There’s nothing you can make that can’t be made.
No one you can save that can’t be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you…

-All You Need Is Love by The Beatles

Having transformed himself from the most incompetent, naive, and inept of Presidents into the most incompetent, naive, and inept of ex-Presidents, Jimmy Carter has navigated the treacherous waters of presidential legacy and reputation even more maladroitly than when he stumbled through the four years of pathetic futility known as his Presidency. Not content to relax following the accolades and acclaim bestowed upon him by a grateful nation for successfully steering the country into malaise, such laurels instead inspired him to conquer new horizons in an Olympian effort to become the world’s most recognizable useful idiot.

While some wits may argue that the malapropism “useful idiot” is an oxymoron since you can’t be an idiot and be useful, I would respond that while it doesn’t make one great, it does make one Jimmy Carter. In fact, the whole argument is based on perspective: by offering his idiocy to Hamas, Carter made himself useful; but when he became useless to his own country he merely demonstrated his own idiocy. So not only does Carter’s ministrations on the behalf of tyrannts, dictators, and terrorists prove the maxim, but it also justifies Carter’s place in history. As President, there was no situation in which he couldn’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. No foreign policy blunder was too small, no economic plan was too absurd for our Nobel Prize winning President to implement, hence the determinism of causality. But in retrospect, we may have been asking too much from a man who got punked by everyone from Pol Pot to the Ayatollah Khomanei, and from everything from the Soviet Union to a rabbit.

“Carter viewed PLO leader Yasser Arafat as a ‘little George Washington.’ He pens, ‘We pursued the concept of non-violent resistance of Hamas leaders and gave them documentation and video presentations on the successful experiences of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.’ Peace in the Holy Land must include Palestinian militant leader, Marwan Barghouti, the serial killer. Carter calls him the ‘most intriguing player in the Middle East.’ He has run for the presidency in the Palestinian National Authority.”*

Thirty years have passed since Carter boarded Air Force One for his return to his beloved Plains, Georgia as a private citizen, but the passing years have done nothing to diminish either his “ferocious moral clarity” or his stupidity. Focusing his prodigious moral outrage on that noted hate group, the Southern Baptist Convention, Mr. Carter has decided that after 60 years of psychological abuse, he is breaking the spiritual and emotional chains of oppression and religious bigotry. Maybe if the Southern Baptists were more like Hamas, which is internationally recognized for their work with children,  or the Iranian theocracy, which is praised for it’s religious tolerance, then Mr. Carter (and his kind) would return to the fold. Yet it was Carter’s relativism that elevated him into a revered progressive icon.

To his supporters, his critics were simply dilettantes who were incapable of appreciating his ability to craft nuanced panoramas from the various Leftist and Islamist hues that comprised his pallette of 1970’s realpolitik. But if those volatile ideologies comprised the paints, then the audacity of his vision provided the canvas for his many successes.  That the world will mourn Jimmy Carter once he departs the international stage is without doubt, but as he enjoys the double digit unemployment and “misery index” of obscurity, those of us who must trudge wearily on without him will do so inspired by his sublime accomplishments.

The Left’s predilection of removing all human agency from any action and therefore it’s consequences is not only disingenuous, it’s not reality. For the Left, it’s an article of faith that guns kill people, that people are killing the planet, and that all we need is love. The purile idea that intentions trump consequences is only acceptable in the make-believe of children. But the world is not a playground, and Osama bin Laden is not a child. Ideas that are not commensurate to Natural Law are not innate. There is a reason why all civilizations have regarded murder, rape, and robbery with horror, because those actions are contrary to what is innately regarded as moral and ethical behavior. Guns don’t kill people, but people do. The planet is not dying because of too few humans, but cultures are. And love is only possible if it is recognized as an alternative to actual hate. Jimmy Carter was not symptomatic of America’s “malaise” in the late seventies, he was the cause of it. Since he no longer has a home with the Southern Baptists, maybe he could find a more suitable one with Hamas.

*The Myopia of Jimmy Carter by Michael D. Evans of The Washington Times