The press are fawning over Jimmy Carter in an attempt to rewrite history
and transform him into a deity of sorts.
Here is the truth, the uncensored truth, about Jimmy Carter.

'Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former
President'

<https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/jimmy-carter-was-a-terrible-president-and-an-even-worse-former-president/>

'The truth is that historians have not been harsh enough.
Apopular narrative surrounding the legacy of Jimmy Carter is that as
president he was a victim of unlucky timing that impeded him politically
but that he excelled during his long post-presidential career. The
reality is that he was a terrible president but an even worse former
president.

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Carter’s true legacy is one of economic misery at home and embarrassment
on the world stage. He left the country in its weakest position of the
post–World War II era. After being booted out of office in landslide
fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his
life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United
States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as
treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only
he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and
lash out at American Jews who criticized him.

A former governor of Georgia who had little charisma and national name
recognition when he began campaigning for president, Carter ended up in
the White House as a fluke. He presented an image as an honest,
moderate, and humble southern Evangelical Christian outsider — an
antidote to the corruption of the Watergate era. He also benefited from
the vulnerabilities of the sitting president, Gerald Ford.

Once in office as an unlikely president, Carter spent his one and only
term showing the American people, and the rest of the world, that he was
not up to the job.

When he took the presidential oath in January 1977, the unemployment
rate was a high 7.5 percent; when he left office in January 1981, it was
just as high. Meanwhile, inflation, which was already elevated at 5.7
percent in 1976, the year he was elected, went up in each of his years
in office — and reached a staggering 13.5 percent in 1980, the year he
was booted out. The only year in the post–World War II period in which
inflation was higher was 1947, when the economy was booming and
unemployment was minuscule. Put another way, to maintain the buying
power that $100 had on the month Carter was sworn into office, you’d
need $150 by the time he left the White House just four years later.
Under Carter, gas prices doubled, and the supply became so scarce that
Americans had to endure long lines at stations to fill up their tanks.

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On the international stage, Carter showed weakness, and America’s
enemies took notice. Rather than recognize the true nature of the Soviet
threat, he preached the defeatist ideology of “peaceful coexistence,”
and the USSR steamrolled into Afghanistan. Also under his watch, radical
Islamic revolutionaries took over Iran, holding Americans hostage for
the last 444 days of his presidency.

It is telling that the defining speech of his presidency was known as
the “malaise speech,” in which he spoke not as a leader but as an
essayist writing on the “crisis of confidence” in America. He observed:
“For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our
people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five
years.” As he built a legacy of scarcity, he criticized Americans for
wanting plenty, lamenting that “too many of us now tend to worship
self-indulgence and consumption.”

It should be no surprise that Ronald Reagan’s message of strength and
optimism turned 1980 into a complete rout. Carter not only lost 489
electoral votes to 49, but he got trounced by ten points in the popular
vote — even though an independent candidate, John Anderson, drew 7
percent.

Carter, who performatively carried his own luggage as president, tried
to present himself as humble. But somebody actually humble would have
taken the hint by the magnitude of his defeat. The real Jimmy Carter was
stubborn and arrogant. He had plans for a second term, and he wanted to
see them through despite the overwhelming rejection by the American
people. So instead of stepping away, he spent the rest of his life
simply pretending that he was still president and pursuing foreign
policy goals even when it meant undermining the actual president.

The two most egregious examples of this came in his efforts to stop the
first Iraq War and his freelance nuclear diplomacy with North Korea.

In his mostly sycophantic 1998 book on Carter’s post–White House career,
The Unfinished Presidency, Douglas Brinkley gave a startling account of
Carter’s behavior in the run-up to the 1990–91 Persian Gulf conflict.

Concerned by the looming threat of war after Saddam Hussein’s invasion
of Kuwait, Carter pulled out all the stops — and then some — to try to
thwart the president, George H. W. Bush. Carter’s efforts started off
within the realm of acceptable opposition for a former president. He
wrote op-eds, hosted conferences, gave speeches — all urging peace talks
as an alternative to repelling Saddam with the use of military force.

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But when that failed, he took things to an extraordinary level. Carter
wrote a letter to the leaders of every country on the U.N. Security
Council, as well as a dozen other world leaders, Brinkley recounted,
making “a direct appeal to hold ‘good faith’ negotiations with Saddam
Hussein before entering upon a war. Carter implied that mature nations
should not act like lemmings, blindly following George Bush’s
inflammatory ‘line in the sand rhetoric.’”

As if this weren’t enough, on January 10, 1991 — just five days before a
deadline that had been set for Saddam to withdraw — Carter wrote to key
Arab leaders urging them to abandon their support for the U.S.,
undermining months of careful diplomacy by the Bush administration. “You
may have to forego approval from the White House, but you will find the
French, Soviets and others fully supportive,” Carter advised them.

It is one thing for a former president to express opposition to a policy
of the sitting president, but by actively working to get foreign leaders
to withdraw support for the U.S. days before troops were to be in the
cross fire, Carter was taking actions that were closer to treason than
they were to legitimate peace activism.

Carter’s meddling was not limited to the first Iraq War or to Republican
administrations. In 1994, there was a standoff between the U.S., its
allies, and North Korea over the communist country’s nuclear program.
The U.S. was floating the idea of sanctions at the United Nations. Over
the years, Carter had received multiple invitations to visit North Korea
from Kim Il-sung and was eager to fly over and defuse the situation with
an ultimate goal of convening a North–South peace summit and unifying
the peninsula. Begrudgingly, the Clinton administration agreed to let
Carter meet with Kim as long as Carter made clear that he was a private
citizen and that he was merely gathering information on the North Korean
perspective, which he would then report back to the Clinton
administration.

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Without telling the Clinton administration, however, Carter flew to
North Korea with a CNN film crew and proceeded to negotiate the
framework of an agreement. He then informed the Clinton team after the
fact, with little warning, that he was about to go on CNN to announce
the deal. This infuriated the Clinton administration, and according to
Brinkley’s account, one cabinet member called the former president a
“treasonous prick.” To make matters worse, Carter then accepted a dinner
invitation from Kim, at which point Carter claimed on camera that the
U.S. had stopped pursuing sanctions at the U.N., which was untrue.
Nevertheless, once Carter went on television to announce all this,
Clinton felt completely boxed in, and he was forced to accept the deal
and abandon sanction efforts.

Over time, it became clear that Kim had just used Carter to take the
heat off, get economic relief, and buy time while still continuing to
enrich uranium in violation of the agreement, which it withdrew from in
2002 after being called out for cheating. Within a few years, North
Korea had built a nuclear arsenal. Carter’s effort at freelance
diplomacy, in addition to advancing a foreign policy at odds with the
administration, squandered a crucial window to stop North Korea from
going nuclear.