The Great Appeaser Has Died

The Great Appeaser, James Earl Carter, Jr., has died at one hundred years of age.

As was the case with the late Nathan Birnbaum (aka George Burns), who was kept alive until March 9, 1996, forty-nine days after he had turned one hundred on January 20, 1996, with Leslie Townes “Bob” Hope, who turned one hundred years of age on May 29, 2003, and died fifty-nine days later on July 27, 2003, and with Heinz Alfred Kissinger, who turned one hundred years of age on May 27, 1923, and died six months, two days later on November 29, 2023, James Earl Carter, Jr., died on December 30, 2024, eighty-day days after his one hundredth birthday on October 1, 2024. It turns out that the hospice facility in which checked himself in nearly two years ago and in which his late wife, Eleanor Rossalyn Smith Carter, died on November 19, 2023, kept him alive until after he turned one hundred, although it may very well be that he died a natural death that was not expedited as was the case with one of his presidential successors, George Herbert Walker Bush.

As I have explained many times on this site, I have been following politics and elections since the Adlai Stevenson-Dwight David Eisenhower contest in 1956, faithfully watching the details of every major political party national nominating convention between then and 2000 (although I kept abreast of events thereafter online). I also watched election night coverage every two years, and it was in 1970 that watched the coverage of the mid-term Congressional and statewide elections.

Carter began his first drive for elected office in 1966 when he ran for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Georgia. He finished last in the field of candidates in that primary, and denounced every single one of them as un-American, as R. Emmett Tyrell noted in The American Spectator in 1980. Lester Maddox (who was elected separately in 1970 as Carter's lieutenant governor, being unable to succeed himself as governor until terms then extant in the State of Georgia Constitution), or so it was contended. However, when campaigning in a largely white, blue-collar neighborhood during the Pennsylvania primary in April of 1976, Carter responded as follows to a question concerning the integration of neighborhoods: "I have always been in favor of ethnic purity." This prompted Maddox, who was also running for the Democratic presidential nomination that year, to say, "Us segregationists have been looking for a euphemism like that for a long time. Thanks, Jimmy."

Much was made during the summer of 1970 about “Jimmy” Carter (he was the first major public official to use the diminutive of his first name, something that has become quite common since, which I, trained in the parochial formality of the 1950s, have always found quite disconcerting) in news reports that year, and it was on November 3, 1970, that the former peanut farmer defeat the Republican nominee for the Georgia governorship, former WSB-TV/NBC-TV news reporter Hal Suit at a time when Republicans were not competitive in most parts of the south.

The Constitution of the State of Georgia limited governors to one term every four years. The ambitious Carter began plotting a presidential race during the Watergate-dominated years of 1973 and his final year in office, 1974. Indeed, it was while flying from New York to Texas to visit my parents for Thanksgiving in 1974 that I changed Delta flights in Atlanta to fly to Houston, and from there on Texas International Airlines to Harlingen, Texas, in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, that I recognized Carter standing directly in front of me as I waiting to get off the Atlanta-Houston flight. He had his overcoat flung over his left shoulder, something that became a trademark of his, as he left the plane as I muttered to myself “He thinks he has a chance to become president?” Shows what I, a doctoral student in political science at the time, knew.

Many Democrats, though, understood how dangerous Carter was as a veritable southern-fried George McGovern who stood a chance to win in the general election in 1976 solely because of Richard Milhous Nixon and Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. That is why a number of old-line Democrats urged Minnesota Senator and former Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey to challenge Carter in the Pennsylvania primary. Unbeknownst, though, but to a handful of people was the fact that Humphrey was dying of pancreatic cancer. It is generally considered to be the case that Humphrey used the possibility of his candidacy as a wedge to get Carter to commit to taking on his protégé, Minnesota Senator Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale, as his Vice-Presidential running-mate (which means that Carter's showcasing of seven possible running-mates, including Senators Frank Church and John Glenn, was so much window dressing).

Following his victory over then President Gerald Rudolph Ford on November 2, 1976, and his subsequent inauguration on January 20, 1977, James Earl Carter, Jr., presided over what can be argued is now the second worst presidential administration of the Twentieth Century, first place belonging, of course, to the morally challenged, mentally disabled and ethically corrupt lifelong demagogue named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., who has some nerve to talked about his own predecessor and successor, Donald John Trump, learning “decency” from Carter’s example even though he, Biden, is one of the most indecent men to serve as the president of the United States of America.

