The Pride of Plains

He gets all giggly and squirmy when he's about to meet -- face to face! -- and they might even shake his hand! -- people who own and operate their own torture chambers... the unabashed, unapologetic strongmen of the third world who rule with sheer terror and methods that would have been everyday fare for Hammurabi. He is totally weak for the totally strong... an admirer of absolute power, especially when it's expressed in as brutal and crude a way as possible. Well then, who is this strange creature? Some sort of "S & M" buff who lives in his parents' basement by day and cruises biker bars by night? A guy with piercings on every square inch of his body -- including a few that are, um, "concealed" in certain unmentionable places? No, not a bit of it. This is our esteemed and venerated, so-called "best ex-president ever", James Earl Carter. And what is worse, he disguises his shameless tyrant-groupie-ism as "democratic election monitoring", or "seeking to promote dialogue on human rights", or some other such wan and bloodless cause. Yes, the man is truly a discredit to his race and would be an object of universal derision, _except_ that, in his capacity as "peacemaker" over the years he has been a thorn in the side of the Republicans -- particularly the current administration -- and therefore a hero to the Democrats. With his unbroken record of foolish meddling and gaffes, he seemed the very epitome of Democratic foreign policy, a refinement -- a purification, if you will -- of the approach they have ever held dear, which is to say, grinning, shaking hands, bootlicking, cowering, perpetually apologizing, and selling out American interests. But then a funny thing happened on the way to making the U.S. into U.N. territory -- he started gripping and grinning with some of the wrong people, AKA "enemies of Israel". And the first thing that happened was that there was a massive bail-out from his organization, which had, up until that time, been considered a kind of idyllic "if only" version of the State Department -- the sort of place John Lennon might have set up if he had not been tragically felled by an assassin's bullet before he could devote himself exclusively to world affairs. Yes, the message was -- peacemaking, and "dialogue", and compromise are good and fine, but they cannot be allowed to violate the only absolute in American foreign policy, which is the "defense" of Israel at any and all cost. Leave it to Jimmy to make such a foolish mistake, i.e. to assume that our foreign policy ought to be characterized by "equal protection". Well, of course it isn't, and it never will be, as he knows only too well. He is the one who has coddled dictators (and, one suspects, given their glamorous wives the once-over during state dinners) ever since he ascended to the White House. He's the one who would rather sit down with Kim Jong-Il over a feast of monkey brains and Napoleon brandy than dine with the Pope. And his quixotic world-wide quest to achieve "democratic elections" has not fooled anybody; we know he is much happier in the company of guys with a lot of medals on their chests and whips hanging from their belts. And yet, his strange brew of obsessions was never remarked upon by his fellow Democrats until he started chatting up outfits like Hamas, and even now they aren't entirely sure they want to join the Bush administration and the State Department in "regretting" and scolding such a fine, upstanding example of humanity. Yep, he's the crazy uncle who manages to escape from the attic and take a whiz in the punch bowl. The Democrats were using him to bust the chops of the Bushites but now they're wondering if they shouldn't have just reined him in. Too late, guys.