Marathon Pundit: "Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains," coming to a theater near you

Thursday, November 08, 2007

"Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains," coming to a theater near you

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"One of the world's most admired men" is how Jimmy Carter is touted in the trailer for the upcoming Jonathan Demme documentary, Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains. My opinion of him is strikingly different: Carter was our worst president since James Buchanan.

Demme has this to say about Carter:

I have always held President Carter in high esteem, so I leapt at the opportunity to do a documentary portrait of him. I chose the book tour of Palestine Peace Not Apartheid as the backbone of the documentary before reading the book. I knew that with the kind of subject matter promised by the title, there would probably be a lot of fireworks on that journey. I love how his un-self-censored behavior and attitudes help reveal how authentic and deep President Carter's faith-based motivation really is - and how terrifically complicated he is as a human being, with such an active sense of humor, an encyclopedic knowledge of a seeming endless array of subjects - and how super-sensitive yet bold, feisty and obstinate he can be at times - and that he reveals how a devoted, adoring husband like him fits so organically with the fellow who "loves the ladies." Every time I see this film, President Carter makes me believe that - as frightening and appalling as so many things are in the world today - that there is nevertheless a very real possibility for peace and better lives for future generations if we strive to somehow get along and if we aspire to defining the upside of being human.

When I think of "Jimmah," several ideas pop into my head. For starters, Carter coined the term "misery index" during his successful presidential campaign in 1976. The misery index--no one has used the term since--was the total reached when adding the unemployment rate and the rate of inflation. As Ronald Reagan pointed out four years later, Carter was silent about the misery index in during the next presidential campaign--it had grown during Carter's presidency.

Iran: Three days ago, the 28th anniversary of the takeover of our Iranian embassy by Iranian "students" passed. Carter's gross mismanagement of Iranian-American relations was so severe, that they remain today a complete disaster, with a potential of a nuclear-armed Iran destroying Israel possibly in the near future.

The Carter Center: Fourteen advisers resigned from the Carter Center protesting the former president's "strident and uncompromising position" over pro-Palestinian bias they found in Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.

They wrote:

Israelis, through deed and public comment, have consistently spoken of a desire to live in peace and make territorial compromise to achieve this status. The Palestinian side has consistently resorted to acts of terror as a national expression and elected parties endorsing the use of terror, the rejection of territorial compromise and of Israel's right to exist. Palestinian leaders have had chances since 1947 to have their own state, including during your own presidency when they snubbed your efforts.

That's just half of the equation. Saudis and other suspect Arabs are among the largest contributors to the Carter Center.

From Jacob Laskin in FrontPage Magazine:

Especially lucrative have been Carter’s ties to Saudi Arabia. Before his death in 2005, King Fahd was a longtime contributor to the Carter Center and on more than one occasion contributed million-dollar donations. In 1993 alone, the king presented Carter with a gift of $7.6 million. And the king was not the only Saudi royal to commit funds to Carter’s cause. As of 2005, the king’s high-living nephew, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, has donated at least $5 million to the Carter Center.

Meanwhile the Saudi Fund for Development, the kingdom’s leading loan organization, turns up repeatedly on the center’s list of supporters. Carter has also found moneyed allies in the Bin Laden family, and in 2000 he secured a promise from ten of Osama bin Laden's brothers for a $1 million contribution to his center. To be sure, there is no evidence that the Bin Ladens maintain any contact with their terrorist relation. But applying Carter’s own standard, his extensive contacts with the Saudi elite must make his views on the Middle East suspect.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. If the name sounds familiar, it should. He's the man who shortly after the September 11 attacks, presented a $10 million check to Mayor Rudy Giuliani to help fund the recovery efforts there. But after the ceremony where the prince handed the check to Giuliani, the Saudi royal said, among other things, that the U.S. should "should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause."

Rudy, in one of his finest moments, snapped back with, "I entirely reject that statement. There is no moral equivalent for this [terrorist] act. There is no justification for it. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification for it when they slaughtered 4,000 or 5,000 innocent people."

Giulani never cashed the check. Good for him. Good for us.

Al Franken makes an appearance in the trailer, but on the positive side, so does Alan Dershowitz, an ardent supporter of Israel. But my hopes aren't high that Demme's film will be "fair and balanced."

But the music for the film sounds pretty good, so it may not be completely worthless.

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