Jimmy Carter: Useful Idiot

In the early days of the Bolshevik take-over following the 1917 Russian Revolution, Lenin and his followers used the term "useful idiots" to describe idealistic Western liberal-socialists who failed to understand that the dictatorship of the proletariat comes out of the business end of a loaded rifle barrel. Peanut Carter fits that description perfectly.

An Associated Press release dated November 2, 2005 tells us:

"The Bush Administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were "manipulated, at least" to mislead the American people, former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday," on NBC's "Today" show.

To coin a phrase, "What did Peanut know, and when did he know it?" Was he opportunistically piggy-backing on the Democrats' theatrical, surprise demand the day before for a closed-door Senate session to launch phase one of their 2006 campaign slogan? Or did he know about it beforehand and coordinate his propaganda thrust with theirs?

Peanut is a very intelligent man, as his Naval Academy record testifies. But no politician in his right mind would want to duplicate Peanut's record in the Presidency. What was repeatedly apparent was his lack of judgment.

Why should anyone today accept an assessment of the Bush administration's performance by the man who praised the personal character of Yasser Arafat, North Korea's Kim Il Sung, Yugoslavia's Joseph Tito, and Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu?

By the late 1970s, liberal, Keynesian economics had pushed stagflation to its worst, with short-term interest rates north of 20 percent per annum. Just to pay the rent and grocery bills, women were forced into the full-time workplace and men "moonlighted' on two or three jobs. Peanut's solution was to appear on TV wearing a cardigan sweater and announce that the United States would just have to accustom itself to tougher conditions, because of what the New York Times approvingly called the "limits of our power."

In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's thugs seized power in Iran, stormed our embassy in Tehran, and held Americans hostage for more than a year. All that Peanut could muster was a failed expedition of a couple of helicopters on a suicide rescue mission. Among other things, this established the framework for Osama Bin Ladin's contemptuous assumption that we would also fail to respond to 9/11.

CIA intelligence assessments given to the Bush administration may have been inaccurate. But if Peanut and Bill Clinton had been living in the real world, instead of liberal-socialism's ivory tower, there would have been no 9/11.

The writer's weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776

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