Celebutards

by Andrea Peyser

“I try not to commit a deliberate sin,” he told the magazine. “I recognize that I’m going to do it anyhow, because I’m human and I’m tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, ‘I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.’

  “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it.”

  By declaring his technical purity (and securing God’s permission), Carter almost seems to be presciently distancing himself from the whole Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky mess that would strangle the White House two decades hence. It did nothing for his reputation, however. Clinton the Cheater was wildly popular in spite of, or maybe because of, his sexual transgressions. But after four years in office, Carter the Limp couldn’t get elected town dog catcher. Carter’s impotence, real or figurative, was a theme that would dominate his presidency from its very first day, January 20, 1977, when Carter, accompanied by wife Rosalynn and daughter Amy, chose to walk, instead of ride, along the inauguration route in Washington, D.C. Carter wanted to be seen as a man of the people. But the public wants a virile, mythical figure, not a waffling peanut farmer who couldn’t make up his mind to save the nation.

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  Carter wanted to be seen as a man of the people. But the public wants a virile, mythical figure, not a waffling peanut farmer who couldn’t make up his mind to save the nation.

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  As president, Jimmy Carter could not catch a break, and probably didn’t deserve one. The Carter era was a time of huge inflation and snaking gas lines. People slept in their cars in order to be in front of a pump as soon as stations opened and just as quickly ran out of fuel. It also was the time when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter responded to this threat by keeping United States athletes out of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, as well as by instituting aid to the Islamist Afghanis, a policy, continued under the Reagan administration, whose full disastrous impact would be known two decades later.

  CARTER EXTENDED AN open-arms policy to all Cubans who wanted sanctuary in the United States from Fidel Castro’s country. It would be an unmitigated embarrassment. Between April and October 1980, some 125,000 Cubans washed up on our shores in the Mariel boatlift. As it turned out, a good number of these so-called refugees were released from Castro’s prisons and mental institutions, flooding Scarfaces and freaks onto the streets of Miami.

  BUT FOR ALL the failures for which Carter is remembered, the absolute nadir was reached in the final year of his presidency, when sixty-six hostages were seized by militants in the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran. Fifty-two were held captive an astonishing 444 days, an embarrassment that crippled the limping Carter presidency, as a band of Iranian thugs made the all-powerful United States government look like the Keystone Kops. Only one rescue attempt was planned, and even this was aborted at the very last second. Even so, on April 25, 1980, the military rescue helicopter collided with a refueling plane in the Iranian desert. Pandemonium erupted as United States servicemen believed they were under enemy attack. Eight were killed. Though the hostages were held another nine months, no rescue attempt was made. Carter was so unpopular toward the end of his presidency, he was challenged by Teddy Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic nomination, but somehow stubbornly emerged as the party’s standard bearer. In the end, he was defeated in the general election by Republican Ronald Reagan. The day Reagan was sworn in to office also was the day the hostages were released from Iran.

  What is a failed politician to do? It is a theme that would crop up more than two decades later with Al Gore, when he lost a White House he thought he owned. Some men in Carter’s position might slink into bitter obscurity, return to farming, and be forgotten. But for some reason known only to him, Jimmy Carter believed his gifts were too valuable to squander, whether or not the public wanted them. And so, Jimmy Carter set out to save the world. Whether or not the world wanted him.

  Carter did high-profile volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity, helping low-income people build and purchase houses. He set up the Carter Center to advance human rights and promote health care. But despite boldly putting his name on his work, he was unsatisfied with the role of global do-gooder. As president, Carter negotiated a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. He knew that conducting foreign policy was the key to fame, renewed relevancy, and impossible-to-get reservations at his restaurant of choice, even if it meant he must meddle, irritatingly, at the adult table. But Carter appears to have been born lacking the gene for shame. Despite his reputation as a learned man, he also has developed a keen ability to ignore all facts except those that might generate buzz.

  Carter has angered President Bill Clinton and both Presidents Bush by his meddling, freelance diplomacy. He persuaded Clinton to let him visit North Korea in 1994 where he negotiated an agreement under which that country agreed to stop processing nuclear fuel. For his efforts, Carter won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize—rapidly shaping up as the consolation prize for failed, lefty politicians—for his work in bringing peace to places from Haiti to North Korea. Too bad you can’t rescind a Nobel. Within a few years, North Korea was back to making nukes.

  Carter ignited outrage when he was seen schmoozing with Cuban leader Fidel Castro during the 2000 funeral of former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Not one to be cowed, he visited the island nation in 2002, becoming the first president in or out of office to do so since the Communist revolution of 1959. While in Cuba, Carter met with Castro and addressed the people, in Spanish, on national television.

