Sanctimonious, Bitter and Irrelevant...
posted by AcademicElephant
...is no way to go through life, Jimmy.
Our 39th President James E. Carter weighed in with a timely and constructive statement in a speech last night at American University: he is now "certain that Al Gore defeated George Bush" in 2000. His assembled choir broke into applause at the very thought.
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"The year 2004 is hard to grade," continued Carter. "I don't have any detailed information about what actually went on in Ohio. If Ohio had gone one way or the other, it would have changed the outcome of the election. And the only thing that I know about Ohio, was that there's general consensus that the secretary of state of Ohio, who is responsible for the administration of the election, was highly partisan in his public approach and perhaps even in his private administration. But I don't know about that."
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Carter has never been one to let a little thing like actually knowing what he's talking about stop him from making cowardly and insidious insinuations.
So what brought out Carter's ire on this particular Thursday night? I have a theory that he has it in for Bush because the President is his polar opposite. Carter both loathes him for his policies, which he considers political heresy, and lives in dire fear that Bush might actually prove right in the long run, a development that will throw his presidency into an even deeper shadow of failure. Both Bush and Carter presided over terrible episodes resulting from the long conflict between the west and the middle east. Could their responses have been any more different? Clearly, Carter's policies were a disaster. Nothing can change now except the degree by which he is condemned. If Bush's diametrically opposed approach turns out to have been the turning point towards constructive change in the region, then Carter will emerge from the perspective of history to have been one of our worst presidents.
Now the "scholarly" Carter must have envisioned this scenario, what with ominous recent events such as the election in Afghanistan and the ghastly prospect of the Iraqis ratifying their consitution in October looming on the horizon. His only recourse is to attempt to undermine Bush's efforts by suggesting that his presidency is illegitimate.
And even this is a sadly empty potshot by the man who declared the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela legitimate. Carter has set himself up as the great moral authority on judging elections. What if Bush is remembered not as the one who came in to count the ballots, but the one who made those ballots available to 50 million people? To 100 million people? More?
Carter's knee-biting attempt to undermine the authority of our President during a time of war and natural disaster is pathetic and disgraceful, especially following on the heels of Bill Clinton's "This Week" performance on Sunday. Clinton's smear of Bush was typically self-serving, but at least he is trying to achieve something--his wife in the Whitehouse. Carter has no such agenda. His words are those of a failed and tired has-been (or maybe never-was?) who sees his political antithesis moving through dangerous and troubled waters towards a kind of historical legacy that he could never dream of. The verdict on the Bush presidency is of course still out, but I know how I would "grade" (such a typically school-marmish phrase) the performance of Jimmy Carter.
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