Ex-presidents Ford and Carter: Big differences

This morning Gerald Ford's funeral will take place at Washington's National Cathedral. Among those in attendance will be James Earl Carter, Jr. of Plains, Georgia.

The American Thinker's Richard Baehr compares Gerald Ford's mostly quiet post-presidential years with the noisy, intrusive, and annoying "second term" of Jimmy Carter.

Baehr writes:

But in other ways Carter has acted as if the last 26 years were an extended second term in office. He has freelanced in foreign policy - lending his ex-presidential imprimatur to the likes of Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, and Yassar Arafat. He has been outspoken when he has disagreed with the policies of a sitting President (pretty much every Republican).

In the period leading up to the war with Iraq and in the immediate aftermath, he was so vocal in his attacks on American policy and President Bush, that he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize by the Scandinavian salons, who were only so eager to stick a finger in the eye of President Bush by "knighting" Jimmy Carter. It was Carter who invited filmmaker Michael Moore to sit with him in the Presidential box at the 2004 Democratic convention, presumably for his achievement with Fahrenheit 911. Of course, Carter had campaigned for the Nobel prize for two decades, and this could be seen as a lifetime achievement award for his globetrotting effort to rehabilitate his reputation among the elites by so often standing up for those standing in opposition to his own country.

The invitation to Moore was Carter's thank you salute to the Nobel committee. Today, of course, there is much controversy about a new book by Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. This screed, which Carter is defending on a national book tour, and endlessly on C-SPAN and cable news and interview programs, is exactly the kind of one sided, error filled propaganda piece that any true statesman for peace would reject out of hand. But it does reflect Carter's long and intense dislike for Israel, and a nasty streak that probably relates to his wounded self image from suffering such a shattering election defeat to Ronald Reagan, a candidate considered unelectable until he came up against Carter and his record of four years of failure.

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