Jimmy Carter: "..at worst, Carter is a knowing supporter of bad actors, and at best, a naïve moral relativist."

In the Federalist, David Harsanyi reminds us of the despicable record of Jimmy Carter since his presidency.

Before the socialist cratering of Venezuela, Carter had been one of Hugo Chavez’s most important international allies. In a speech at the Carter Center, three weeks before Venezuelans voted in 2012, the former president noted that “of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” (You won’t be surprised, I suspect, to learn that the United States was “one of the worst” because it allowed all citizens to spend money on campaigns.)

Numerous international pro-democracy groups disagreed with Carter’s assessment. In Venezuela, Chavez was the only one with access to unlimited funds — not to mention the state’s infrastructure and media — while anyone who opposed him was cowed into silence lest they lose their property and be deported. Carter, like many others these days, forgets there’s a lot more to liberalism than voting.

...at worst, Carter is a knowing supporter of bad actors, and at best, a naïve moral relativist.

Read more https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/03/reminder-jimmy-carter-is-our-worst-ex-president/

Jimmy Carter, supporter of boycotts of Israel, being treated for cancer by a by a “breakthrough” drug created in Israel!

Adam Kredo reports in the Free Beacon,

Former president Jimmy Carter, who in the past has been supportive of boycotts against Israel, is having his cancer treated by a “breakthrough” drug created in the Jewish state, according to reports.

Carter, who is being treated for cancer in his liver and brain, said he has been making a recovery since taking a cancer drug known as Keytruda, which was created by Israeli doctors.

Carter has been a vocal critic of Israel.

The drug is believed to be the next generation of treatment for cancer.

Carter has not commented on the fact that this drug was made by Israeli doctors.

Precedent

At Front Page Magazine Daniel Greenfield quotes Jimmy Carter back in 1980:

the Secretary of Treasury [State] and the Attorney General will invalidate all visas issued to Iranian citizens for future entry into the United States, effective today. We will not reissue visas, nor will we issue new visas, except for compelling and proven humanitarian reasons or where the national interest of our own country requires. This directive will be interpreted very strictly.

Greenfield concludes,

Apparently barring people from a terrorist country is not against "our values" after all. It may even be "who we are". Either that or Carter was a racist monster just like Trump.

...In November 1979, the Attorney General had given all Iranian students one month to report to the local immigration office. Around 7,000 were found in violation of their visas. Around 15,000 Iranians were forced to leave the US.

Read more here.

Naive appeasement

Victor Davis Hanson asks at National Review,

In a system of closed borders, immediate and permanent deportation for criminal activity, and no sanctuary cities, would the illegal immigrant have more or less respect for his hosts?

Then we come to Iran. Does Supreme Leader Khamenei tone down his anti-American rhetoric — unwise though such rhetoric may seem in the midst of heated debates over the wisdom of President Obama’s negotiations — when the United States offers concessions on continued enrichment and centrifuges, or backs off from snap-back sanctions and anywhere/anytime inspections? If the U.S. Congress should defeat the treaty, reinstate even tougher sanctions, organize another global boycott, and warn the Iranians that they will be held accountable for their terrorist operatives, would Iranian theocrats keep chanting “Death to America” in their legislative chambers and press ahead with enrichment as they wink and nod to their allies about nuclear proliferation?

The trait is not quite ingratitude so much as it is gratuitous derision. It all reminds me of 1980, when the ingratiating Jimmy Carter (remember the aborted appeasement mission of Ramsey Clark, and Andy Young’s blessing of Khomeini as a probable “saint”?) was slandered as satanic by the Iranian hostage-takers, while President-elect Ronald Reagan was met with silence and released hostages.

The Castro brothers just upped their rhetoric, as Fidel demanded millions of dollars in embargo reparations as part of President Obama’s “normalization” of relations with Cuba — apparently to remind the world that the Cubans have no intention of paying back the billions of dollars they confiscated 55 years ago in American capital and property, much less of easing up on human-rights activists. Why would the Castros do that at this point, when no American president in a half-century has been more deferential to their Stalinist government?

Why did Putin react to Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s obsequious reset with invasions of his smaller neighbors? Is the U.S. popular in Libya for removing the hated Qaddafi? Do the Palestinians appreciate stepped-up foreign aid to them and American pressure on Israel? Why did ISIS swallow Iraq immediately following our departure, when we had been told ad nauseam in the 2008 campaign that our foreign presence there was an irritant and a radicalizing force among the peoples of the Middle East?