Although most of the rest of this commentary will focus on James Earl Carter, Jr.’s, foreign policy, such as it was, his domestic policies failed miserably Carter was no less a disaster domestically. Although he had promised to cut the size of the Federal government, he added two new Cabinet departments, the Department of Education and the Department of Energy. This latter concoction succeeded in creating an artificial and unnecessary gasoline and natural gas crisis in June of 1979 by basing summer allocations of fuel upon February usage, thus creating long lines and inflated prices at a time when inflation was ripping through this nation's economy. His own "misery index" (which combined the unemployment rate with the rate of inflation) nearly doubled during his disastrous presidency. Aleksandr Solzhentisyn noted at Harvard University on June 8, 1978, that a man possessed of such a naïve view of the world and incapable of governing his own nation was pretty easy prey for the Soviets and the Red Chinese (whose government Carter formally recognized in December of 1978).

The Department of Education has, of course, worsened the state of American public miseducation and it was all but inevitable that it, which began with Carter’s drive for “diversity,” would become one of the leading forces of mandating the ideological brainwashing associated with “diversity, equity, inclusion” and the Marxist-based “critical race theory.

Although he was nominally pro-life (he did sign the Hyde Amendment into law, which was the first effort to limit, albeit with exceptions, Medicaid funding for abortion), Carter ("I have lusted in my heart") did hew the feminist line as president. He called the Democratic party platform "an albatross" around his neck after he lost his re-election bid in 1980 to Reagan, specifically citing its support for abortion as a reason he lost support among the "Reagan Democrats" (Catholic blue-collar white ethnics). However, he did nothing to remove support for abortion from the Democratic Party platform. All he was concerned about was the retention of power. Period.

Inflation, which was bad when Carter defeated Ford in 1976, increased even more during Carter’s one term office, and things were so bad by 1979 that the thirty-ninth president decided to blame the American people for lacking the spirit necessary to rise to the occasion in an address that became known as the "malaise speech”:

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.

As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.

These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.

We remember when the phrase "sound as a dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until 10 years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our Nation's resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.

These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.

Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal Government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our Nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our Government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual. (Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals: "The Malaise Speech" | The American Presidency Project.)

The American people had every right to believe that the next five years would worse because of James Earl Carter’s failed policies. He was a humorless man who took himself very seriously as he self-righteously pronounced on various subjects.

Indeed, 1979 was such a bad year in the United States of America that the “people” decided to get rid of the malaise by sending Carter back to Plains, Georgia, as he lost forty-four states to former Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan on November 4, 1980, and then compounded matters by conceding early on election night even though the polls remained opened in many places in the southwest and west, something that many Democratic Party operatives openly rued was responsible for depressing the turnout in those states.

James Earl Carter, Jr.’s., disastrous presidency, replete as it was with hyperinflation, was the result of the aftermath of Richard Milhous Nixon's abuse of presidential power that was, in retrospect, tamer in comparison to the abuses we have seen in the past four years with President in Name Only Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and the weakness of the 33rd degree Mason who succeeded Nixon, Leslie Lynch King, Jr./Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. That Ford, who prematurely "liberated" Eastern Europe from Soviet domination in his second televised debate with Carter on October 6, 1976, came from thirty-three points behind Carter to finish four points behind in the national popular vote was a testament to the fact that many people were terrified of Carter's simple-mindedness and absolute inexperience in national governance. Indeed, Johnny Carson summed up Carter's naked ambition to be president when playing his Carnack the Magnificent seer during the Fall of 1976. Holding an envelope to his head in order to "divine" the answer to the question posed therein, Carson said, "Yes and no, pro and con, for and against." He opened up the envelope, saying, "Describe Jimmy Carter's position on three major issues." Carter was a waffler on issues long before the late former Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas called then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton "the pander bear" in 1992.

James Earl Carter, Jr., was an utter opportunist and a self-righteous demagogue when the occasion required him to stoop to that level. Although hailed by many as a man of principle, he was anything but that.