  Castro is not the only avowed enemy of this country with whom Carter has played footsie. He installed himself as an observer of Venezuela’s recall election in 2004 after members of the European Union declined the mission, complaining that there were too many restrictions placed upon them by the administration of Hugo Chavez. Though some of the American press and pollsters reported massive fraud at the polls, Carter insisted that Chavez, an avid Socialist with a miserable record of human rights abuses, was the proper winner. When Chavez stood on the floor of the United Nations and called President Bush “diablo [devil],” one can only assume Carter approved.

  Carter was on a roll. In March 2004, he went after President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair for waging war to oust Iraqi butcher Saddam Hussein “based upon lies and misinterpretations.” Then he upped the volume. Asked in 2007 how he would judge Blair’s support of Bush, he responded, “Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient.”

  And then, he outdid himself. In an interview published May 19, 2007, in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, he said, “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history. The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.”

  Tulane University historian and Carter biographer Douglas Brinkley called Carter’s “worst in history” remark unprecedented. Shocking.

  “When you call somebody the worst president, that’s volatile. Those are fighting words,” he said.

  The next day, White House spokesman Tony Fratto dismissed Carter’s flailing as so much grousing from a loser. “I think it’s sad that President Carter’s reckless personal criticism is out there. I think it’s unfortunate. And I think he is proving to be increasingly irrelevant with these kinds of comments.” Ouch.

  Maybe Carter knew he’d blown it. Days later, Carter blamed others for “misinterpreting” what he clearly said. He told the Today show that the words “were maybe careless or misinterpreted.” He said he “certainly was not talking personally about any president.” This would not be the last time that Carter, when asked to defend bloviations spewing from his mouth or emanating recklessly from his pen, would try to take them back. Sort of.

&
nbsp; Nothing Carter has ever done or said, no matter how hurtful or ridiculous, could compare with his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

  Carter pathetically tried to attract attention, even enmity, with his comparison of Israel and South Africa’s former apartheid system, in which the separation of the races was written into law. But this comparison just doesn’t fly in Israel. In the Jewish state, many Palestinians are full citizens. But Carter didn’t care.

  Even more frighteningly, he suggested that Americans tend to get their information from the Jewish-dominated media, which he claimed silences opposition voices. That’s a dangerous absurdity that feeds into any number of conspiracy theories that have been used historically as an excuse to put down Jews. In truth, these days many leftist pundits and politicians are downright hostile to Israel. But Carter omitted and twisted facts that did not meet his thesis.

  A furor erupted over the book, as fifteen people resigned in disgust from the advisory board of the Atlanta-based Carter Center. Kenneth Stein, an adviser to Carter for twenty-three years, walked away after calling the book “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited”—an alarming claim—“superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.” In another interview, Stein said that Carter had “taken [material] directly” from a previously published work. He got no reply from Carter.

  Even then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi issued a statement: “With all due respect to former President Carter, he does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel. Democrats have been steadfast in their support of Israel from its birth, in part because we recognize that to do so is in the national security interests of the United States. We stand with Israel now and we stand with Israel forever. The Jewish people know what it means to be oppressed, discriminated against, and even condemned to death because of their religion. They have been leaders in the fight for human rights in the United States and throughout the world. It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes technically based on oppression, and Democrats reject that allegation vigorously.” Tell ’em, Nancy.

  Well, did Carter mean “apartheid” or not? At the end of 2006, Carter wrote an open letter to the Jewish community, in which he stated that “apartheid in Palestine is not based on racism but the desire of a minority of Israelis for Palestinian land and the resulting suppression of protests that involve violence.” He also defended himself from charges (deserved) that he had suggested that Jews control the news media. He insisted, “I have never claimed that American Jews control the news media, but reiterated that the overwhelming bias for Israel comes from among Christians like me who have been taught since childhood to honor and protect God’s chosen people from among whom came our own savior, Jesus Christ.” OK, then, “Apartheid” is neither accurate nor defensible. So why use the word?

  Ethan Bronner, the New York Times’ deputy foreign editor, used the Gray Lady’s pages to pen a devastating review of Carter’s book in January 2007.

  Bronner blasted the book as being “premised on the notion that Americans too often get only one side of the story, one uncritically sympathetic to Israel, so someone with authority and knowledge needs to offer a fuller picture. Fine idea. The problem is that in this book Jimmy Carter does not do so. Instead, he simply offers a narrative that is largely unsympathetic to Israel. Israeli bad faith fills the pages. Hollow statements by Israel’s enemies are presented without comment. Broader regional developments go largely unexamined. In other words, whether or not Carter is right that most Americans have a distorted view of the conflict, his contribution is to offer a distortion of his own.”

  Bronner does not dispute that many Palestinians live in substandard conditions. But the good in the book, he wrote, is erased by the author’s refusal to see what is happening in the Middle East. “For the most radical leaders of the Muslim world—and their numbers are not dwindling—settling the Israel question does not mean an equitable division of land between Israel and Palestine. It means eliminating Israel.”

