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The Spectacle Blog
Asked about his biggest failure as president, Jimmy Carter offered the following:
“I guess my biggest failure was not getting re-elected. And I learned two things; one is that you ought not to ever let American hostages be held for 444 days in a foreign country without extracting them. I did the best I could, but I failed.”
Seriously, it took losing the presidency to learn this? Via Political Wire, which posted video.
View all comments (29) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Philip Klein
http://spectator.org/blog/2010/12/14/what-carter-learned
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Warrior | 12.14.10 @ 3:17PM
4 hours would have been unacceptable. The genius that he is, it only took him about 30 years to figure it out. He was probably too busy getting another Marxist elected in a Central American country to realize he even made a mistake.
Al Adab| 12.14.10 @ 4:44PM
What he should have learned is what T. Roosevelt did, "Pedicaris alive or Raisuli dead."
Alan Brooks| 12.15.10 @ 12:07AM
What Nixon did by way of Watergate was nothing compared to indirectly helping Carter get elected.
I like Dubya 444 times more than that intellectual coward Carter.
Pee Wee Herman is Charles Atlas next to Carter.
Alan Brooks| 12.15.10 @ 12:11AM
...I meant every word:
Carter is the locus classicus of illiberalism.
Answer this: how could such a smart guy, an engineer, be such a mush-head? such thoroughly embarrasses one to be American.
Pete| 12.14.10 @ 3:32PM
What's the other one? What's the other one??? His first "learning" is so profound, you simply can't keep us in the dark with respect to the second.
Al Adab| 12.14.10 @ 4:43PM
The second is that no one cares what he thinks. The math does explain his budgets though.
Christopher Holland| 12.14.10 @ 7:51PM
And people like Carter think that George W Bush was stupid! At least Bush knew what one plus one add up to.
Alan Brooks| 12.15.10 @ 3:06AM
Nixon should be blamed for Carter, not Watergate. And possibly there is something dreadfully wrong with Evangelicals if so many of them defend Carter to this day. An incompetent dishwasher or janitor gets sacked-- an incompetent POTUS gets millions in retirement plus benefits; and a Presidential Library. Go figure.
WB| 12.14.10 @ 3:41PM
That's the peanut farmer for you ...
Alan Brooks| 12.15.10 @ 3:09AM
Peanut farmers are good people, WB; Carter is a smarmy, ex-incompetent-POTUS.
Ex-president, that is-- he is still incompetent.
But, naturally, you fools will elect a GOP version of Carter in '12 or '16.
Grzmlyk| 12.14.10 @ 4:23PM
Come on, folks: Everybody knows Jimmih is our most saintly ex-president. He's Good with a capital "G!" Not a fatuous, bigoted, selfish, overblown, bloviating, egomaniacal, foolish narcissist at all.
You know, just like all the other recent Democrats who are paragons of presidential timber like Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton . . .
And Dems think Sarah Palin is unqualified for the office?
Maybe they ought to be informed that there's no requirement in the Constitution that presidents have to be incompetent pompous asses whose only worldly success has come from bilking taxpayers.
9Irish| 12.14.10 @ 6:55PM
Beautiful!!! Couldn't possibly have said it better!!
Alan Brooks| 12.15.10 @ 3:12AM
"And Dems think Sarah Palin is unqualified for the office?"
She is a '10'.
PattyMor| 12.14.10 @ 4:36PM
You mean it wasn't the stagflation or the unemployment, plus the 18% interest rates that caused the problem? Or the boxes of Rule for Radicals that they left behind in the VISTA offices?
It just goes to show, you can be a nuclear engineer and still be incompetent.
Christopher Holland| 12.14.10 @ 7:57PM
Carter never was a nuclear engineer - that was another of the many big lies this self righteous man promoted during his career. He did a course on nuclear power while he was a naval officer but he left the navy before the first nuclear powered ship, the USS Nautlilaus, was commissioned. Like manythings that Carter said, being a nuclear engineer was what Winston Churchill politely called 'a terminal inexactitude'.
Kevin Kendrick| 12.15.10 @ 8:30AM
"terminological inexactitude"
Mark J. Goluskin | 12.14.10 @ 4:47PM
This Jimmah Carter fellow is the reason I am a conservative Republican! I was in high school and realized that this dolt was not fit for the job. And he is NOT fit to offer anything worthwhile to any of his successors. Period!
Bob Harper| 12.14.10 @ 8:11PM
Well, Mark - you're smarter than me. I was well out of high school when Carter was elected. But the same lesson was learned: after seeing his non-response to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, suffering through his malaise inducing speeches, his cowardly inaction to the occupation of an American Embassy and the imprisonment of US diplomats ... Well, the upshot is it turned this one-time flower child into a conservative. It's called growing up, something that a Carter, a Kennedy or a Clinton has yet to do.
beebop| 12.15.10 @ 5:36AM
but didn't he have the most expressive eyebrows evah?
Reaganite Republican | 12.14.10 @ 5:36PM
If the plan was to drive the country off a cliff, not getting another four years of Jimmeh’s special brand of malaise was surely a setback
And what a shame the next guy was so hell bent on fixing it
Billy Was The Smarter Brother| 12.14.10 @ 7:22PM
And here I thought his biggest failure was to get elected the first time.
Alan Brooks| 12.15.10 @ 3:15AM
That's what Carter ought to have said, but he is too smarmy to admit it. remind me not to go to church in Georgia.
Heywood| 12.15.10 @ 6:58AM
I remember Nixon saying something about the failed rescue attempt--he mentioned something like we had over 1,000 helicopters at the time-- but Carter decided to use just 8?? That's typical of how Carter thought and operated. Total incompetence and Carter wasn't nowhere near as bad as Obama has been!
Darudz| 12.15.10 @ 10:23AM
The only good thing I can recall during the Carter years was the 18% interest CDs were earning in my IRA
Dale Cord| 12.15.10 @ 10:55AM
Jimmy Carter? what can you say about this man, that hasn't been defined in our dictionary under "F" for failure. Failing to keep his sworn oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution and the American people, as every President since Woodrow Wilson to the present has failed to do.
Casey Abell| 12.15.10 @ 12:19PM
I'm gonna cut Jimmy some slack here. It must have been tough to name his biggest failure...when there's so much competition for the title.
Dale Cord| 12.28.10 @ 12:41PM
2011 a year that will live in Infamy. Future school history books will read: The year the Muslims conquered the United States of America. With not so much as a whimper from its cowardly military leaders, and name calling armchair patriots. Disgraceful,Shameful there are no words to adequately describe her defeat. As the 300 Spartans strength and ingenuity conquered all of those who challenged them, so a small band of renegades conquered the greatest country the world has known. When Davids rock slued Goliath. It also foretold a warning. "The bigger they are,the harder they Fall." Our country lost its battle of survival when it became intoxicated with its deceptive mentality, that it did not need its Creator anymore, and wisdom no longer was apart of its citizens physiology to survive