|
|
Friday, August 18, 2006
|
|
 JIMMY CARTER IS A FUCKING PUTZ
There's a general rule for presidential candidates that has been observed for over 200 years. That is if you hold another office, or lose a very close election, you may continue to critisize the sitting president. This is why John Kerry refuses to do the honorable thing and set himself adrift on a fucking ice floe. To his credit, after losing the closet election in American history, Al Gore called on all Americans to stand behind President Bush. He didn't have to do this, but he did. He has never called into question the Bush administration's legitimacy, although he could under the circumstances.
There is a higher standard for former presidents. That standard is "do nothing to undermine the incumbent." Even during election campaigns, former presidents take a very different tone than do candidates for the office. And if you lost the presidency in a blowout, you pretty much disappear from public view. There's a reason why people thought President Hoover had died decades before he actually did.
In the 1980 election, President James Earl Carter lost 43 states, the highest loss ratio since Hoover himself. It is harder to imagine a greater electoral repudiation than that. Carter could have been expected to have followed the example of his 38 predecessors and keep his fucking mouth shut. As we all know, he hasn't.
In his 1982 presidential memoir, Keeping Faith, President Carter wrote that his greatest failure was "allowing Ronald Reagan to become president." Ever since, Carter has excoriated every subsequent president, including Bush Sr. and Clinton. Furthermore, his conducting a private foreign policy with North Korea and Haiti in his demented quest for a Nobel Prize is a likely violation of the Logan Act.
Now Carter as decided that he's going to meddle in the politics and national security policy of America's allies, specifically Israel.
His choice of venue to do so is of particular interest. Carter went to Der Spielgel. Because when one wants to bitch about the Jews, good taste dictates that you do so to the Germans. Where else can you go?
That Carter distrusts the motives of any US government that he himself isn't the head of is hardly a secret. But for a former president of the United States to bitchslap his government in the foreign press in a time of war is something that only President Carter has been ballsy enough to do.
He does however maintain a very high regard for himself.
SPIEGEL: You've been called the moral conscience of your country. How do you look at it yourself? Are you an outsider in American politics these days or do you represent a political demographic that could maybe elect the next US president?
Carter: I think I represent the vast majority of Democrats in this country. I think there is a substantial portion of American people that completely agree with me. I can't say a majority because we have fragmented portions in our country and divisions concerning gun control and the death penalty and abortion and gay marriage.
Yeah, he represents Democrats so well that he nearly lost renomination to Ted Kennedy, who couldn't elaborate to Roger Mudd why he should be president other than because his last name was Kennedy. And he represents the country so well that he was utterly humilated by a former governor who scared the tits off of almost everyone who wasnt a registered Republican. But if we only listen to Saint Jimmy of Plains, the rest of our problems will be fixed, too.
Ordinarily, when someone is referred to as "the moral conscience of your country," one tries to be just a little bit humble. Not Carter. He relishes it. He's the Bob Dylan of politics and glories in that fact.
Just as he did from 1976 to 1980, Jimmy Carter knows just how to fix America. And his prescriptions come from a very interesting view of history. And by "interesting," I mean "criminally insane."
SPIEGEL: Mr. Carter, in your new book you write that only the American people can ensure that the US government returns to the country's old moral principles. Are you suggesting that the current US administration of George W. Bush of acting immorally?
Carter: There's no doubt that this administration has made a radical and unpressured departure from the basic policies of all previous administrations including those of both Republican and Democratic presidents.
SPIEGEL: For example?
Carter: Under all of its predecessors there was a commitment to peace instead of preemptive war. Our country always had a policy of not going to war unless our own security was directly threatened and now we have a new policy of going to war on a preemptive basis. Another very serious departure from past policies is the separation of church and state, which I describe in the book. This has been a policy since the time of Thomas Jefferson and my own religious beliefs are compatible with this. The other principle that I described in the book is basic justice. We've never had an administration before that so overtly and clearly and consistently passed tax reform bills that were uniquely targeted to benefit the richest people in our country at the expense or the detriment of the working families of America.