Faced with an unwanted challenge from Massachusetts Senator Edward Moore Kennedy in late-1979 prior to the 1980 caucus and primary season, Carter said that he would not raise the issue of Chappaquiddick in his campaign (although it would have been legitimate for him to do so). Shortly after making that seemingly noble proclamation, Carter was asked at a town meeting at Queens College in Flushing, New York, in September of 1979 why Democrats should choose him over Senator Kennedy (who had yet to announce his candidacy, which he did in a most incompetent and inarticulate manner in an interview with Kennedy apologist Roger Mudd on November 3, 1979, the very day that the American hostages were seized by Mohammedan militants in Iran). Carter said, "Well, I have never panicked in a crisis." No, he did not raise Chappaquiddick directly, but everyone knew what he was saying.

Carter gutted the defense of this nation and appeased our enemies no end, wrapped himself in the American flag following the seizure of the hostages, implying that it was un-American for Kennedy even to challenge him in the midst of the hostage crisis. Carter denounced Kennedy as being weak on defense and a free spender on domestic programs that would bankrupt the nation. After he had secured the nomination, Carter denounced the Republican presidential nominee, former California Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan, as a warmonger who would starve the poor and the elderly. As one writer noted at the time, as Carter was flailing about and making wild charges against Reagan, "We tend to forget the ego that drives Carter to retain the power he sought so doggedly in the fields of Iowa in 1975. People forget that when Gerald Ford sent Air Force One to take Carter on a vacation following the 1976 elections, Carter said, 'This is the plane I've been waiting for."

Historian Craig Shirley summarized James Earl Carter’s struggles in 1979 as follows:

Historian and author Craig Shirley, who wrote multiple books about Reagan and Carter, pointed to the economic conditions at the time as a major contributor to Carter’s demise.

"Interest rates were something like 18%. Inflation was almost as high. The value of a dollar wasn’t worth today what it was yesterday. It was really devastating to people’s savings," Shirley spotlighted in a C-SPAN interview a few years ago. . . .

"Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency would be known for many things: stagflation, a terrible economy, weakness in the face of Soviet advances, but also the Camp David Accords and ushering in the Age of Reagan. Yet to his everlasting chagrin, Carter’s failed four years in office will always be reduced to the word "malaise," and his awful, terrible, embarrassing speech in July of 1979," Shirley wrote on the 40-year anniversary of the infamous address. (Jimmy Carter’s presidency: A time of ‘malaise’ that led to the election of Ronald Reagan.)

Historian Craig Shirley failed to mention the fact that President James Earl Carter, Jr., stood atop a platform after the 1979 World Series ended with the Pittsburgh Pirates defeating the Baltimore Orioles while the Series' Most Valuable Player, Wilver "Willie" Stargell, pushed Carter out of the way to shake a teammate's hand, saying, "Excuse me, Mister President," and with that Carter sheepishly stepped down from the platform as the cameras caught moment on live television. As one of my students at Allentown College of Saint Francis de Sales in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, said the day after, "That was an emabareassment. The man [Carter] is an embarrassment." 1979 was indeed a very bad year for Jimmy Carter.

Carter's domestic failures were summarized as follows in an article published on National Review Online:

When he took the presidential oath in January 1977, the unemployment rate was a high 7.5 percent; when he left office in January 1981, it was just as high. Meanwhile, inflation, which was already elevated at 5.7 percent in 1976, the year he was elected, went up in each of his years in office — and reached a staggering 13.5 percent in 1980, the year he was booted out. The only year in the post–World War II period in which inflation was higher was 1947, when the economy was booming and unemployment was minuscule. Put another way, to maintain the buying power that $100 had on the month Carter was sworn into office, you’d need $150 by the time he left the White House just four years later. Under Carter, gas prices doubled, and the supply became so scarce that Americans had to endure long lines at stations to fill up their tanks. (Jimmy Carter: Terrible President, Worse Former President.)

However, it was James Earl Carter’s foreign policy that earned the label I stuck on him during my college teaching years in the late-1970s at Illinois State University, the then named Allentown College of Saint Francis de Sales, and in 1980 during the election at Nassau Community College: The Great Appeaser.

The Foreign Policy Legacy of the Great Appeaser

As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation at first by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say in 1844 that "communism is naturalized humanism.' 

This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorship; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. (This is typical of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century and of Marxism). Not by coincidence all of communism's meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East? But such is the logic of materialistic development. 

The interrelationship is such, too, that the current of materialism which is most to the left always ends up by being stronger, more attractive and victorious, because it is more consistent. Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism and socialism could never resist communism. The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East. (Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart. June 8, 1978.) 

