Confused and Bereft
As far as I can remember, I pretty much ignored the kerfuffle over Jimmy Carter’s book, and I don’t intend this as a late arrival to the party, only, as put-downs go, this one’s really good:
JPost - Why Jimmy Carter is not an anti-Semite, by Shmuley Boteach
Jimmy Carter is not so much anti-Semite as anti-intellectual, not so much a Jew-hater as a boor. The real explanation behind his limitless hostility to Israel is a total lack of any moral understanding.
Carter wants to do what’s just. His heart’s in the right place. He just can’t figure out what the right is. He is, and always has been, a man of good intentions bereft of good judgment. He invariably finds himself defending tyrants and dictators at the expense of their oppressed peoples. Not because he is a bad man, but because he is a confused man.
CARTER SUBSCRIBES to what I call the Always Root for the Underdog school of morality. Rather than develop any real understanding of a conflict, immediately he sides with the weaker party, however wicked or immoral.
One of the main reasons I ignored the whole thing (or tried to, if I didn’t), was because just about everything about it, whether blog entry or otherwise, was always prefaced “But he’s such a nice man” as if that should excuse one from being told off when one’s being a flipping moron. There are lots of nice men out there, but many of them are still idiots, and none of them get to be presidents or deserve to have books published on sensitive international affairs which, had they been presidents, would have done a lot to unsettle those affairs. It’s just all so stupid.
December 31st, 2006 at 12:11 pm
I am sorry, but Carter is not even a nice man. Perhaps at one time he was, but his pride has never recovered from losing in a landslide to Ronald Reagan, and the bitterness fairly drips from his mouth every time it opens. He never passes up the opportunity to say something snide.
You want to know who genuinely is a nice man? Walter Mondale.
December 31st, 2006 at 12:27 pm
He’s still alive?
[ninme wikies]
By gum he is. He must be nice. (The ones I think are dead usually are, since being nasty gets one press)
I think his accent lets him get by with people thinking he’s nicer than he really is. But in person, apparently, he’s quite sweet. Bubblehead’s a fan, having met him when he and Rosalind came to see the boat named after him.
December 31st, 2006 at 1:23 pm
You may have something there. As my sister, who now lives in the deep south, has pointed out, Southerners can say pretty much anything because they phrase it as a question and follow it with “bless-yo-heart” in that drawl. Try this w/ a twang: “Why yo’ mama was nuthin’ but a 2-bit whore, was she, yo po thang? Raised you no bettern’ a squirrel, did she, Sugar, Bless-yo-heart?”
See? Sounds like sympathy.
December 31st, 2006 at 5:05 pm
That’s hilarious. I’ll have to keep an ear out for that if I ever visit the Deep South.
What about the opposite end of the spectrum? Where a person’s true feelings are most likely to be delivered without guile. The Texan?
January 1st, 2007 at 2:21 am
No, Maine ye idiot.
:>
January 1st, 2007 at 9:31 am
No, I think it’s me. Even when I am nice people always think I’m a jerk. Make ‘em laugh, they say, but nobody likes a joker.
…Guess I’ll go eat worms.