Comparing Obama to Carter

 Published april 1, 2011 in the Lynchburg Ledger

I suspect that one of the people most excited about Barack Obama’s presidency is former president Jimmy Carter.  Up to now, Jimmy Carter has been considered the most incompetent president in history.  Now, in a race to the bottom, Barack Obama seems to be on track to take the title from Carter.

Carter in turn, has described the Bush (43) administration as the “worst in history.”  Historically, former presidents have refrained from commenting on their successors, but Democrats like Carter and Clinton seem to think they are above that.

Jimmy Carter was the 39th President and served from 1977 to 1981, when he was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980, perhaps the best president of the century.

We are still suffering from the incompetence of the Carter administration some 30 years later, both internationally and domestically.

Under Carter, Iran went from a friendly dictatorship to an Islamic nation dominated by Islamic fundamentalists. 

On taking office, Carter announced that "human rights" was among the highest of his priorities. Carter immediately made America’s ally, the Shah of Iran, one of his first targets.  Carter publicly chastised the Shah for his human rights record, claiming he had been torturing about 3,000 prisoners, many of them accused of being Soviet agents. Carter sent a clear message to the Islamic fundamentalists that America would not come to the Shah's aid.  His anti-Shah speeches were actually played from public address systems in downtown Tehran.

When it comes to foreign relations, we can not think in terms of good and bad, but rather in terms of tolerable and intolerable.  When you depose an ally, you better be sure what you get in their place. 

Carter didn’t and Iran became a fundamentalist Islamic state.  The regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, which took power, executed more people in its first year in power than the Shah's government had allegedly killed in the previous 25 years.  Khomeini's regime was a human rights nightmare and continues to be even today.  Two American hikers who possibly strayed into Iran have been held for over two years charged with spying.  A third was released on a massive amount of bail. 

We had a similar situation in Egypt where Obama abandoned our long-time ally Hosni Mubarak.  Mubarak was a tolerable dictator and a stabilizing influence in the Middle East.

Obama has also decided it was time to oust Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, in spite of Gaddafi’s much less militant stands in recent years.  Gadaffi voluntarily surrendered his growing nuclear capability after we invaded Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein.

Is history about to repeat itself?  Speculation is that the Muslim Brotherhood is poised to take political control of Egypt.  If they do, Egypt will be turned into another Iran.

It was Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini who introduced the idea of suicide bombers to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and who paid $35,000 to PLO families who would offer up their children as human bombs to kill as many Israelis as possible. 

Khomeini gave the world Hezbollah to make war on Israel and destroy the multicultural

democracy that was once Lebanon.  They are responsible for the deaths of 241 U.S. Marines in their Beirut barracks in 1982.

Jimmy Carter is responsible for the chain of events that gave us not only Hezbollah, but al-Qaida and the 9-11 attack, the Taliban and a nuclear Iran and North Korea.

It was Jimmy Carter who negotiated the flawed agreement with North Korea (at Bill Clinton’s request) that resulted in their nuclear weapons capability today.

When the Soviet Union saw us so willingly abandon a staunch ally such as the Shah of Iran, they invaded Afghanistan, and it was the resistance to the Soviet invasion that helped give birth to the Taliban. We actually supported the Taliban back then by providing arms and instructors from the CIA. 

The Iranian revolution also led to the Iraq-Iran War that took a million lives and encouraged Hussein to invade Kuwait to strengthen his position.  This brought us Desert Storm where we had to evict Iraq from Kuwait.

Economically, Carter adopted the Keynesian economics of the time, buying into the theory that there was a reverse "trade-off" between inflation and unemployment — an idea that proved spectacularly wrong but one Barack Obama subscribes to.  Under Carter, the U.S. became mired in "stagflation," with both inflation and unemployment rising sharply. 

Under Obama, we have high unemployment and his policies are keeping them high by restricting small business.  The rate of inflation has been held artificially low by the Federal Reserve but with rising gas prices, the costs of every thing else, such as food, is on the rise.

Carter was famous for embracing dictators.  He kissed Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev on each cheek.  Carter also kissed Fidel Castro when he visited that communist despot.

Obama took another approach.  Obama greeted the king of Saudi Arabia with a full bow from the waist.  He also bowed to Japan’s Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko at the Imperial Palace.

During the Carter administration, the Housing and Community Development Act of 1977 was passed and set in motion the events which led to the housing meltdown and financial collapse of 2008, which helped elect Obama.

Carter established the Departments of Energy and Education.  Ever since, our supply of domestic energy has steadily decreased as we become increasingly dependent of foreign oil.  Our students, who once scored at the top of international scholastic tests, now score at or near the bottom.

Unless we repeal ObamaCare, our health care system, now the finest in the world, will revert to a second class system such as we see in Europe.

Jimmy Carter was a one-term president.  Let us hope and pray Barack Obama will be also.