It is good to remember the best about people when they pass. Many leaders are making it a point to say wonderful things about America’s longest living president, Jimmy Carter, passing away at 100 years old. I respect Jimmy Carter for his love of humankind. His work with Habitat for Humanity likely accomplished more good and made lives better for more people than the four years of his presidency. As a journalist, I was blessed to cover the last half of his presidency and his reelection campaign. It was during his tenure that my work as an investigative reporter for a major news organization was recognized with an international award. While recognizing the good of President Carter, there is another story.
Carter’s foreign policy was a disaster. To my memory, Carter was the first and only president to systematically use food as a weapon when he embargoed grain shipments to the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan. Carter and the Democrats previously had made a big deal out of never using food as a weapon. Moreover, Carter wanted to appear as a champion to the family farmer (because he was a peanut farmer) so he got Congress to pass this big aide package to farmers because of the grain embargo. Only problem was that the big grain companies that supported Carter’s election got all the money and the family farmer got nothing—that was my award-winning investigative story.
More on foreign policy. I believe that Carter’s support of terrorist Yassir Arafat as “the father of the modern Palestinian movement” was a testimony to Carter’s legacy. Arafat was an anti-Semite terrorist who wanted all Jews annihilated. Carter, however, in my opinion, is the father of the modern terrorist state against Israel. His role in deposing the Shah of Iran and allowing the extremist Ayatollah government has murderously impacted the world for nearly half a century. Yes, Carter did broker peace between Egypt and Israel, but that peace was tenuous because the terror cells used the underground from Egypt to smuggle weapons and terrorist actors into Israel. It was Carter’s foreign policy that accelerated Islamic terrorism to the detriment of the only free society in the Middle East–Israel.
Carter’s domestic policy was equally as bad. What better than to embargo oil from Iran ostensibly because of the extremist revolution Carter essentially brought about? The extremists taking American hostages led to the Iranian oil embargo, which led to skyrocketing oil prices, double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. Proverbs 29:2 says, “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; But when a wicked man rules, the people groan.” We did a lot of groaning during the Carter years. Along about 1982, I wrote an editorial in the Washington Post that Reagan had cleaned out the Carter barn, but the moldy smell would remain for years to come. Yes, let us remember the good of this man, but we cannot forget his shortcomings because we are still living them.
