Former President Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, died yesterday, and will receive a national day of mourning on January 9. The ailing president, who entered hospice at his home in Plains, Georgia 22 months ago, was 100 years old, the longest-lived president in American history.
But he won’t likely receive a completely honest account of his life. For instance, in one of his last public appearances, he became an election denier. He falsely claimed that President-elect Donald Trump didn’t really win the 2016 election. The former president was also linked to People’s Temple cult leader and mass-murderer Jim Jones during his presidency.
While a man of significant personal accomplishment, as president, he was a failure. His one term ended with sky-high mortgage interest rates, the disastrous mission to rescue American hostages in Iran, and the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the White House to begin 12 years of Republican rule.
Disastrous Domestically
A Naval Academy graduate, Carter defeated incumbent Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election after a debate in which Ford preposterously claimed that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” And “the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union,” Ford said.
The gaffe gave Carter the White House — and the country a weak, ineffective president.
While mortgage interest rates inched toward 10 percent under Ford, Carter boosted them to 11.2 percent in 1979, then to 13.74 percent the following year. In 1981, with the nation still reeling from Carter’s policies, they rose to 16.63 percent.
Along with those high rates, Carter also delivered an average annual inflation rate of 9.9 percent.
In July, 1979, Carter delivered his infamous “malaise” speech.
Disastrous Abroad
Foreign-policy wise, Carter could take credit for three disasters. He turned once-productive Rhodesia into a Marxist wasteland called Zimbabwe by imposing sanctions to overthrow its white-minority government.
As the Africa-Business.com website noted, “Zimbabwe, for instance, was considered the bread basket of Africa — with one of the most fertile lands on the African continent — exporting wheat, tobacco, and corn to the rest of the continent and beyond. However, most of the farming till a few years back was in the hands of white farmers — 4,000 of whom owned almost 70 per cent of the fertile land in Zimbabwe.”
Carter backed Marxist Robert Mugabe and his revolutionaries, who quickly destroyed the nation’s economy and turned it into a net food importer.
Carter also terminated military assistance to Nicaragua to weaken its president, Anastasio Somoza, which helped the communist Sandinista revolutionaries to power in 1979.
But perhaps what damaged his presidency most was the failed mission to rescue American hostages in Iran. Iranian student revolutionaries stormed the embassy on November 4, 1979 and took 63 hostages, 10 of which were free later in November.
The takeover led to a nightly report from ABC’s Ted Koppel that became Nightline.
On April 16, Carter authorized Operation Eagle Claw, a joint operation of all four military services. It launched eight days later.
“Operation Eagle Claw began when eight United States Navy RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters took off from the deck of the American aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, in the Arabian Sea for a 600-mile trip to rendezvous in the Iranian desert with six C-130 transport aircrafts,” the Army Airborne and Special Operations Museum explains:
The aircraft encountered a haboob, a violent wind-driven sand storm common in the desert. This caused extreme visibility issues, damage to the aircrafts, and sickness with the crews. President Carter and his staff received the news and decided to abort the mission.
As the force prepared to depart, a RH-53D helicopter crashed into a C-130 carrying extra fuel for refueling, igniting a fire that killed 5 Airmen and 3 Marines.
As Ford’s debate gaffe gave the White House to Carter, Carter’s ultimate failure gave the White House to Reagan.
Carter packed his administration with globalist Deep Staters such as National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bilderberg Group. He was a founder of the Trilateral Commission.
Carter’s most significant accomplishment might have been creating Black Music Month.
Link to Jim Jones
One aspect of Carter’s political career the far-left mainstream media’s effusive encomia won’t include is his link to phony faith-healer and “miracle” worker Jim Jones, maniacal founder of the communist People’s Temple Christian Church.
Jones wrote to Rosalyn Carter in 1977 to solicit medical aid for Cuba. The First Lady replied with a handwritten note.
San Francisco politician and homosexual rapist Harvey Milk wrote to the president and three congressmen in February 1978 to get help stopping what he believed to be a smear campaign against Jones and his Temple, which had moved to Guyana in 1974. Jones was also linked to former California House Speaker Willie Brown, who boosted Vice President Kamala Harris’ political career.
“It’s important here to detail the role played by Rosalynn Carter, wife of President Jimmy Carter. She became enthralled with Jim Jones when she visited San Francisco with then-vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale during the 1976 campaign,” the Jonestown page at the San Diego State University website explains:
She spoke from Jones’s pulpit, and also had a private dinner with him at a posh San Francisco restaurant. They continued to correspond by letter after that. Rosalynn was obviously captivated with Jones. So it is logical to assume that she praised Jones in her subsequent conversations with her husband after he became president. And, upon receiving that letter from Harvey Milk a couple of years later, he no doubt recalled his wife’s splendid memories of Jones.
On November 18, 1978, Jones and his gang of cutthroats murdered U.S. Representative Leo Ryan and two journalists who went to Guyana to investigate the temple’s activities.
After those murders, Jones induced some 900 followers to drink Flavor Aid laced with cyanide. Those who refused were injected. Jones shot himself in the head.
Post Presidency
After he left the White House, Carter became a global humanitarian and peacemaker and, to his credit, built houses for the poor through Habitat for Humanity.
Unhappily, in 2019, Carter joined election deniers to say, falsely, that Trump was an “illegitimate president.”
“If fully investigated, [Russian election interference] would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016,” Carter said. “He lost the election and he was put in office because the Russians interfered … on his behalf.”