While I would describe the policies of the Bush Administration as short-sighted and incredibly stupid, I wouldn't call them immoral. If anything, President Bush's foreign policy is based on the Wilsonian model, which argued that instituting democracies prevents wars. What President Bush doesn't seem to understand is that Wilsonianism is what created places like Yugoslavia and Iraq in the first place, and neither has been the model of peaceful conduct in the last 80 years.
I think that George Bush honestly believes that democracy is the answer. I don't question his motives on that. And that's not immoral, it's just wrong. There's a big difference.
Carter's idea that the United States has never engaged in preemptive military action, on the other hand, is just dishonest. Just ask the people of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and California, who wouldn't be American's at all were it not for a war that President Polk provoked with Mexico. The people of Guatemala certainly aren't building statues in memory of Lyndon Johnson, who used force to overthrow a democratically elected government in 1965. And what exactly was the Bay of Pigs?
I'm not saying that any of those actions were wrong necessarily, but they were unprovoked exercises in military power.
And for Carter to say that thre's never been an administration completely in the pocket of the rich only proves that he knows absolutely nothing about 19th Century America, when every administration was. Do you think the robber barons and monopolies that Teddy Roosevelt crushed just created themselves? Carter's citations of US history prove pretty conclusively that he's either a liar or a fool.
SPIEGEL: You also mentioned the hatred for the United States throughout the Arab world which has ensued as a result of the invasion of Iraq. Given this circumstance, does it come as any surprise that Washington's call for democracy in the Middle East has been discredited?
Carter: No, as a matter of fact, the concerns I exposed have gotten even worse now with the United States supporting and encouraging Israel in its unjustified attack on Lebanon.
SPIEGEL: But wasn't Israel the first to get attacked?
Carter: I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon. What happened is that Israel is holding almost 10,000 prisoners, so when the militants in Lebanon or in Gaza take one or two soldiers, Israel looks upon this as a justification for an attack on the civilian population of Lebanon and Gaza. I do not think that's justified, no.
While President Carter was singularly unwilling to defend America or its interests or those of its allies - and it's important to remember that the greatest legacy of Camp David is that it got Anwar Sadat killed - it doesn't necessarily follow that any other leader should follow his example.
You can say that Israel's actions in Lebanon were ineffective and counter-productive, but no sane person can say that they are unjustified. To suggest that they are demonstrates an utter ignorance of international law and basic morality. Carter doesn't like it, but every country retains the right to defend its borders.
But let's pretend that Carter has point regarding the prisoners. The overwhelming majority of the foreigners currently in Israeli custody were captured in Israel as they were committing or planning acts of terror. As a matter of international law, Israel has the right to try each and every one of them before a military court and execute them. People sometimes forget that the only countries in the Arab world that Israel isn't in a legal state of war with are Egypt and Jordan.
The solders that Hebollah captured were ..... also in Israel. They were not engaged in offensive actions against Lebanon. Even if they were, the only legally recognized entity that could deal with it is the Lebanese army. This brings us to the larger point. The single greatest obligation a government has to control renegade forces within its borders through a monopoly of violence. This is why private militias are generally frowned upon. If a renegade militia cannot or will not be stopped by its host government from threatening another nation, then the threatened nation has the legal and moral right to do. Which part of this does President Carter have trouble understanding?
But if Saint Jimmy wants to engage in moral equivilency, I'm game. Let's assume that American soldiers were being kidnapped in the United States and taken to either Mexico or Canada. What would virtually every American president not named Carter do in those circumstances? We know what Carter would do - send Hamilton Jordon on a secret mission and blow up a bunch of his own helicopters before paying $700 million dollars in what is essentially ransom. But that's why Carter was only president for four years, isn't it?
SPIEGEL: Do you think the United States is still an important factor in securing a peaceful solution to the Middle East crisis?
Carter: Yes, as a matter of fact as you know ever since Israel has been a nation the United States has provided the leadership. Every president down to the ages has done this in a fairly balanced way, including George Bush senior, Gerald Ford, and others including myself and Bill Clinton. This administration has not attempted at all in the last six years to negotiate or attempt to negotiate a settlement between Israel and any of its neighbors or the Palestinians.