The answer is something more than just the obvious: that naïve appeasement is more dangerous than wise deterrence, or that the sober advice to keep quiet and carry a large stick trumps sounding off while wielding a toothpick.

...Obama’s misreading of human nature has proverbially sown the wind, and the whirlwind is upon us.

Read more here.

The new normal

Victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review,

For a time, reset, concessions, and appeasement work to delay wars. But finally, nations wake up, grasp their blunders, rearm, and face down enemies.

...Hitler figured that for a decade America had been unarmed and isolationist. Britain repeatedly had appeased the Third Reich. The Soviets initially collaborated with Hitler.

...Hitler met no opposition after militarizing the Rhineland. He annexed Austria with impunity. He gobbled up Czechoslovakia without opposition. Why shouldn’t Hitler have been stunned in 1939 when exasperated Britain and France finally declared war over his invasion of distant Poland? Six years of war and some 60 million dead followed, re-establishing what should have been the obvious fact that democracies would not quite commit suicide.

By 1979, the Jimmy Carter administration had drastically cut the defense budget. Carter promised that he would make human rights govern American foreign policy. It sounded great to Americans after Vietnam — and even greater to America’s enemies. Then Iran imploded. The American embassy in Tehran was stormed. Diplomats were taken hostage. Radical Islamic terrorism spread throughout the Middle East. Communist insurrection followed throughout Central America. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. China went into Vietnam. Dictators such as the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini assumed that Carter no longer was willing to protect the U.S. postwar order. Or perhaps they figured that the inexperienced American president was too weak to respond even had he wished to do so.

Then, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in 1980 on the promise of restoring U.S. power. At first, both America’s friends and enemies were aghast at Reagan’s simplistic worldview that free markets were better than Communism, that democracy was superior to dictatorship, and that in the ensuring struggle, the West would win and the rest would lose.

Barack Obama, like Carter, came into office promising a sharp break from past U.S foreign policy. The public was receptive after the costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the recent financial meltdown on Wall Street.

Troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan on pre-announced deadlines. The post-surge quiet in Iraq fooled Obama into eagerly yanking out all U.S. peacekeepers. A new outreach to radical Islam went to ridiculous lengths. The Muslim Brotherhood was invited to Obama’s speech in Cairo that claimed the West owed cultural debts to Islam for everything from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Terms like radical Islam, jihad, and Islamic terror were excised from the official American vocabulary and replaced by a host of silly euphemisms. In symbolic tours, Obama offered apologies for past American behavior in the Middle East and Asia. He bowed to both theocratic sheiks and the Asian monarchs. The defense budget was cut. Reset with Vladimir Putin’s Russia assumed that the Bush administration, not Putin’s prior aggression in Georgia and threats to Crimea, had caused the estrangement between Moscow and Washington.

Predictable chaos followed as the U.S. became an observer abroad. The Islamic State appeared to fill the vacuum in Iraq. Syria imploded. So did most of North Africa. Iran sent agents, surrogates, and special forces into Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, even as it pressed on to get a bomb.

China stepped up its violations of the waters and airspace of America’s traditional Asian allies. Putin did the same in Eastern and Northern Europe.

By 2015, America’s enemies had created chaos and defined it as the new normal.

The next president will face a terrible dilemma. To restore order, he or she will have to convince our allies that we are recommitted to their security.

Any red lines issued will have to be enforced. Aggressors such as Russia, China, Iran, and the Islamic State will have to be warned to cease and desist or face pushback from far stronger U.S.-led coalitions. Just as Reagan’s return to normal U.S. foreign policy was considered radical after the Carter years, so too the next administration will be smeared as dangerously provocative after Obama’s recession from the world stage.

The Obama foreign policy cannot continue much longer without provoking even more chaos or a large war. Yet correcting it will be nearly as dangerous. Jumping off the global tiger is dangerous, but climbing back on will seem riskier.

Read more here.

Israel's leaders refuse to meet with Carter

William Jacobson reports that Israel's president and prime minister, after consulting with the Israeli National Security Council and Israeli Foreign Ministry, are refusing to meet with former president Jimmy Carter during his visit to Israel.

Read more here.