The 39th president’s transformation from preening liberal to full blown America-hating Gollum seems to be complete.
The remarks came at a Duke University event that also featured his oldest grandson, Jason, who was elected to the Georgia Senate in May 2010.
The former president said his travels abroad since he lost the 1980 election helped him realize the U.S. is “extra stingy” about sharing its wealth with developing nations, particularly when compared to European democracies that put an emphasis on foreign aid. Helping the less fortunate, he said, should be viewed as a moral obligation and not an act of charity.
“It dawned on me they were just as intelligent, they were just as ambitious, and their family values were just as good as mine,” he said. “It’s not a matter of superiority or generosity or handing out gifts to others who are less than you. They just haven’t had a chance in life.”
I think it’s that “lost the 1980 election” bit that’s key. Carter has never forgiven America for choosing Ronald Reagan over him, and then re-electing Reagan and essentially rejecting Carter’s liberalism until the election of Barack Obama (and Obama had to lie about his true beliefs to get elected). The United States has saved the world from Europe’s wars twice and then faced down the Soviets, while leading the world in economic freedom, funding the UN despite its obvious counter-productivity toward American interests and being the go-to nation whenever there is a crisis anywhere in the world. We spend billions as a nation and as organizations and individuals to do what we can to make the world a better place. America is the most generous nation in world history; that shouldn’t be a partisan issue or dispute. Carter hates it because America turned right in part in reaction to his own failures as president. How he must loathe hearing “It took a Carter to get a Reagan.”
Plus, Jimmy Carter has simply lost touch with reality.
The Georgia Democrat said at an event in Atlanta that Occupy organizers have succeeded in forcing the media and Congress to realize the “chasm is getting greater than leaps and bounds” between the rich and the poor.
“It‘s been relatively successful even acknowledging there’s no leadership, there‘s no coherence and there’s no single list of issues they want to succeed,” the former president said of the movement started late last year in lower Manhattan to decry corporate influence in government and wealth inequality.
The only way that Occupy can be seen as a success at all is if you already agreed with its anti-capitalist and occasionally anti-Semitic message (Carter has made it abundantly clear over the years that he does), and you ignore the rapes and various other crimes that went along with the occupy camps. So, sure, discounting the Occupy Movement’s idiocy and criminal activities, and the damage it did to public spaces and the general pointlessness and sense of entitlement it fostered, it was a barn burner.
Liberals ought to find both Jimmy Carter and the occupiers a collective source of embarrassment.
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