Jimmy Carter

On Saturday I noted how Washington Post staffer Laura Vozzella front-loaded her February 4 Metro-section front-pager with overheated rhetoric from liberal Democrats suggesting that voter ID bills pushed by Republicans were the second-coming of Jim Crow. As I wrote my critique, I wondered what sort of news editor would allow such extremely biased dreck to go to publication.

Today's Washington Post editorial blasting the voter ID bills may very well answer my question. In "How to discourage Virginia voters," the Post editorial board today suggested that Del. Mark Cole's bill to make the state's voter ID law stricter is evidence of "institutional racism" in the Old Dominion.

According to CNN's Piers Morgan, former President Jimmy Carter was "right" for criticizing the "self-indulgence and consumption" of many Americans in his infamous 1979 "Malaise Speech."

Morgan might find himself with a minority of Americans who actually favored Carter pointing the finger at the country, but that didn't stop him from blaming the recent financial meltdown on a failure to listen to voices like Carter's. [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

In 1984, an Associated Press writer covering the Democratic primaries wrote that "In a presidential contest dominated by concerns over the economy, inflation, and unemployment, the Democratic candidates have been loath to acknowledge the extent to which Carter administration policies contributed to those problems. Democrats have also controlled Congress for most of the past three decades, which made it relatively easy to enact the policies Carter pursued."

Of course, that AP report really never happened. The establishment press never razzed Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and the other 1984 Democratic presidential candidates about the ruinous Carter-Era inflation, 20%-plus interest rates, and high unemployment against which the Reagan administration was making significant progress in the early 1980s. But on Tuesday morning, Beth Fouhy at the Associated Press felt it necessary to wonder why this year's GOP primary candidates are rarely mentioning George W. Bush, even though the economy under Barack Obama is making relatively scant progress towards a genuine recovery and makes a much more appropriate target for criticism. Here was her comparable paragraph, plus the two which followed:

Recently on Morning Joe it was Jon Meacham suggesting that Barack Obama doesn't particularly like people and was in the wrong line of work. Today it was Tina Brown's turn, opining that PBO doesn't dig his gig.  

Discussing PBO's ever-paltrier poll numbers, Brown opined that Obama "doesn't like his job."  Video after the jump.

Rachel Maddow neglected to do her homework before her "exclusive" interview with Jimmy Carter last week -- "exclusive" in the sense that no one else was talking to Carter at the time.

Maddow asked the former president about the ransacking of the Israeli embassy in Egypt, followed by Carter making a jaw-dropper of a claim about Israel's alleged refusal to relinquish land as stipulated in its 1979 treaty with Egypt (video after page break) --

Wouldn't it have been wonderful if while Ronald Reagan was President the media gushed and fawned over him the way they do now?

On this weekend's syndicated "Chris Matthews Show," the host actually spent half the program discussing with his guests why Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry is no Reagan (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Appearing as a guest on Friday's Last Word to discuss Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman's plan to simplify the income tax code, MSNBC political analyst Richard Wolffe saw extremism in the Tea Party movement as he asserted that Huntsman's plan was "moderate when you compare it to where the Tea Party extremists want to take this."

As the discussion turned to the current anemic job growth numbers and Texas Governor Rick Perry's views on economics, Wolffe claimed that President Jimmy Carter had created more jobs that President George W. Bush as he blamed Bush and Republicans for the current economic slowdown:

To borrow from a certain president's former preacher, the "chickens are coming home to roost" in Social Security's disability program. It's nearly bankrupt, and set to run out of cash by 2017.

In the Associated Press's writeup ("Social Security disability on verge of insolvency") of the situation occasioned by a congressional report repeating the obvious, Stephen Ohlemacher surprisingly and correctly retold a bit of the history which readers should find quite interesting, as it largely explains how the program got out of control (bold is mine):

On the website WowOWow.com, CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl on Tuesday declared about the Osama bin Laden takedown "The initial reaction is triumphant: a feeling of justice done; of unfinished business dealt with; of a hurtful wound cauterized." But then she wondered about luck:

The next step for me was thinking about Barak [sic] Obama and luck. If there’s one thing we Americans want and expect from our presidents, it’s that they’re blessed with good fortune, and that they then spray their fairy dust on the rest of us.

