Jimmy had Billy, Barack has George

Obama's slumdog brother: Meet the hopeless drunk from a Nairobi shanty town who is the U.S. President's BROTHER

Carter's rose colored glasses

Duped in North Korea: From Obama's Mentor to Jimmy Carter

Excerpt:

In June 1994, Carter visited North Korea. He was hosted by Kim Il-sung, a tyrant, who died mere days later. And yet, Carter reported that Kim was "vigorous, alert, [and] intelligent" and had engaged in "very free discussions with his ministers." Kim spearheaded a militantly atheistic regime, which jailed Christians; Carter, however, discovered a Kim "very friendly toward Christianity."

For the impressionable ex-president, Kim provided the full Potemkin village treatment. To say Carter was suckered is an understatement. He wrote this report:

People are busy. They work 48 hours a week. ... We found Pyongyang to be a bustling city. The only difference is that during working hours there are very few people on the street. They all have jobs or go to school. And after working hours, they pack the department stores, which Rosalynn visited. I went in one of them. It's like Wal-Mart in American stores on a Saturday afternoon. They all walk around in there, and they seem in fairly good spirits. Pyongyang at night looks like Times Square. They are really heavily into bright neon lights and pictures and things like that.

Of course, in truth, North Korea is draped in darkness, as well-known satellite photos attest. Worse, within just one year of this incredibly gullible appraisal by Carter, 10%-15% of the North Korean population (two to three million people) starved to death -- the worst famine in modern times.

Adding insult to injury, a few years after that, North Korea announced that it was a nuclear state, a direct violation of the "Agreed Framework" brokered by Carter in 1994. Then, Carter triumphantly assured us that "the crisis is over" -- words headlined by both the New York Times and Washington Post.

Needless to say, the crisis was far from over. And when George W. Bush, saddled with this agreement, which North Korea was clearly violating, declared the Kim regime part of an "axis of evil," Carter protested. "I think it will take years before we can repair the damage done by that statement," sniffed Carter.

Comment: A very good and very well documented article. Love the quote, "very friendly toward Christianity"

Jimmy's Rose Colored Glasses

America hasn't improved much over past 3 decades, Jimmy Carter says

Excerpt:

America is no better off now than it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, says former President Jimmy Carter. From national politics to relationships with other nations, there is a lot of room for improvement.

"We had almost complete harmony with every nation on Earth," the Nobel Peace Prize winner said of his administration. "We not only preserved peace for our country, we never went to war. We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a missile."

Comment: The world improved immensely when the Gipper was elected!

Time to "run away from President O'Carter"

The Carter-Obama Comparisons Grow - Walter Mondale himself sees a parallel

Excerpts:

Walter Mondale, Mr. Carter's vice president, told The New Yorker this week that anxious and angry voters in the late 1970s "just turned against us—same as with Obama." As the polls turned against his administration, Mr. Mondale recalled that Mr. Carter "began to lose confidence in his ability to move the public." Democrats on Capitol Hill are now saying this is happening to Mr. Obama.

Mr. Mondale says it's time for the president "to get rid of those teleprompters and connect" with voters. Another of Mr. Obama's clear errors has been to turn over the drafting of key legislation to the Democratic Congress: "That doesn't work even when you own Congress," he said. "You have to ride 'em."

Mr. Carter himself is heightening comparisons with his own presidency by publishing his White House diaries this week. "I overburdened Congress with an array of controversial and politically costly requests," he said on Monday. The parallels to Mr. Obama's experience are clear.

Comparisons between the two men were made frequently during the 2008 campaign, but in a favorable way. Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, for instance, told Fox News in August 2008 that Mr. Obama's "rhetoric is more like Jimmy Carter's than any other Democratic president in recent memory." Syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg noted more recently that Mr. Obama, like Mr. Carter in his 1976 campaign, "promised a transformational presidency, a new accommodation with religion, a new centrism, a changed tone."

But within a few months, liberals were already finding fault with his rhetoric. "He's the great earnest bore at the dinner party," wrote Michael Wolff, a contributor to Vanity Fair. "He's cold; he's prickly; he's uncomfortable; he's not funny; and he's getting awfully tedious. He thinks it's all about him." That sounds like a critique of Mr. Carter.

...

Liberals increasingly can't avoid making connections between Mr. Carter's political troubles and those of Mr. Obama. In July, MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked his guests if Democrats up for re-election will "run away from President O'Carter." After much laughter, John Heileman of New York Magazine quipped "Calling Dr. Freud." To which Mr. Matthews, a former Carter speechwriter, sighed "I know."

Pat Caddell, who was Mr. Carter's pollster while he was in the White House, thinks some comparisons between the two men are overblown. But he notes that any White House that is sinking in the polls takes on a "bunker mentality" that leads the president to become isolated and consult with fewer and fewer people from the outside. Mr. Caddell told me that his Democratic friends think that's happening to Mr. Obama—and that the president's ability to pull himself out of a political tailspin is hampered by his resistance to seek out fresh thinking.

Comment: President Obama can give a great stump speech, but people are tired of hearing it again and again.

Carter's Superiority complex

Carter: 'Probably superior' to other ex-presidents

What he said:

"I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents."

What he meant:

"What I meant was, for 27 years the Carter Center has provided me with superior opportunities to do good."

