May 20, 2007 09:26 AM
I have long known that Jimmy Carter could be the catalyst for important comedy in others. In 2005, for example, he brought out some hilarity in the United States Navy when that usually somber organization decided to name its latest attack submarine after the 39th President. That decision was the occasion of much mirth all around the internet.
But who knew that Mr. Carter was himself a comedian of unusual gifts? Yes, we all have long known he can be an amusingly sanctimonious sermonizer, as when he confessed to Playboy that he had sometimes--"often"!--felt "lust in his heart." Cringe-making self-righteousness, too, has long been a Carter trademark as when he went on national TV and cribbed from the historian Christopher Lasch to berate the American public for being lazy and self-indulgent. (As the historian Andrew Roberts put it, "When Carter spoke of Western ’malaise’, . . . he little recognized how perfectly he himself personifed it.") But a real, honest-to-goodness stand-up comedian? Who would have thought it?
A recent article from the Associated Press convinces me that Mr. Carter has what it takes. Exhibit A, The Headline:
Bush presidency ’worst in history’ for international relations: Carter
Now, the AP headline writer might deserve some credit for that hilarious conjunction, but consider the rich material he was working with!
“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” quoth Mr. Carter.
For sheer comic brass, that takes the cake. Pace President Carter, "as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world" his own administration leads the pack, as the phrase "Iranian hostage crisis" indisputably shows. (A CNN headline from 1980: "As the Iranian hostage crisis drags into its second year, 52 Americans are still held captive by the new regime in Tehran, with no resolution in sight"--my emphasis.)
Some names:
SSGT Dewey L. Johnson, age 31Those were the 8 young men who died during the Mr. Carter’s misconceived, ill-prepared, botched attempt to rescue the hostages.
SGT John D. Harvey, age 21
CPL George N. Holmes, Jr., age 22
MAJ Richard L. Bakke, age 33
MAJ Harold L. Lewis, age 35
CAPT Lyn D. McIntosh, age 33
CAPT Charles T. McMillan, II, age 28
TSGT Joel C. Mayo, age 34
Misconceived? Ill-prepared? Well, Mr. Carter had spent the first part of his one-term presidency gutting the military, so it is perhaps not surprising that a special forces operation undertaken when he was commander-in-chief would, most observers now think, have been a disaster even if there had been enough helicopters to carry it out.
The Iranian Hostage Crisis was the immediate terminus a quo of our current confrontation with radical Islam. Had we acted with decision then, it is likely that we would not be battling al Qaeda and other Islamist groups now.
But to have acted decisively, we may have had to act pre-emptively, a form of behavior that Mr. Carter disapproves of (and this brings me to Exhibit B):
“We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered. But that’s been a radical departure from all previous administration policies.”
Where to begin? "We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war"? How about the letter that Bill Clinton signed in 1998 suggesting that Saddam Hussein was so great a threat to U.S. interests that we might have to remove him, pre-emptively? How "directly" does our security have to be threatened before Jimmy Carter would act? We know that having a US Embassy overrun and its personnel taken hostage is not a direct enough threat for him. How about 9/11? Let’s say that North Korea or Iran puts a nuclear warhead on a missle and targets Detroit. Is that direct enough?
In 1981, the Israelis attacked and destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. The world--including, I regret to say, the United States--reacted with condemnation. A quarter of a century later, the world is grateful, though it says so only in hushed voices when no one is looking.
The cream of Mr. Carter’s comic burst against President Bush is that he, Jimmy Carter, excels every president in recent memory, not only in the disrepute into which he brought the United States on the world stage, but also in the ruin he made of the economy when he was president: high-unemployment plus soaring inflation, the famous "misery index" (which reached nearly 22 percent under Mr. Carter’s tenure) that helped Ronald Reagan sail into the White House in 1980.
"The worst in history" is pretty bad, and let’s face it, the United States has been lucky when it comes to its leaders. We’ve had some moral pygmies, and some whose administrations were a magnet for financial scandal, but we’ve had nothing on a Rome-in-decline, to say nothing of a modern African (and here and here and . . . )or Middle East (and here and here and . . . ) or Oriental or Communist (and here and here and . . .)or Fascist scale. For that we should be grateful. Still, when it comes to all-around incompetence, fired by unbearable moral sanctimony, the 39th President of the United States, James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr., wins the prize. He really is the worst to date, and it was naughty (if amusing) for him to foist off the distinction on another man.