When Jimmy Carter sat in the Oval Office, you got to think the gods had turned against him, with his double-digit inflation and gas lines. You knew he had lost his mantle of heaven when his helicopter mission to recue the American hostages in Iran failed tragically in a sandstorm.

"Thank God for Jimmy Carter. He takes on the tough ones."

That's how "On Faith" moderator Sally Quinn ended her April 26 post "Does God hate women?"

Quinn insisted that it was "a question that never occurred to me until I began to study religion" and that the 39th president of the United States had a role in her examining the topic:

With civil unrest breaking out all over the Middle East and Africa sending oil and gas prices through the roof, one could make the case that Barack Obama more and more is looking like Jimmy Carter.

On this weekend's "Chris Matthews Show," the liberal host made it seem that this is even on his mind as he made a rather telling slip of the tongue (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Disgraced former columnist Helen Thomas on Thursday not only stood by the anti-Semitic remarks that got her fired in June but also went a disgusting step further.

Speaking at an anti-Arab bias workshop in Detroit, Thomas told attendees, "Congress, the White House, and Hollywood, Wall Street, are owned by the Zionists" (h/t Detroit Free Press via Yid with Lid):

Former president Jimmy Carter lied in an interview with NPR talk-show host Diane Rehm on Tuesday. She ended the interview by asking about the Tea Party and he claimed he had never criticized them -- despite smearing them as racists in 2009 in an NBC interview with Brian Williams:

REHM: Last question, very briefly, what do you think of the Tea Party movement?

CARTER: You know, I never have criticized the Tea Party movement because, strangely enough, I capitalized on the same kind of situation politically that has made the Tea Party successful -- that is, an extreme dissatisfaction with what was going on in Washington. Because I came along right after Watergate and right after the Vietnam lost and right after the assassination of the two Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., and so I capitalized on that, and I was elected over some very wonderful people who were U.S. senators and immersed in the Washington scene.

In the November 22 issue of Newsweek magazine, Daniel Stone defended the Obama administration by blaming the institution of the presidency for failures rather than the chief executive himself: "The issue is not Obama, it’s the office....Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st-century presidency?" The same argument was used to excuse an overwhelmed Jimmy Carter 30 years earlier.

The sub-headline for the piece read: "The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world." At one point, Stone explained: "Among a handful of presidential historians Newsweek contacted for this story, there was a general consensus that the modern presidency may have become too bloated." A January 13, 1980 Washington Post article made a similar conclusion about the beleaguered Carter administration: "Voters have lowered their expectations of what any president can accomplish; they have accepted the notion that this country may never again have heroic, larger-than-life leadership in the White House."

Former President Jimmy Carter on Sunday claimed that Fox News implants "completely false images" of Barack Obama while also distorting the facts about legislation before Congress.

Speaking to Howard Kurtz on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Carter practically blamed all of the current president's problems in the polls on the cable news network (video follows with transcript and commentary):

If you’re a left-of-center media personality and you use your national TV platform to call a candidate for the United States Senate a “bitch,” how might you be rewarded? Apparently in this day and age, you’re granted an interview with a former sitting president of your political party.

Even though he wasn’t one of the most distinguished presidents of the United States, former President Jimmy Carter appeared on Joy Behar’s HLN program to promote his book, “White House Diary.” During his interview, Behar asked Carter to offer his assessment of Barack Obama’s performance as president.

Video Below Fold

 

 Chris Matthews on Monday participated in a little bit of revisionist history for the benefit of his former employer Jimmy Carter.

As the "Hardball" host brought up the possibility of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg running as a third party candidate in 2012, the former President actually said that this was why he lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980 (video follows with transcript and commentary):

 

Chris Matthews, on Monday's Hardball, invited on his old boss, former President Jimmy Carter, to commiserate about the rise of the Tea Party, as the two condescendingly praised the movement at first, with Matthews admitting "they're not all crazies, they're regular people" but then went on to ridicule them as dupes of the rich.