In fact, that's not true either. If it were up to most of President Truman's advisors (including the most respected man in America at the time, Secretary of State George Marshall) Israel wouldn't have been recognized at all. Israel did not recieve arms from the United States in any significant way until 1973. And the American experience in Middle East negotiations is that one of the negotiators is ultimately murdered as a consequence. Camp David led directly to the Sadat assassination, and the Bush/Clinton policy on Madrid and Oslo were as responsible as anything else for the murder of Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin. And there's still no real peace to speak of. In fact, The Camp David summit in the dying days of the Clinton Administration were directly responsible for the second intifada that continues today.
But President Carter loves to build his non-existant legacy on Camp David.
SPIEGEL: What makes you personally so optimistic about the effectiveness of diplomacy? You are, so to speak, the father of Camp David negotiations.
Carter: When I became president we had had four terrible wars between the Arabs and Israelis (behind us). And I under great difficulty, particularly because Menachim Begin was elected, decided to try negotiation and it worked and we have a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt for 27 years that has never been violated. You never can be certain in advance that negotiations on difficult circumstances will be successful, but you can be certain in advance if you don't negotiate that your problem is going to continue and maybe even get worse.
What the former president doesn't do is explain what brought the Egyptians to the table in the first place. The Yom Kippur War effectively destroyed the Egyptian military and the IDF was in a position where they could go to Cairo almost unopposed. Sadat knew that aggression against Israel was a policy that threatened Egypt's national independence. Under those circumstances, not only is there little choice but to negotiate, there's very little to negotiate. Any American with an interest in how this works should ask the Japanese. They'll be more than happy to explain it to you.
At this point in the interview, Carter slips into a world of fantasy not unlike my current sex life.
SPIEGEL: But negotiations failed to prevent the burning of Beirut and bombardment of Haifa.
Carter: I'm distressed. But I think that the proposals that have been made in the last few days by the (Lebanese) Prime Minister (Fuoad) Siniora are quite reasonable. And I think they should declare an immediate cease-fire on both sides, Hezbollah said they would comply, I hope Israel will comply, and then do the long, slow, tedious negotiation that is necessary to stabilize the northern border of Israel completely. There has to be some exchange of prisoners. There have been successful exchanges of prisoners between Israel and the Palestinians in the past and that's something that can be done right now.
If the Lebanese government couldn't prevent Hezbollah from violting the Israeli border in the first place, what good will negotiating with them now do? Siniora is incapable of executing the fundamental obligation of a government, to secure its territory. Siniora could not even enforce the Taif Agreement, which ended the Civil War or UN resolution 1559, both of which called for the disbanding of Hezbollah. If Israel should negotiate with anyone (which is a huge if) , it should be with Hezbollah, who has demonstrated that it alone dictates Lebanese national security policy.
And Carter only gets worse from there.
SPIEGEL: Should there be an international peacekeeping force along the Lebanese-Israeli border?
Carter: Yes.
SPIEGEL: And can you imagine Germans soldiers taking part?
Carter: Yes, I can imagine Germans taking part.
SPIEGEL: ... even with their history?
Carter: Yes. That would be certainly satisfactory to me personally, and I think most people believe that enough time has passed so that historical facts can be ignored.
Wow. Maybe we should explain the "history" that the German reporter is referring to. You see, there was this thing between the Germans and the Jews called the Holocaust. The German military was instrumental in the slaughter of half of Europe's Jews. And it ended only 61 years ago. For anyone who thinks that "historical facts can be overlooked" should remember how well the Serbs overlooked the historical fact of losing a battle to the Albanians in Kosovo back in the 14th century as recently as eight years ago. While Carter's at it, why doesn't he get the Japanese to take over the Demiliterized Zone in Korea? What could happen? Personally, I think that German troops anywhre near Israel will leave a bad taste in some folks mouths.
I can't see how anyone can view Jimmy Carter as either delusional, stupid or one of the worst liars in human history. For a guy whose presidency was supposed to be about human rights, he's spent the last 25 years coddling dictators at the expense of democratically elected governments.
If nothing else, he seems determined to prove that the American people did the right thing in crushing his dreams back in 1980.
Permalink
Labels: Fun With Politics, The Serious Side of skippy
|
|
|
| |