Those comments, offered by the late Soviet dissident Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, who had been imprisoned in various Soviet gulags from 1945 to 1953 before serving another three years in internal exile in Kazakhstan as a prelude to his deportation from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on February 13, 1974, were made during the height of Cold War tensions. The reigning caesar ignoramus in the United States of America at that time, Jacobus Carterus, had said in his commencement address on May 22, 1977, at the University of Notre Dame that Americans suffered from what he termed an inordinate fear of communism.

Carter's role as the world's preeminent appeaser of Communist dictatorships was examined over fourteen years ago in Still Preparing the Way for Antichrist, another word or two about the nation's thirty-ninth president is pertinent in order to "frame" the remainder of this article now that he has died. 

James Earl Carter, Jr., enabled Communist revolutionaries in Nicaragua and El Salvador in Central America and in Angola on the continent of Africa. He played the role of an obsequious inferior to Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev's domineering superior at the Soviet-American summit in Vienna, Austria, that took place between June 16, 1979, and June 18, 1979, as the decrepit, corrupt, venal old Stalinist, Brezhnev, played the Baptist Jimmy Carter for the fool that he is and remains when he, Brezhnev, an atheist, invoked the name of God in behalf of the alleged necessity of signing the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II (SALT II). Carter was convinced that he had made inroads on the dictator's atheism:

Inside the U.S. Embassy's cramped and dreary conference room, the leaders arranged themselves and their aides at either side of a gleaming 25-ft. table. Brezhnev brought with him nine aides, including Chernenko, Gromyko, Ogarkov and Ustinov; Carter was accompanied by the same number, including Brown, Brzezinski and Vance. As guest, Brezhnev led off. He put on his rimless spectacles and stolidly read aloud from his sheaf of prepared remarks. He was followed by Carter, who talked from several pages of notes handwritten on yellow legal paper. Among them was a sentence he had noted on hearing Brezhnev utter it the day before: "God will not forgive us if we fail." (Time Magazine, June 25, 1979, page 7.) 

Carter's giddy Sovietphilia, an echo of what was exhibited throughout the career of former United States Senator George S. McGovern (D-South Dakota), who was termed--and rightly so--"an apologist for international communism" by the late President of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations George Meany on the Columbia Broadcasting System's Face the Nation program in 1972, ended six months later when the Red Army invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, prompting the nitwit to say to Barbara Walters in an end-of-the year interview televised on the American Broadcasting Company, "Barbara, I've learned more about the Soviet Union in the last three weeks than I had in the past three years." As my only sibling was wont to say when faced with the startled statements of politicians who had "discovered" something that was obvious for all to see, "Do tell." Yes, do tell, Jimmy. Do tell.

However much Jimmy Carter was a Communist appeaser, he was not, though, a Communist himself. He believed that the government of the United States of America could "dial back" tensions in various hot spots of the world by refusing to engage in a policy of confrontation with the Soviet Union and/or Red China, to whose murderous regime he extended formal diplomatic recognition, effective January 1, 1979, in a Speech on December 15, 1978, and by supporting what he believed to be "legitimate" "people's revolutions" in Nicaragua and El Salvador against repressive and corrupt rightist/military regimes. Carter was an appeaser in the mold of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's second vice president, Henry Agard Wallace, who served during Roosevelt's third term (January 20, 1941, to January 20, 1945).

Carter's apologists still insist that he meant to support moderate factions within Nicaragua who were opposed to the brutal, repressive, corrupt, and venal dictator of that country, President Anastasio Somoza, not the Communist Sandinista National Liberation Front. This is what was claimed at the time. Indeed, the "official history of the United States Department of State contains what is meant to be a permanent record of this delusion (see Central America, 1977–1980) presently.

Even before the Sandinista Communists had risen to power during the summer of 1979, though, the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlevi, had been overthrown by the so-called Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was termed a "saint" by James Earl Carter's Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young. As we know the "saint" authorized so-called "student militants" to seize hostages at the American Embassy in Teheran, Iran, and there they stayed as they experienced beatings and solidary confinement at times until after Carter left office on January 20, 1981. One of the symbolic lowlights of the failed Carter presidency was the failure of a rescue mission on April 24, 1980, when six American military helicopters, caught up in a dust storm in the Iranian desert, suffered one mishap after another, including one that collided with a C-130 tanker refueling plane that resulted in the deaths of eight crew members aboard the chopper and injuring several others. This was the nadir of the the Carter presidency and prompted Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to resign in protest before the failed mission, although he witthheld his announcement until after the atempted rescue failed. (Vance was kept in the dark about the mission's planning by his deputy secretary, Warren Christopher, who became William Jefferson Blythe Clinton's first Secretary of State in 1993 and by National Security Adviser Zbignew Brzezinski "evil.")