After Matthews asked if the Tea Partiers realized that "they're being backed by big corporations and all this conservative money at the top," Carter responded that they had no idea that they were "suborned" by those "who don't give a darn about low-class working people" like them, as seen in this exchange:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well what you think of these Tea Party people? Mr. President I look at a lot of them as, they're not all crazies, they're regular people. A lot of them middle, middle-class people and they're very religious. They're church-going people like yourself. And I wonder do they know that they're being backed by big corporations and all this conservative money at the top?

(video after the jump)

Among Wednesday’s broadcast network evening newscasts, ABC’s World News uniquely informed viewers of revelations that former President Bill Clinton lost the nuclear codes required for the commander in chief to set in motion any use of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Noting that similar accusations had been made seven years ago in the book of retired Lieutenant Colonel Robert Patterson – who notably received attention on Fox News Channel at the time and was cited in ABC’s piece – correspondent John Donvan quoted from the more current source, the memoir of former Joint Chiefs Chairman Hugh Shelton. Donvan:

Think of it like an ATM pin number to get your money, except that when Bill Clinton was President, someone lost the biscuit. This is according to the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Hugh Shelton, who’s just come out with a memoir, and it’s right there on page 392. "At one point during the Clinton administration, the codes were actually missing. That's a big deal," Shelton writes, "a gargantuan deal." Especially, he says, because the codes were unaccounted for for months.

A clip of Lieutenant Colonel Patterson was shown recounting: "[President Clinton] thought he had misplaced them upstairs. We called upstairs, we started a White House, kind of a pretty thorough search around the White House for the codes, and he finally confessed hours later that he, in fact, misplaced them. He couldn't recall when he had last seen them."

The Style section of Monday's Washington Post has an enormous picture of Jimmy Carter with the simple headline "The Book of Jimmy." The Post is jarringly behind Carter's publicity curve for his latest book White House Diary, but reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia began with the usual goo from Carter's church in Plains, Georgia: "On those scattered weekends when Jimmy Carter isn't out enforcing Middle East harmony or slaying Guinea worms or compensating for presidential malaise with ex-presidential vim, the 86-year-old can be found in Sunday school."

Anyone who's paid attention to Carter would know that "enforcing Middle East harmony" is not the right description for someone who compares Israel to apartheid-era South Africa.

Readers who don't want a cavity from all that sugar might move on to the next story, but Roig-Franzia arrived at a sharper point in paragraph nine, after Carter has declared that America is the nation most committed to waging war in the entire world, and that the Iraq invasion was "horribly unnecessary" -- the reporter read Carter's book and finds that he's a preachy know-it-all: 

Appearing on Monday's CBS Early Show, former President Jimmy Carter came up with his own version of history while remarking on Democratic chances in this year's midterm elections: "...when I was in office at this time, I had a 66% favorable rating and we had a very successful midterm election." In reality, Carter's approval stood at 49% in late October of 1978 and the Democrats lost seats in Congress.

Carter went on to blame Republican obstructionism for the Democrats' problems in 2010: "[Obama] is faced with an obstacle that I didn't have and that is almost complete polarization and absence of any cooperation from the Republican Party." The former president praised Obama: "He's gotten some very wonderful achievements so far." However, he lamented: "I don't think the Democrats are going to have a very good success in a couple of weeks."

Co-host Harry Smith earlier asked about the Middle East peace talks breaking down following the continuation of Israeli settlements. Carter replied: "Well, the key thing is for Israel to give up its ambition to occupy and control Palestine...they are still building Israeli homes in Palestine, against the wishes of the Palestinian people." Ironically, Carter was on to discuss his work for Habitat for Humanity just prior to condemning the construction of Israeli homes. He later called for "an assurance that Israel will get out of Palestine and let the Palestinians have their own viable and contiguous nation."

