The only thing Hillary has in her favor, IMO, is she married a better president that Jimmy Carter.
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Jimmy Carter was used by Castro
Dick Williams
For those with long memories, fun with Jane Fonda, Jesse Jackson and Jimmy Carter never ends.
This week, that laughable trio almost became one. Take away the former president's pallor and tropical costumes and he almost resembled Jackson, that infamous free-lancer of foreign policy. In fact, the tropical shirt Carter wore on his first day in Havana was the bargain-basement version of the very nice safari shirts Jackson favors on foreign jaunts.
Carter also was cozying up to an enemy of the United States in the manner of Fonda's poses atop a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft weapon. OK, so Fidel Castro's Cuba never actually invaded us, but those Soviet missiles on his island signaled a clear intent someday. And he has killed untold numbers of Cuban exiles who took asylum in the United States and tried to return to fight.
With Democrats like these, the Republican Party hardly needs an offense. Just cameras.
It was oh-so-nice of Carter -- in his unending search for the Nobel Peace Prize -- to speak to the Cuban people and call for an end to the U.S. trade embargo. It will allow President Bush to be the champion of freedom May 20 when he visits Miami and delivers his assessment of the last dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere. Bush will be in a city where 1 million Cuban exiles and their descendants know how a communist dictator hijacked a revolution, confiscated their land and businesses and killed their relatives.
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Perhaps the Nobel prize is given for masochism. Here was Carter in Cuba, site of his second-worst embarrassment as president. Nothing could match the Iranian hostage disaster, but Castro's launch of the Mariel boat lift was one of those "helpless Yanqui" caricatures. The Cuban leader emptied his jails and his mental institutions in one brilliant poke at the inept American president.
Carter seems never to learn. When the U.S. liberal hive was abuzz with criticism of Ronald Reagan for calling the Soviet Union an evil empire, Carter delivered a major address at Notre Dame University.
The American people, he said, "have an inordinate fear of Communism." So inordinate it turned out, that Reagan served two terms and should end up on Mount Rushmore. Carter has spent the last 22 years cozying up to dictators.
Here, I will insert a disclaimer just to pacify moderates. There is no arguing that Fonda, Carter and Jackson have practiced good works. She has helped adolescent girls while Carter has built homes for the poor and Jackson has ... well ... he has preached effectively.
But back to the issue at hand. Carter was used effectively by Castro. By calling for an end to the embargo, Carter was doing what mattered to Castro. Carter might just as well have embraced Elian Gonzales as he spoke the words.
But Carter piled on. "Many Cubans who fled the revolution retain a sentimental attachment for their homes," Carter said. Pardon me, but that's like saying the citizenry of Atlanta didn't really mind that Sherman burned down the town. They had just some fond memories they'd like to recapture. Maybe Carter has given away so many homes he no longer understands that the pre-Castro Cubans earned them and built them.
Carter's speech at the University of Havana ought to be required reading in our nation's government and history classes. It levies no judgment upon socialism and trifles with the very notion of capitalism. It should be studied for its naiveté and its careful condemnation of freedom and the United States, freedom's beacon.
But after it is studied, it can be consigned to the trivial. As has been his presidency.
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