Saturday, February 24, 2007

Jimmy Carter needs to shut the frack up, and go back to building houses.

I am so fracking tired of Jimmy Carter.

I was four when he was elected president. I still remember sitting in line for over an hour for gas at the height of his presidency. A seven year-old in a 1974 Buick in the middle of summer with no AC is an unhappy seven year-old. I was tired of Jimmy Carter by the age of eight.

I don't remember the hostage crisis, per se. I do remember them getting off the plane after being released, though, and someone saying how great it was that Reagan got these folks home (the conventional wisdom holds this to be true; Iran was afraid of the incoming administration, who they believed would have used force to get the hostages. And they were right to do so.)

Carter's recent book was, of course, more than a little bit of a fiasco. The moment you start comparing Israel to Apartheid-era South Africa, you've gone down a bad road. People are going to get sick of that really really quick.

But here's what is sticking in my craw today. Carter has never believed in the long-standing tradition of ex-presidents shutting the frack up, and once again he's decided that he needs to criticize the current administration. This time his invective is aimed at Dick Cheney (my hero, by the way; he shoots from the hip, political future be damned. He can be honest politically, because he just doesn't care to be elected to anything ever again).

And, just for the record, the Camp David Accords were not Carter's doing. They were a combination of the groudwork laid by Kissinger and Sadat's trust of Kissinger. What's especially telling here is that Kissinger got his nobel peace prize in 1973, and Sadat and Begin in 1978. Carter's was awareded twenty four years AFTER Sadat and Begin.

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