Network anchors once again bowed and scraped before Jimmy Carter as he claimed he was a better president than Reagan and he was "superior" to all the other ex-presidents in public service.
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.
And
so we have to put up with this megalomaniacal failure, along with his
tired, angry opinions yet again. On CNN, Larry King asked if the Tea
Party was racist. (That question is as insulting as King is old, and
CNN irrelevant.) Carter answered that it is only a tiny minority, but
then added that it's goaded by Fox News and Newt Gingrich. "I think
that Gingrich five years ago would be embarrassed at what Newt Gingrich
is saying today and doing today." He said because Gingrich is running
for president, he has to "go hard right and appeal to the extreme."
But Carter feels poor Obama is "suffering from
perhaps the worst Washington environment of any president in history,
and I would even include Abraham Lincoln as we led up to the war
between the states." Amazing, isn't it? Carter can sit there and say
ridiculous junk - failing to get one or two Republican votes on liberal
bills is a darker and more divided political environment than the
prelude to the Civil War? - and Larry King just nods. No wonder he's
been put out to pasture.
Speaking of ludicrous claims, on "60 Minutes," CBS
reporter Lesley Stahl asserted that Carter was the most successful
president in modern times, more successful than even Ronald Reagan.
"But when all is said and done, and many will be surprised to hear
this: Jimmy Carter got more of his programs passed than Reagan and
Nixon, Ford, Bush 1, Clinton or Bush 2."
And many would most certainly not be surprised to
hear that Lesley Stahl would try to rewrite history this foolishly on
national TV. Passing a number of "programs" isn't a measure of success.
Doesn't it matter if those programs worked? Did Carter's
legislation succeed in whipping inflation and bringing full employment?
Or did he preside over the most disastrous economy since the Great
Depression? Did he get the hostages home? Or were they sent home out of
fear of incoming President Reagan?
Stahl wasn't done, fortunately for this column,
which is writing itself: "A lot of critics of yours, when you were
President, say that you've been a fantastic ex-President. You hear that
all the time."
Click. Change channel. On "Today," NBC's Matt
Lauer inquired how Carter might be evaluated today by people who were
born after 1980. (In other words, people who didn't live through the
misery of Carter's incompetence.) If they read Carter's book, would
they think his presidency was a success or failure? Naturally, said
Carter, "I think success." He claimed to advance peace and human rights
- despite troubling facts like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and
the communist takeover of pretty much every damn country they wanted
on his watch.
Carter also took a turn with NBC anchor Brian
Williams, who worked as a White House Fellow during Carter's
presidency. (He didn't mention that.) Williams lauded Carter's
"brutally honest" book, and noticed a recent photo of assembled
presidents showed Carter a little off to one side. He asked
sympathetically: "What is it about you, you think, the way you've
decided to conduct your life in post-presidency? Do you feel listened
to? Do you feel that you received your due, or do you feel, in fact,
apart from the crowd?"
Carter was brutally honest, all right - about his
own inflated self-importance. "No, 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 working of the Carter
Center into international affairs, and to some degree domestic
affairs."
Williams did note that after the taping, this
statement "raised tension and eyebrows," but Carter could only retort,
not retract: "What I meant was for 27 years the Carter Center has
provided me with superior opportunities to do good."
Like King, Williams wanted Carter's commentary on
how "such high numbers of people believe that this American-born
Christian president is either foreign-born or a Muslim or both?" Carter
obliged by slamming Fox News for "totally distorting everything
possible concerning the facts."
This, from the man who thinks it's factual that he was better for America than Ronald Reagan.