Back here in the Americas, James Earl Carter, Jr.,  was so committed to the murderous, dictatorial regime of Daniel Ortega, which rose to power in part because of Somoza's own brutality against opponents and, on one very well-known incident, on a foreign journalist (ABC-TV News reporter Bill Stewart was shot in the head at point blank range by one of Somoza's soldiers, a scene that was videotaped and shown to television viewers around the world), that he, serving as a self-appointed poll-watcher as an ex-president, wept when the results of the February 25, 1990, free elections, which were more or less forced because of pressure brought to bear by the administrations of Presidents Ronald Wilson Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush, resulted in Ortega's defeat by Mrs. Violetta Chamorro, whose husband Pedro, a leader of moderate forces in opposition to Somoza, had been murdered by Somoza's goons on January 10, 1978.

Yes, James Earl Carter, Jr., The Great Appeaser, wept when his Cuban-backed, mass murdering pal, Daniel Ortega, lost to Violetta Chamorro. Documentation will be provided in a moment to demonstrate the "peace-loving" nature of the Sandinistas when they held power for the first time before coming back, this time in free elections, in 2006, whereupon he began to rule in an authoritarian manner once again and has used the past eighteen years to attack what he believes is the Catholic Church and imprisoned or exiled priests and bishops in recent years.

Carter continued his coddling of Communist dictators in his post-presidential years whenever he took time off from his ostentatious building homes for Habitat for Humanity and carping about the popularity of his successor, President Ronald Wilson Reagan, whom he hated for having defeated him and for not having him, Carter, to state dinners at the White House. I have said this before and I will say it again: James Early Carter, Jr., was a mean-spirited, petty, vindictive little man, something that others have recognized as well:

However, Carter's longest-running and deepest dislike for a fellow member of the president's club was his one-time rival, former President Ronald Reagan. 

After Reagan defeated Carter in the 1980 presidential election, Carter held a grudge against Reagan for never inviting him to a state dinner at the White House, per the Times. Carter also bonded with former President Ford over their shared dislike for Reagan. 

"It was no secret that Carter was not a member in good standing of the ex-presidents’ club, in part because he never accepted their code," author Jonathan Alter wrote in his book, "His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life." (Deceased President Jimmy Carter feuded with successor presidents.)

One of the reasons President Ronald Wilson Reagan did not invite James Earl Carter, Jr., to state dinners at the White House was that Carter had a penchant for interfering in his successors' foreign policy decisions, including going to North Korea in 1994 to give his “respect” to Kim Il Sung, the father of Kim Jong Il, who was the father of the rocket man himself, Kim Jong Un. This is what Carter said after being dissatisfied with a briefing given him in 1994 by mid-level Department of State officials within the administration of President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton:

"You haven't told me what Kim Il Sung wants," Carter told his briefers. "What he wants is my respect. And I am going to give it to him." (The story behind Carter's North Korean trip.)

Jimmy Carter certainly gave his "respect" to the murderous tyrant, the now quite deceased Kim Il Sung, traveling to North Korea to convince the peace-loving, jolly dictators of North Korea to develop nuclear power for peaceful means. Carter assured us even as late as 2010 after North Korea shelled the South Korean Island of Yeonpyeong that King Jong Il was simply craving the respect of world's governments to send it necessary food and medical supplies that this thoroughly corrupt regime has been unable to supply for its own people from the bounteous joys of sixty years of Communist thuggery. Then again, of course, James Earl Carter, Jr., never met a Communist dictator he didn't embrace with open arms.

It is one thing for a former president to express opposition to a policy of the sitting president, but by actively working to get foreign leaders to withdraw support for the U.S. days before troops were to be in the cross fire, Carter was taking actions that were closer to treason than they were to legitimate peace activism.

Carter’s meddling was not limited to the first Iraq War or to Republican administrations. In 1994, there was a standoff between the U.S., its allies, and North Korea over the communist country’s nuclear program. The U.S. was floating the idea of sanctions at the United Nations. Over the years, Carter had received multiple invitations to visit North Korea from Kim Il-sung and was eager to fly over and defuse the situation with an ultimate goal of convening a North–South peace summit and unifying the peninsula. Begrudgingly, the Clinton administration agreed to let Carter meet with Kim as long as Carter made clear that he was a private citizen and that he was merely gathering information on the North Korean perspective, which he would then report back to the Clinton administration.

