Carter carries on in this vein. “When we permit the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, it’s just impossible for a fundamentalist to admit that a mistake was made.”
“We” means, presumably, the U.S. government: The same government that prosecuted cases of prisoner abuse at both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons, and did not “permit torture” there – except according to Carter’s fellow Nobel laureate, Amnesty International.
Never one to refuse a cheap shot at the expense of his country, Carter complains: “Unfortunately, after Sept. 11, there was an outburst in America of intense suffering and patriotism, and the Bush administration was very shrewd and effective in painting anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous.”
Why patriotism and intense suffering are unfortunate we are not told. Carter just “knows” that they are. But who in the administration ever painted “anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous”? Again, Carter does not tell us.
There was a time, long ago, when Jimmy Carter was described as the “best former president,” a judgment that rested largely on his reputation for building housing for the homeless. But every day Carter seems more and more like the former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, now the volunteer lawyer of such clients as Sendero Luminoso’s Abimael Guzman, Milosevic, and most recently SaddamHussein.
Not that Carter considers himself a marginal figure. “I think I represent the vast majority of Democrats in this country,” he has said. “I think there is a substantial portion of American people that completely agree with me.”
It remains to be seen, however, whether Carter has any constituency outside the Ned Lamont wing of the Democratic Party.
Americans corrected one mistake when they evicted Carter from office in 1980. As the midterm elections near, one can only hope that they don’t make another.