WASHINGTON — Facts are facts, and such is the degree of
politicization in the republic today that when a political
organization announces a literary prize the perspicacious among us
have a pretty good idea who the winner will be. When the
left-leaning New York Times Book Review announced on its
cover that a survey of litterateurs had chosen the finest
novel of the past 25 years, close students of that tribe knew
before opening the magazine that the award had gone to Toni
Morrison. Thus, you will not be surprised to hear that the
conservative panel that annually awards the J. Gordon Coogler Award
for the Worst Book of the Year has conferred the 2005 prize on
Jimmy Carter. Jimmy published a book; he wins the Worst Book of the
Year Award — once again. This is not Jimmy’s first Coogler. He has
now won the award twice. No other literary impostor can make that
claim.
Jimmy has actually published twenty books now. Probably he
should have been made Coogler Laureate twenty times. The problem
is, so vain is this insufferable huckster and so desperate has he
become for notice that, as his presidency attracts ever more flies
in history’s dustbin, he is increasingly likely to show up at our
Coogler Awards ceremony — whether invited or not. There he would
stand, clutching his Coogler to his bosom and sermonizing until the
janitors turned out the lights. Worse, he might bring Rosalynn, an
author in her own right.
Jimmy was the worst president in American history and, in
personal terms, the most repellent. That last statement would have
been implausible a year or so after he vacated the White House.
Today, however, after a quarter century of caddish behavior towards
his successors, it is perfectly acceptable. His public criticisms
of sitting presidents have been insulting and usually dishonest. He
has oozed vitriol against America even while he was strutting on
foreign soil. Before him no president criticized his government
from foreign soil. Jimmy has repeatedly broken that rule.
In fact no prior president has spoken as rudely and dishonestly
of his successors or of his country as has Jimmy. The acerbic Harry
Truman came to loathe President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In public,
however, Harry minded his tongue. Jimmy’s presidential achievements
were even more modest than those of Bill Clinton and of Gerald
Ford, and his blunders on the domestic and foreign policy fronts
are unsurpassed and possibly unsurpassable. What is more, he writes
bad books.
One of the reasons is that he is a man of demonstrably bad
character. Only a man of bad character would write as he does in
Our Endangered Values, “I announced that the protection of
[human rights] would be the foundation of our country’s foreign
policy, and I persistently took action to implement this
commitment. It has been gratifying to observe a wave of
democratization sweep across our hemisphere and in other
regions….” Actually the sweeping that went on during Jimmy’s
years was the sweeping of anti-Western forces into power in places
such as Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua, and forget not, Iran. The
democratization he deviously takes credit for did not begin until
the mid-1980s with the military buildup of the Reagan
administration and the demonstrated resolve of a president who,
along with Lady Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, bankrupted the
Soviets and their satellites without firing a shot. In this
tendentious book Jimmy actually accuses the Pope’s anti-communism
of alienating Catholics who yearned for liberation theology — that
is to say Marxist theology.
When Jimmy left office he was dismissed by liberals such as the
historian Arthur Schlesinger for being so “conservative.” That is
to say, his view of economics fit somewhere in between the views of
the early Franklin Roosevelt and those of the late Herbert Hoover.
Yes, but in social policy he was strictly New Age liberal. He even
expressed a belief in UFOs, a preposterosity that Schlesinger and
his ilk tend to forget. In foreign policy he was a pompous
procrastinator, lecturing Americans on their “inordinate fear of
Communism.”
Essentially, this Georgian Snopes is simply a backcountry
huckster, much like Bill Clinton. Carter began his political career
welcoming the support of the Ku Klux Klan. He adjusted his appeal
to the dominant forces in the Democratic Party of the 1970s. Now
with this book he has adjusted once again. He is another howler
voice in the chorus of the Angry Left, the Halitotic Left. He has
earned the J. Gordon Coogler Award for the Worst Book of 2005. I
just pray that the day of our gala ceremony he gets on the wrong
Greyhound bus.
