Jimmy Carter will be 100 years old on Oct. 1. That in itself might have been enough to stage a concert in his honor. After, no other president has hit the century mark, and so why not? Yet when the roster of D-listers, has-beens and never-weres took the stage to honor Jimmuh last Tuesday, they weren’t content with praising his unprecedented longevity. Instead, they spent a great deal of time hailing “the singularity of his achievements” and praising the ways in which he supposedly made the country better. That’s right: once again leftists exchanged fantasy for reality.
The New York Times reported Friday that a stellar lineup including the B-52’s, BeBe Winans, Angélique Kidjo, Chuck Leavell “and many others,” some of whom you may even have heard of, took the stage at Atlanta’s venerable Fox Theatre to honor the failed president.
The air was thick with undeserved praise. “You can see he had a relationship to music — look at how we gathered here together tonight. He used it as a powerful tool to bring people together.” Carter brought people together? Then why is the country so divided today? I know, I know: The Gipper and the Bad Orange Man. Anyway, the business about how Carter used music to bring people together were the words of country singer Carlene Carter; the Times noted that Carter “is not related to the former president but said he still feels like kin.” According to multiple online sources, Carlene Carter is a woman and doesn’t claim to be a man, so it remains unclear why the Times referred to her as “he,” but it may just have been wishful thinking that she would jump onto the trans madness bandwagon.
The Times was less confused about the concert for Carter. “In many ways,” the Paper of Record pontificated, the concert “mirrored the scope and ambitions of the man it was celebrating: Global and idealistic in its reach, but firmly planted in Georgia, molded by religious and cultural traditions as well as the rich but complicated history of the rural South.” Uh huh. Global and idealistic and the worst president of the latter half of the twentieth century.
The performers showered him with praise. Michael Trotter Jr. “of the married duo the War and Treaty” called him “our forever president.” Carlene Carter added that Jimmy was a “mighty fine man.” Hannah Hooper of “the alternative rock band Grouplove” gushed that he was “an environmental god.” Musician Dave Matthews, addressing the hero of the night, who was not present, said: “You are most definitely the rock ’n’ roll president.” Chuck Leavell of the Allman Brothers band said: “We were so proud of his administration and all the accomplishments that he made.”
Accomplishments? During his one term as president, Carter fought the “energy crisis” by scolding Americans for using too much energy and overseeing a proliferation of government regulation in order to make Americans become more energy-conscious and less wasteful. But the whole endeavor was built on sand: there was actually no energy crisis. The world’s oil reserves did not run out in the 1980s, as had been predicted, and not because Carter saved the day by winning what he called the “moral equivalent of war.”
Carter only made the real problem worse: oil companies were so beset with restrictions and regulations that they couldn’t take adequate steps to find new oil supplies. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, changed that, and the days of the energy crisis were over, at least until apocalyptic climate hysteria of a different kind became the centerpiece of later Democratic presidents’ efforts to assert even more federal control over the lives of Americans.
The Department of Education is another Carter failure. Despite pouring tens of billions into U.S. public schools, student performance has not improved; just the opposite has happened. Even worse, the federal bureaucrats who oversee the Department of Education have created national standards and curricula that are marred by a pronounced leftist bias. This has taken the form today of a manic attention to race and diversity, at the expense of giving children a basic education.
Related: World’s Worst Philanthropist Honors Our Second-Worst President
Carter has received a great deal of praise, as well as a Nobel Peace Prize for the Camp David Accords, but in reality, they accomplished little. The final agreement had Israel making substantial territorial concessions in exchange for promises that Egypt would not attack Israel, which the Egyptians kept because U.S. foreign aid was made contingent upon peace. Other than that, the Accords brought no peace to the Middle East. They legitimized the existence of the “Palestinian” people, a propaganda invention of the KGB in the 1960s, and advanced the assumption that Israel was occupying territory to which only Israel actually had a legitimate claim.
Meanwhile, the Iranian hostage crisis, as well as the abject failure and apparent amateurishness of the rescue operation, epitomized the Carter administration’s impotence in the face of repeated provocations from the nascent Islamic Republic of Iran. In a very real sense, Jimmy Carter is the Father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a rogue regime that still viciously oppresses its own people while allying with and financing jihad terror groups around the world.
Only Old Joe Biden has now ensured that Carter will not be thought of as our worst president ever. So what were these people celebrating? Why are “celebrities” usually on the wrong side of every issue? If Jimmy Carter was a great president, the nation sure could use some bad ones.
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