Comment: He was not as distant from people as Obama. But his administration did not accomplish much.

Carter's fecklessness .... Obama's inheritance

The Carter Ricochet Effect

Excerpts:

Mr. Carter had set out to make America as inoffensive as possible. Two weeks before Juhayman seized the Grand Mosque, Iranian radicals seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 66 Americans hostage. They did so after Mr. Carter had refused to bail out the Shah, as the Eisenhower administration had in 1953, and after Andrew Young, Mr. Carter's U.N. ambassador, had described the Ayatollah Khomeini as "somewhat of a saint."

...

President Obama likes to bemoan the "mess" he inherited overseas, the finger pointed squarely at President Bush. But the real mess he inherited comes straight out of 1979, the serial debacles of which define American challenges in the Middle East just as surely as the triumphs of 1989 define our opportunities in Europe. True, the furies that were unleashed that year in Mecca, Tehran and elsewhere in the Muslim world were not of America's making. But absence of guilt is no excuse for innocence of policy.

Pretty soon, Mr. Obama will have his own Meccas and Tehrans to deal with, perhaps in Jerusalem and Cairo. He would do well to cast a backward glance at the tenure of his fellow Nobel peace laureate, as an object lesson in how even the purest of motives can lead to the most disastrous results.

Comment: In contrast with Joe L .... a guy I really don't like (but I was foolish enough to vote for him!)

Jimmy Carter all over again?

Fred Barnes: It's like Jimmy Carter never left town

Excerpt:

Today's struggles between conservatives and moderates are mere skirmishes compared with the titanic intraparty battle touched off by Ronald Reagan's challenge of President Ford for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. Ford's dreamy Democratic successor, Jimmy Carter, brought matters to a head. He proved incompetent in foreign policy and a bumbler on anything to do with the economy.

The result was a Republican bull market. In 1978, Republicans gained 15 House seats and 3 senators. That was a preview of 1980, when they netted 35 House seats and captured control of the Senate with a 12-seat pickup. And, oh, yes, there was another victory. Reagan won the presidency in a landslide.

The resemblance between the 1970s and today isn't exact. Political analogies never are. But there's enough to hearten Republicans. As we saw in the election of Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey last week, the political energy and ardor are on the center-right. Just as they were 30 years ago.

A coalition of Republicans, independents, and tea party populists is beginning to take shape. How come? Because they again have a common foe. In the 1970s, it was Carter's feeble leadership in the face of stagflation and the collapse of U.S. interests abroad.

Today's it's the hyper-liberal policies of Obama and Pelosi that are for fostering rampant spending, surging deficits, ruinous debt, higher taxes, growing unemployment and unlimited government in Washington. On top of all that, Obama's foreign policy of "engaging" adversaries and hammering allies is a dangerous flop.

Comment: Ashamed to say ... I voted for Carter. My wife reminds me of this often.

Carter on Baptist unity

Carter says Baptist strife hurting evangelism

Excerpt:

Addressing more than 1,000 Baptists at the closing session of the April 24-25 New Baptist Covenant Southeast regional gathering in Winston-Salem, N.C., Carter said people around the world do not associate Baptists in the United States with terms like "harmony," "peace" and "cooperation" but rather as a contentious and divided group.

"It is this image of division as we struggle for authority over each other," Carter said, that hinders evangelism. "The arguments and the animosity in the Christian faith are like a cancer metastasizing in the body of Christ," Carter said. "This diverts us from Christ's ministry and presents a negative image of Christianity."

Carter said he convened a group of Baptists several years ago, including several leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, who agreed to talk without criticizing each other and came up with a statement of agreement including the inspiration of Scripture, local church autonomy and respect for all people.

Carter said those words and the unity effort became meaningless in 2000, when the Southern Baptist Convention narrowed its doctrinal parameters to exclude women from serving as pastors.

Carter said issues like women's roles in the church and home, the theory of evolution, abortion and how to respond to homosexuality are important, but they are not as important as the common belief that salvation is attained by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

Carter said expansion from a few thousand Christians during the New Testament era to 30 million Christians in the Roman Empire would not have been possible if Christians then were as divided as they are today.

Observation: Over 1800+ years Christians agreed on creationism, the sanctity of human life, and God's definition of marriage. Perhaps Baptists should follow that formula!

Hamas through rose colored glasses

Carter: Hamas would accept Israel as neighbor

Excerpts:

Former President Jimmy Carter said Monday that Hamas is prepared to accept the right of Israel to “live as a neighbor next door in peace.”

Carter said the group promised it wouldn’t undermine Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ efforts to reach a peace deal with Israel, as long as the Palestinian people approved it in a referendum. In such a scenario, he said Hamas would not oppose a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Hamas, a militant Islamic group that both the United States and Israel consider a terrorist organization, calls in its charter for Israel’s destruction. It has also traditionally opposed peace negotiations with the Jewish state.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, later said Carter’s comments “do not mean that Hamas is going to accept the result of the referendum.”


Comments:

What Jimmy 'heard':

“There’s no doubt that both the Arab world and Hamas will accept Israel’s right to exist in peace within 1967 borders,”

Hamas statement:

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, later said Carter’s comments “do not mean that Hamas is going to accept the result of the referendum.”