  Ultimately, he disputes the notion that Carter is anti-Semitic, concluding that the former president sees everything through the prism of a devout Christian, which makes him tone deaf to the shouts and murmurs of the region. It’s an optimistic assessment. And one I don’t share.

  From whence does Carter’s loyalty to Arab causes arise? When did his distrust, bordering on rabid hatred, of Israel commence? Could it be a simple matter of dollars and cents?

  Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who was once counted as a Carter adviser, reported in Front Page magazine that Carter’s foundation has drunk up untold millions in oil money from the Middle East, especially from Saudi Arabia. Carter even received a monetary reward in the name of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan. Dershowitz himself persuaded Harvard to return $2 million of this man’s dirty money when he learned that the Zayed Centre for Coordination called the Holocaust a “fable,” claimed Israel assassinated President John F. Kennedy and the United States was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. His organization also hosted speakers who called Jews “enemies of all nations.” And still, Carter took money from this character, saying, “This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan.”

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  Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who was once counted as a Carter adviser, reported in Front Page magazine that Carter’s foundation has drunk up untold millions in oil money from the Middle East, especially from Saudi Arabia.

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  “I sadly concluded that Jimmy Carter of the twenty-first century has become complicit in evil,” Dershowitz wrote. “Carter and his Center have accepted millions of dollars from suspect sources, beginning with the bail-out of the Carter family peanut business in the late 1970s by BCCI, a now-defunct and virulently anti-Israeli bank indirectly controlled by the Saudi Royal family, and among whose principal investors is Carter’s friend, Sheikh Zayed.”

  Carter received $500,000 from the bank’s founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, who has doled out more than $10 million for Carter’s projects. Carter took the money, overlooking Abedi’s statement that his bank is “the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists.”

  And thus, Carter has set himself up as the biggest hypocrite of modern times. He blasts “Jewish money” for warping coverage of the Middle East in favor of Israel, while never fully disclosing the fact that Jimmy Carter is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Arab world.

  “By Carter’s own standards, therefore, his views on the Middle East must be discounted,” wrote Dershowitz. And still, Jimmy Carter presses on.

  One might think of Jimmy Carter as the terrorists’ pal. But in April 2008, he went one better. Jimmy Carter became the terrorists’ tool.

  Defying officials of his own government as well as Israel’s who warned Carter against providing aid and comfort to the enemy, Carter staged a Middle Eastern tour of favorite terrorist haunts. And so, Carter’s role in foreign politics matured. For years, he’d played sidelines agitator. Now he’d emerged as a full-blown collaborator.

  Arriving in the West Bank town of Ramallah with wife Rosalynn, he hugged and kissed on both cheeks Nasser Shaer, a former deputy prime minister in the Hamas-led (read: terrorist) government. He praised the late terror-monger and thief Yasser Arafat and solemnly laid a wreath on his grave, while praising him for championing causes that are just (he didn’t mention Arafat’s wholesale looting of the Palestinian treasury). Naturally, he accused Israel of holding up the latest peace negotiations.

  He tried to get to Gaza, but Israel wouldn’t help him. In fact, officials shunned him. So at a Cairo hotel, he met with Mahmud al-Zahar, who masterminded the Hamas seizure of the Gaza Strip. Al-Zahar got so juiced from the drop-in, he declared that Carter’s presence was a blow to the United States’ boycott of Hamas.

  In Damascus, he topped himself. Despite warnings from State Department officials in the United
States who feared Carter would breathe legitimacy to butchers, he met top exiled leaders of Hamas, Khaled Mashaal and Moussa Abu Marzuk. These men are labeled global terrorists by the United States. These men are at the top of Israel’s most-wanted list.

  Evidently, reasoning with Carter is fruitless. A source close to Carter told Reuters news service that the notoriety of his mission only encouraged him to go further.

  Pressed about playing nice with killers, Carter got cute. He insisted that he was only visiting terror haunts as a private citizen. “I’m not a negotiator. I’m just trying to understand different opinions and provide communication between people,” he said.

  Then, Jimmuh really stepped in it.

  Following his terrorist tour with a trip to Wales in May 2008, Carter dropped a nuclear bomb. He became the first American who might be in a position to know to declare that Israel possessed at least 150 nuclear weapons—something Israel has never admitted, and Americans have never discussed. Well, he’s Jimmy Carter, enemy of the Jewish state.

  He said this by way of arguing that the United States should try to persuade Iran to dump its nuclear ambitions. But observers noted that Carter might push Iran to start producing nukes for real. Carter’s outrageously loose lips may have put lives in peril. Finally, the public might begin to see that, for Jimmy Carter, that’s the whole point.

  I’m afraid Jimmy Carter is something far worse than a simple Jew hater: he is a situational anti-Semite. One with no deep feelings in his heart about the matter. He is an opportunist.

  The $64,000 question is—Did Carter actually condone terrorist attacks against Israel? Here is the wording on chapter 30 of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, as Carter wrote it:

  “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the road map for peace are accepted by Israel.”