Rest in Peace, President Carter

     I still vividly recall the day I sat for my ASVAB in Flushing, Queens. It was Wednesday, November 3rd, the day after Election Day 1976. The whole world was talking about the improbable election of a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, former Governor Jimmy Carter. He'd defeated Gerald Ford, the only man who became the vice president then president without getting elected. I sat for my ASVAB, and aced it, and by September the following year I enlisted in the Air Force and I proudly called President Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, my Commander in Chief.

     As a 17 year-old kid on that cold day, I could feel the excitement and the hope in the country. I was just a couple of months shy of legally being able to vote for the first time but, as Gerald Ford had famously begun a State of the Union Address, our long national nightmare was finally over.

   Watergate was still a fresh, raw memory for all of us and, during that 1976 general election, the partisan makeup in Congress didn't change significantly. Jimmy Carter won the electoral college by a full 57 votes and the Democrats retained control of Congress. Carter had a solid mandate, far more of a mandate than the one crowed about by the clown about to take over in a few weeks.

     Even though President Carter died at the age of 100 just yesterday, it's easy to see Carter taking his place among other consequential one term presidents such as John Adams and Abraham Lincoln. And for a one term president, Carter was remarkably transformative. His administration created the Departments of Education and Energy. 

     Did you know that the president had a yacht? Yes, a yacht. Jimmy Carter got rid of it, selling it for $286,000. With unemployment at 8% and inflation at 14% (a wonderful gift from the Nixon/Ford administrations), Carter quickly saw there was no way we could justify its operating budget.

    Carter also brought about the Camp David Accords, a 14 month-long effort that brought peace between Egypt and Israel. Carter was perhaps more dedicated to lasting peace than any US president in modern history, if not all history. He never sent a soldier into battle.

     Carter was taken down through the duplicitous machinations of an evil piece of shit like Ronald Reagan. Like Nixon 12 years earlier, Reagan's campaign secretly and illegally made a back room deal with the Iranians whereby he sold them weapons then laundered the money from the proceeds for the Contras. And all the Iranians had to do was hold on to the American hostages until the minute, literally the minute, Reagan took the oath of office.

     It took the Iran Contra scandal literally six years to catch up to Reagan and by the time he testified before Congress regarding his role in the scandal, he was so incipiently demented that he literally couldn't recall any of the briefings he got on the subject.

     Carter had every right to be bitter about getting mugged by Reagan and his pack of right wing thugs. Making the Iranians artificially hang onto the hostages longer made Carter look bad. Reagan never should've been allowed to take the oath of the presidency considering the dirty deal he had made with Tehran. He should've spent the rest of his life in prison for his act of treachery, he and his entire criminal cohort.

     But Carter moved on. He founded the Carter Center in 1982 and launched what became the longest post presidency in American history, one marked by unending acts of humanitarianism. He founded Habitat for Humanity, which has created countless homes for the underserved in this country, and there are literally thousands of pictures of President Carter with a hammer in his hands. While other presidents of both parties spend their post public life making tons of money, Jimmy Carter wasn't interested in any of that. President Carter was the very delineation of a Christian man living the best Christian life possible.

     And, it could be said, his crowning achievement post-presidency, was in winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 (And, unlike Obama after him, Carter actually earned it). 

     And, in death, Carter is being reviled by the right wing, with justly obscure right wing pundits still calling him the most terrible president ever without even a hint of irony considering the fool who's about to occupy Carter's old seat.

    But I'm pretty confident that posterity will name President Jimmy Carter as one of the better presidents of the 20th century if not for all time, a man who was so good at the presidency, it took several criminal acts to dislodge him from the White House.