Presidents Carter and Clinton
Former Presidents Carter and Clinton are two of my least favorite former Presidents. My son gifted me with Carter's Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis for Christmas. While I have not finished the book, I'm nearly finished with it!. Jimmy Carter twists values and history as he constantly criticizes the religious right (lumped into "fundamentalism") and the Republicans on nearly every page. My wife reminds me that we split the vote that year, and I was the one who voted for Carter. It's a vote I've long regretted. As a Baptist, one might think I would respect these two Baptist former Presidents. I respect neither of them. Former President Clinton is an immoral snake oil salesman and former President Carter is a naive revisionist who had a failed presidency (just so you know how I feel!). For a Baptist President whom I have great respect, consider Harry S Truman (For a good biography of him, consider Truman: by David McCullough)
The Southern Baptists have rejected Carter's hair-brained idea of a reunion of the apostate Northern Baptist Convention with the recently purged conservation Southern Baptist Convention. You can read about it here: SBC officials reject Carter, unity talk, but not all Southern Baptists join chorus.
Excerpt: Southern Baptist officials harshly rejected Jimmy Carter's effort to unite all Baptists in North America under a compassion agenda, calling the ambitious plan "voodoo ecumenism" and a thinly veiled Democratic strategy to woo values voters.
Jimmy Carter's latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, has created quite a stir with its revisionism with regard to the Palestinean / Israeli conflict. You can read about it here and here and here.
Put simply, these are two statesmen that I do not respect! Here's another blogger's viewpoint: SBC Outhouse: Mohler for President, continued
You are right on the money concerning President Carter and President Clinton. When you consider the fact that Harry Truman was president when you and I were born, I suppose that we do have some perspective on the last fifty years of American presidents.
ReplyDeleteI used to tell my students that Carter was a pretty good ex-president, but my opinion dramatically changed during the last decade or so. His strident support for the Palestinians and his hatred of the Israelis is pretty striking, i.e., his latest book. I'm just not sure why he went off the rails, but he should have stuck to building houses on behalf of Habitat for Humanity.
And where does one start with "Slick Willy" and his behavior while president? He is the poster boy for postmodernism, but sad to say, there are many of us baby boomers who are emulating him.