Jimmy's World

Jimmy Carter is the eternal striver. He did not reach the pinnacle of success as a naval officer or a peanut farmer, but he persisted and – thanks to Watergate - got elected to the presidency. There he exhibited the characteristics that got him booted from that office as soon as his first term was up.

Unwilling to fade away in comfortable and blessed obscurity, Jimmy Carter has been on a mission to restore his reputation. His shortcomings before he became president were preformed largely off-stage. No one cared because no one knew. But when he got to the White House, he managed to belly flop on center stage. For Jimmy and Rosalyn, that must have been the most humiliating experience of their lives.

Ever since, they have striven to change the country’s memories of them. First “earnest Jimmy” hammering nails with Habitat for Humanity; then the successful campaign for the Nobel Prize as the Anti-Bush. Combine that with the ceaseless chasing after violent Leftists throughout the globe as their legitimizing agent as a way of getting into the headlines and telling people that he is still relevant. Jimmy is, in a way like the Clintons. He wanted to become president not to do something but to be someone.

Jimmy Carter’s personal crusade is a litmus test. How his actions are recorded and judged will be a test of the American people. If this man is mocked, we will have passed. If he is applauded it will be a mark of our failure as a society and as a people.

Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal gets Jimmy right:

Former President Jimmy Carter has an interesting way of saying more than he intends. He lusts in his heart. He turns to his 13-year-old daughter for foreign policy wisdom. He titles a book, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid." What Mr. Carter means to say is that he is a flesh-and-blood human being, a caring father, a missionary for peace. What he actually communicates is that he is weirdly libidinal, scarily naive and obsessively hostile to Israel.

Now the 2002 Nobel laureate is in reprise mode. "In a democracy, I realize you don't need to talk to the top leader to know how the country feels," he said over the weekend, responding to a question from an Israeli journalist who noted that Mr. Carter had been snubbed by most of Israel's top leadership and reprimanded by its president, Shimon Peres. "When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that's the dictator, because he speaks for all the people."


Come again?

Mr. Carter is on a tour of the Middle East, the most newsworthy aspect of which is a scheduled meeting in Damascus with Khaled Mashal, the head of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. More on that below. For now, ponder what he could possibly have meant by this statement. On a charitable view, what Mr. Carter had in mind is that in a democracy it is the people who ultimately make the policy, whereas in a dictatorship it is only the dictator's opinion that counts. Or as W.H. Auden put it, "Only the man behind the rifle [has] free will."

That's not quite what Mr. Carter said, however. He said the dictator "speaks" for "all" the people, just as the people in a democracy speak for themselves. Taken at face value, this is a reflection of every dictator's conceit: that his will is also the general will, whether the people agree with him or not. This is what Fidel Castro meant when he praised Cuba's elections, in which only the Communist Party is on the ballot, as "the most democratic in the world." Perhaps Mr. Carter has harbored similar views about the relative merits of his opinion versus the people's since he was turned out of high office by 44 states.

Evil is at its most dangerous when it's smiling.

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