Jimmy Carter was the last American President to consistently tell the truth to the American People. He was the last American President to actually be a Christian and live a Christian life. He is the only American President I remember ever admitting he was a sinner, or even to have made a mistake, about anything. He does not play golf or belong to a country club. He lives simply, in a small house, in his home town, in the middle of nowhere. He has devoted the almost 30 years since he was president, exclusively, to charitable and humanitarian efforts. As far as I know, he is the only President to serve as a career officer in the regular navy. I have never heard him to be connected to any scandal. He seems to have genuinely admitted and overcome the deep, bred to the bone racism implicit in a childhood spent growing up in rural Georgia of the 1930s. His mother was a gadfly. His brother drank a little beer. His cousin was a faith healer. He never denied or disassociated himself from them. He is pretty close to ninety years of age.
He says President Bush and Vice President Cheney have done great damage to America and the American people. He calls them liars. He calls them warmongers, without the personal conviction or courage to have served themselves. He calls them torturers. He thinks that they have conspired to usurp the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.
He didn't always speak highly of Bill Clinton, either.
Unlike me, I don't believe he speaks this way because of a deep gut-wrenching hatred for these men. Unlike me, I don't believe he'd like to see them tarred and feathered, run around the National Mall on a splintery rail, pelted with stinking, rotten vegetables, dumped into the most polluted basin of the Potomac at low tide and then made to live out the rest of their miserable lives in a windowless, plumbingless, electricityless lean-to on Diego Garcia, under strict guard.
But it is nice to know that he agrees with me, basically, about the character of these men.
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