[NYPost] At least he got to vote a couple times for Kamala
| He lived long enough to die as the second-worst president in my lifetime, an improvement in rank I never expected to see. I don’t believe in his soul’s probable destination, but he assuredly did. Lots of details about his life and career can be read at the link — here is the key info: |
Jimmy Carter, the Georgia peanut farmer who became the 39th president of the United States during a time of gas shortages, Cold War drama and the Iran hostage crisis, died Sunday.
He was 100.
Carter — the longest-living president in US history — passed away in Plains, Ga. — the town where he was born — after spending nearly two years in hospice care.
He survived Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years, by a little over a year. She died at age 96 in November 2023.
The former president leaves behind four children, Jack, Chip, Jeff and Amy, as well as 11 grandchildren and 14 grandchildren. He was preceded in death by Rosalynn as well as one grandchild.
“My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” said Chip Carter, the former president’s son.
“My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs.”
Carter was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1977, after defeating Republican Gerald Ford, whose campaign was burdened by the political baggage he carried from his decision to pardon disgraced President Richard Nixon following the Watergate scandal.
He served only one tumultuous four-year term before being swept aside by Ronald Reagan — but in that time he racked up triumphs such as the historic Camp David peace accords, in which Israel and Egypt officially recognized each other’s governments.
“Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood,” he once said.
Public observances will be held in Atlanta and Washington, DC followed by a private interment in Plains, where Carter will be buried alongside Rosalynn on a plot visible from the front porch of their home of more than six decades.
The full details of President Carter’s state funeral — including public events and motorcade routes — are still pending and will be released by the Joint Task Force-National Capital Region.
Biden schedules state funeral, National Day of Mourning for Jimmy Carter for January 9
[IsraelTimes] US President Joe Biden has scheduled a state funeral in Washington for former president Jimmy Carter on January 9.
He declares January 9 as a National Day of Mourning across the US. Carter, the longest-lived former president, died yesterday at his home in Plains, Georgia. He was 100.
Biden also orders US flags to fly at half-staff for 30 days from Sunday.
| A few bits from something more contemporaneous (National Review, 2002), which nicely explains my animus: |
Carterpalooza!
• For years, Carter has been a thorn in the side of presidents, acting as a kind of “anti-president,” as Lance Morrow once put it in an essay for Time. You recall how Carter irked Clinton on Haiti and North Korea. His low moment, however, came during the run-up to the Gulf War, when he wrote members of the U.N. Security Council — including Mitterrand’s France and Communist China — urging them to thwart the Bush administration’s effort. Our government found out about it when the Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney, called the defense secretary, Dick Cheney, and said, “What the . . .?” Some people actually allowed themselves to utter the word “treason.”
• Carter has long enjoyed a reputation as a Middle East sage, owing, of course, to his role in the original Camp David accords. That reputation, however, rests on shaky grounds. Truth is, Sadat and Begin had their deal worked out before ever approaching Washington. And the facilitators they used were far from saintly Southern Baptists: They used the dreadful King of Morocco and the even more dreadful Ceausescu of Romania! When they had their plan essentially worked out, however, they called the White House (whose occupant just happened to be J.C.) (initials not accidental, he and his most fervent admirers have seemed to think for years).
Why did they contact the White House? Prof. Bernard Lewis put it succinctly to Charlie Rose recently: “Well, obviously, they needed someone to pay the bill, and who but the United States could fulfill that function?”
Still, Carter is proud-as-all-get-out of his rendezvous with Middle East history. He trades on it incessantly.
• The ex-president has always considered himself screwed out of the Nobel prize, and he and his Carter Center have campaigned rather embarrassingly openly for it. He has won prizes, however, about which he crows: There was one named after his fellow liberal southerner, Fulbright; there was one from the U.N. (natch); and there was my favorite: the Zayed International Prize for the Environment, named for His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates!
Arabs are heavy-duty funders of the Carter Center, and they get a lot for their money.
• No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter is. William Safire has reported that Cyrus Vance acknowledged that, if he had had a second term, Carter would have sold Israel down the river. In the 1990s, Carter became quite close to Yasser Arafat. After the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia was mad at Arafat, because the PLO chief had sided with Saddam Hussein. So Arafat asked Carter to fly to Riyadh to smooth things over with the princes and restore Saudi funding to him — which Carter did.
• Carter’s op-ed piece for the New York Times last month — April 21 — was a nasty piece of work, an apologia for Arafat (despite a pro forma and unconvincing attempt at “balance”) and a mendacious attack on Sharon and Israel.
His hatred for Sharon is deep, obvious, and personal. At times he seems to use the man as a proxy for Israel: in other words, it’s okay openly to despise Sharon, if it’s slightly less okay openly to despise Israel. He refers to Sharon’s — Sharon’s — “invasion” of Egypt and his “invasion” of Lebanon. Of course, Meir was prime minister in the one instance, and Begin was prime minister in the other. Sharon was a general or defense minister. Carter also forgets the annoying little detail that Israel is a democracy, and that the people of that country democratically elected Sharon their prime minister. This is in sharp contrast to the Arab states, plus the P.A., that Carter admires and excuses.
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