “soothe rifts”? How does it reconcile the races? It doesn’t. In 2007, this "peacemaker" wrote a book called Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, implying the Israelis were like South African segregationists. Not only that, he publicly smeared Jewish groups that questioned the book’s premise.

Since Obama’s first year in office, Carter has been insisted that conservative opposition organized against Obama can be explained as discomfort with a black president. Then he denied that he ever criticized the Tea Party as racist, which simply wasn’t true.

Nevertheless, Goodstein went back for more saccharine publicity for the “Nobel Peace Prize winner” as he kept mudslinging:

Mr. Carter said the election of Mr. Obama was a hopeful sign, but he added, “I think there’s a heavy reaction among some of the racially conscious Republicans against an African-American being president.”

He said recent reports showing high unemployment and incarceration rates among black people, “combined with the white police attacks on innocent blacks,” had “reawakened” the country to the realization that racism was not resolved in the 1960s and ’70s.

He said Mr. Trump had violated “basic human rights” when he referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals and called for a ban on Muslims’ entering the country.

“When you single out any particular group of people for secondary citizenship status, that’s a violation of basic human rights,” said Mr. Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work with the Carter Center in promoting human rights and democracy in many countries.

Carter dismissed any evangelicals who favored Trump over Hillary Clinton. “The use of the word evangelical is a misnomer. I consider myself an evangelical as well. And obviously, what most of the news reporters thought were evangelicals are conservative Republicans.” 

There was no challenging questions about how "Baptist unity" is achieved as Carter dismissed any Baptists who are conservative Republicans.