By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on 5.24.07 @ 12:08AM
It's Coogler time -- meaning it's Jimmy Carter time again, as he earns a lifetime achievement award for his literary efforts.
WASHINGTON -- Former President Jimmy Carter is a clever rascal.
The other day, when he esteemed the presidency of George W. Bush
"the worst in history," he was naturally intent on bold-faced
headlines. He is always covetous of attention. But there was more
to it. Assigning the Bush presidency the "worst in history" is now
a major theme among leading Democrats, and it cannot have been lost
on Jimmy that if President Bush's presidency becomes known as the
"worst," Jimmy's presidency will only be runner-up. So Jimmy rather
brazenly joined his fellow Democrats and made yet another attempt
to rise from history's cellar.
Unfortunately he keeps writing books. With his 2006 blunderbuss,
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid he has now written
twenty-one. With each book he emerges anew in all his cheesiness,
his hollowness, his ignominious smallness. It is difficult to
believe that the American people ever raised him to the presidency,
but then he was elected in the middle of the 1970s, a decade when
America was on the run. The Soviet Union was taking advantage of
the Democrats' recent foreign policy bug-out, Vietnam. Moscow's
agents and allies were busily advancing the Marxist-Leninist hooey
in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. At home the moribund
liberals were putting the final touches on their governmental
monstrosity, the welfare state, thus ensuring stagflation,
ungovernable cities, and continued wretchedness for their victims,
the poor.
Jimmy was an exemplary leader for them. When he bewailed
America's "malaise," they imagined still more social engineering,
higher taxes and government bureaucracies to treat the malaise.
Unfortunately for Jimmy and his liberal friends, Governor Ronald
Reagan, a man Jimmy has always considered his moral and
intellectual inferior, knocked him off in 1980. Jimmy turned to
writing books and serving as a prof at Emory University. The books
have all been insipid and occasionally remarkably bad.
His first book, Keeping Faith, won him the J. Gordon
Coogler Award for the Worst Book of the Year in 1982. For the next
two decades his infantile books were merely childish. Then in 2005
there was a dropping off. He copped another Coogler for his Our
Endangered Values. In it he seemed to be taking credit for the
foreign policy achievements of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan,
and the Pope, whom he incidentally accused of alienating Latin
American Catholics with his ferocious anti-communism. Jimmy's
fantasies often are not even amusing.
His 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, is
probably his worst and least amusing. It is mendacious and
anti-Semitic and has attracted charges of plagiarism. It caused
Professor Kenneth Stein to resign from the Carter Center because of
its inaccurate and unfair depiction of Israel through three decades
of diplomatic and military dealings with the Palestinians. Stein
had served as an aide to Carter during most of those years. He
considers the book deceitful and malicious. As the book's
incendiary title adumbrates, Jimmy compares Israel with the white
supremacist regime of old South Africa. Fourteen members of the
Carter Center's advisory board have resigned over the book. In
March Jimmy explained these resignations to an audience at George
Washington University by saying, "They all happen to be Jewish
Americans."
Many years ago an early biographer of Jimmy, Betty Glad, pointed
out that he began his political career appealing to Georgia's Ku
Klux Klan. It is fitting that today Jimmy is charged with one of
the Klansmen's key bigotries, anti-Semitism. For his efforts with
this book, the judges on the J. Gordon Coogler Prize Committee are
awarding Jimmy his third Coogler. No one else has won this award
that many times, though the Clinton sycophant, Jeffrey Toobin, won
it twice, back to back in 1999 and 2000. If he writes a book on
Hillary, Toobin will probably win his third Coogler.
Yet Jimmy has now won his last Coogler. Members of the Committee
have decreed that Coogler Awards for the Worst Book of the Year
shall be limited to three in a lifetime. I think they suspect Jimmy
of writing these bad books as a publicity stunt. I disagree with
them. Taking in the whole sweep of this little scamp's life, I
think he really means every mean, stupid, and treacherous sentiment
in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He has been insincere
in many of his endeavors, but when he is cheap and nasty in a book
he is being true to himself.
topics:
Taxes, Foreign Policy, Books, Military, Israel, Africa, Communism
