Go Back to the Peanut Farm, Jimmy

Redstate:

Jimmy Carter is — by far — the worst American president that anyone alive today can remember. Pick your poison: Unemployment? Inflation? Foreign affairs debacles? Waiting lines at the gas stations? Deadly killer bunny rabbits? Rude and boorish White House aides? Jimmy Carter had it all.

I couldn't agree more. Even as a young boy I remember the disaster that was the Carter Administration. It was a gloomy time in America, politically speaking. Unfortunately, Carter doesn't know when to quit inflicting his brand of foreign policy on America and the world.

Here are some of the lowlights of his post-presidency diplomatic efforts:

1. During the buildup to the Gulf War in 1990 and 1991, while the first President Bush was trying to orchestrate an international coalition to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, Carter wrote a letter to the U.N. Security Council asking its members to stymie Bush's efforts.
2. In 1994, President Clinton dispatched Carter to defuse an impending war with North Korea over that country's nuclear program. After meeting with Kim Il Sung, Carter said of Kim Il Sung, a brutal Stalinist dictator, "I found him to be vigorous, intelligent, surprisingly well-informed about the technical issues and in charge of the decisions about this country." He then went live on CNN International without telling the administration to undermine Clinton's efforts to impose U.N. sanctions on North Korea. Carter believed sanctions threatened the agreement he had worked out. By speaking directly to the world about the prospects for peace, he knowingly encouraged countries like Russia and China, which were resisting a sanctions regime. According to Brinkley, a Clinton Cabinet member referred to Carter as a "treasonous prick" for his behavior.
3. Carter tried to legitimize the Venezuelan referendum in 2004 on the Hugo Chavez regime where exit polls conducted by the reliable American firm of Penn, Schoen, and Berland showed Chavez losing by a large margin (59 – 41), while the official results put Chavez free and clear by a vote of 58 to 41 percent--a 40 point swing. “I think it was massive fraud,” Doug Schoen told Michael Barone at U.S. News and World Report. “Our internal sourcing tells us that there was fraud in the [Venezuelan] central commission.” There are widespread reports of irregularities and evidence of fraud, many of them ably recorded by Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the Wall Street Journal last week. Carter is untroubled by any of this, and declares that Chavez won “fair and square.”
4. In the 1990 election in Nicaragua, Carter, along with most of the liberal Democratic establishment in Washington, openly hungered for a Sandinista victory as a way of discrediting the Reagan-Bush support for the Contras. Sandinista strongman Daniel Ortega had visited Carter in the U.S. and called him “a good friend,” and Carter consistently downplayed or excused reports of Sandinista pre-election thuggery and voter intimidation.
5. Now he is chastising the Bush Administration for not financing the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, for whom he has become an outspoken defender. According to the Jerusalem Post, Hamas calls for the nuclear destruction of Israel in a nuclear holocaust.
6. Carter reportedly volunteered to be Arafat's speechwriter and go-fer, crafting palatable messages for Arafat's Western audiences and convincing the Saudis to continue funding Arafat after the Palestinians sided with Iraq against the United States.
7. He recently accused U.S. soldiers of torture and oppression at Guantanamo.

I wish Jimmy Carter had stuck to teaching Sunday school and his excellent work building houses for the poor for Habitat For Humanity. If he had, there's little doubt that he could have rehabilitated his image and wiped his disasterous presidency from the American consciousness. Even Nixon had China, which he is widely recognized for making important contributions after his failed presidency. Unfortunately, Carter seems to have boundless energy and an uncanny knack for being on the wrong side of history.

While it's too late to impeach him, this organization wants him censured. It'll never happen; but, it's not as if there aren't plenty of reasons to.

The verdict: Nice man, crappy politician.