Jimmah Carter

My first opportunity to vote in the presidential elections was in 1980. Back then, you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know that the peanut farmer was a complete bumbling incompetent. Most people agreed and sent him back to Georgia in favor of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, who even won in such true-blue states as Massachusetts and New York, went on to be one of our greatest presidents. Meanwhile, Jimmah can't accept the fact that the American people rejected him and refuses to shut up and go into retirement.

Shmuley Boteach at the Jerusalem Post has an excellent Op-Ed about Jimmah and his ridiculous book comparing Israel policy with South African apartheid.

I grew up in the US during the 1970s, the one decade universally acknowledged to have truly sucked. In 1970s America we danced to disco music, wore leisure suits and watched the Brady Bunch. But if that wasn't torture enough, we had Jimmy Carter as our president.
I can still recall how depressing it was to watch his taciturn face on TV announcing one catastrophe after another, from the skyrocketing misery index, to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to the capture of our hostages in Iran, to the tragically-botched rescue attempt to free them.

Having spent my formative years in the 1970s, I quite agree that the decade was very depressing. I sometimes wondered if there was going to be a USA by the time I became an adult.

Regarding Jimmah's ridiculous book, Boteach defends him against charges of anti-semitism by reasoning that the man is simply stupid:

Jimmy Carter is not so much anti-Semite as anti-intellectual, not so much a Jew-hater as a boor. The real explanation behind his limitless hostility to Israel is a total lack of any moral understanding.
Carter wants to do what's just. His heart's in the right place. He just can't figure out what the right is. He is, and always has been, a man of good intentions bereft of good judgment. He invariably finds himself defending tyrants and dictators at the expense of their oppressed peoples. Not because he is a bad man, but because he is a confused man.

The problem is that a former president, even one who was rejected so overwhelmingly by the voters, can still do a lot of damage. Carter has done just that by giving moral support to dictators like Castro, Ceaucescu, and Kim Il Sung.

Another minor tidbit. President Bush is often criticized by the left for pronouncing the word nuclear something like "nukylar". Jimmah, who was a nuclear engineer in the navy, pronounces it the same way but I have never heard anyone criticize him for it.