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday’s Joy Behar Show on HLN, comedian Bill Maher praised Jimmy Carter as "a better proponent of what Democrats actually believed in," and asserted that it was "fantastic" when Carter bragged about never taking military action against anyone during his tenure, as the HBO host complained about the modern day Democratic party. Maher: "He was a better proponent of what Democrats actually believed in. He was saying the other day, I heard him on 60 Minutes say that during his administration they never fired a shot, not a bullet, not a missile. He said, you know what, I thought, as the world's superpower, we had the obligation to be the peacemaker. I think that's fantastic. What a choice that would be for a voter because we don't have that kind of choice."

Host Behar complained: "And the tragedy is that Jimmy Carter has been vilified as the worst President in the United States history, practically, besides George W. Bush, of course, and it's really not very nice for people to say that."

During a discussion of Delaware Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell in which Maher took shots at her religious beliefs, he declared, "I need someone in the Senate who believes that global warming is real and the Earth is not 6,000 years old," leading Behar to add, "I know. It's true. I mean, maybe they should be given an IQ test before they can even run."

Maher also voiced support for raising taxes on the wealthy, claiming that increased taxes "healed" the economy in the 1990s. Attacking the credibility of supply-side economic theory, he dismissed the benefits of cutting taxes on the wealthy as he declared that the wealthy would use their money to purchase more boats, seemingly oblivious to the fact that middle class people build boats and therefore benefit financially when they are purchased by the wealthy. Maher:

Jimmy Carter is out with his 26th book, so that means he is on his 26th round of slavish liberal-media interviews hailing him as a genius and a peacemaker. No wonder we’re so tired of him.

While the Bushes have remained dignified and largely silent as ex-presidents, Carter and Bill Clinton just cannot resist venomously attacking Republican presidents and conservative politicians, perhaps because whenever they do this, TV anchors bow and scrape before them and hail their “achievements” and compassion and generosity of spirit toward mankind.

Bill Maher was invited on Chris Matthews' Hardball show, on Tuesday night, to discuss his old guest panelist Christine O'Donnell's controversial statements about practicing witchcraft in high school, but it was the HBO host's take on Jimmy Carter's recent round of interviews that was particularly jarring as he told Matthews that he wished Barack Obama was a little more like that failed president. Prompted by the one-time Carter speechwriter to comment on his former boss, Maher professed: "I love Jimmy Carter! Jimmy Carter is so honest and out there. You know sometimes, I hear people say, 'Oh, Obama, his term could become like Jimmy Carter's.' Yeah, I wish. You know Jimmy Carter did some real bold things, like returning the Panama Canal. Can you see a president trying to do that today? Or, or getting on national television and telling the American people that they're lazy and they're using too much energy?...I think this country needs a lot more of that sort of forthright honesty." [audio available here]

As for O'Donnell, Maher initially claimed she was "a liar" but, in a blatant booking plea, quickly amended, "But I like her." And after Matthews played a clip of O'Donnell commenting on scientific experiments Maher, along with Matthews, took the opportunity to take a shot at all those science-hating Republicans:

In selecting which excerpts, from his sit-down with former President Jimmy Carter, to showcase on Monday's NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams began with the not so humble boast from Carter that “I feel that my role as a former President is probably superior to that of other Presidents, primarily because of the activism and the injection of the Carter Center into international affairs,” but also decided to highlight Carter's blast at Fox News for “totally distorting everything possible concerning the facts” and having “no regard for the truth.”

Williams cued up Carter, who is making the rounds of friendly media to promote his new book, White House Diary: “How do you think it came to be that such high numbers of people believe that this American-born Christian President is either foreign born or a Muslim or both?” Carter answered:

I think the number one factor is Fox News. It's totally distorting everything possible concerning the facts. And I think their constant hammering away at these false premises about our incumbent President has a major impact on the consciousness of America. A lot of well-meaning people, including many of those in the Tea Party movement, believe what is said in this constant hammering away by Glenn Beck and by others who have no regards for the truth.