It is one thing for a former president to express opposition to a policy of the sitting president, but by actively working to get foreign leaders to withdraw support for the U.S. days before troops were to be in the cross fire, Carter was taking actions that were closer to treason than they were to legitimate peace activism.

Carter’s meddling was not limited to the first Iraq War or to Republican administrations. In 1994, there was a standoff between the U.S., its allies, and North Korea over the communist country’s nuclear program. The U.S. was floating the idea of sanctions at the United Nations. Over the years, Carter had received multiple invitations to visit North Korea from Kim Il-sung and was eager to fly over and defuse the situation with an ultimate goal of convening a North–South peace summit and unifying the peninsula. Begrudgingly, the Clinton administration agreed to let Carter meet with Kim as long as Carter made clear that he was a private citizen and that he was merely gathering information on the North Korean perspective, which he would then report back to the Clinton administration.

Without telling the Clinton administration, however, Carter flew to North Korea with a CNN film crew and proceeded to negotiate the framework of an agreement. He then informed the Clinton team after the fact, with little warning, that he was about to go on CNN to announce the deal. This infuriated the Clinton administration, and according to Brinkley’s account, one cabinet member called the former president a “treasonous prick.” To make matters worse, Carter then accepted a dinner invitation from Kim, at which point Carter claimed on camera that the U.S. had stopped pursuing sanctions at the U.N., which was untrue. Nevertheless, once Carter went on television to announce all this, Clinton felt completely boxed in, and he was forced to accept the deal and abandon sanction efforts.

Over time, it became clear that Kim had just used Carter to take the heat off, get economic relief, and buy time while still continuing to enrich uranium in violation of the agreement, which it withdrew from in 2002 after being called out for cheating. Within a few years, North Korea had built a nuclear arsenal. Carter’s effort at freelance diplomacy, in addition to advancing a foreign policy at odds with the administration, squandered a crucial window to stop North Korea from going nuclear. (Jimmy Carter: Terrible President, Worse Former President.)

Carter finally received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002 after he had returned from his visit to dictator and mass murderer Fidel Castro in Cuba. The always righteous Carter lectured both the George Walker Bush administration and Castro, however obliquely, when giving an unprecedented address to Cuban university students, which was televised live and uncensored throughout Cuba. Carter, eager to win the Nobel Prize, chastised the Bush administration for continuing this country's economic boycott of Cuba, and he criticized Castro for not permitting free elections. His speech contained just a little something for everybody.

Sure, what can be said of James Earl Carter, Jr., can also be said of George Walker. Bush and his father, George Herbert Walker Bush, with respect to Red China, as I noted in a print issue of Christ or Chaos in October of 2002. The Bushes were appeasers of Red China as well as Carter, but no one has appeased the Chicoms more than Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

Perhaps the only good thing that can be said about James Earl Carter, Jr.'s., post-presidency is that he was a consistent critic of the murderous policies of the Zionist State of Israel, but even this positive aspect of his post-presidency is tempered by the fact that he justified terrorist attacks launched by Yassir Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization upon innocent Israeli citizens. Two wrongs never make a right, and the fact that Israel's policies against the Palestinians since 1948 have been manifestly unjust in no way justifies attacks upon innocent civilians in Israel. Then again, Carter was always a friend of whichever terrorist he could find to coddle and appease.

One of the supreme ironies of The Great Appeaser’s life is that this bitter old man, then in his nineties, accepted the lie of the Russian Collusion hoax and thus called President Donald John Trump’s election on November 8, 2016, to be illegitimate:

Former President Jimmy Carter questioned Friday whether President Trump legitimately won the 2016 election over Hillary Clinton, arguing Trump is only in office because "the Russians interfered."

The 94-year-old Democrat was speaking at a Virginia forum moderated by presidential biographer Jon Meacham, who asked how the U.S. should "deal with Russia" interfering in the country's ability to have "free and fair elections."

Carter answered by calling on Trump to acknowledge the interference and "condemn it"

"I think a full investigation would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf," he said at the Carter Center event.  (Jimmy Carter says investigation would show Trump didn't win 2016 election: He's in office 'because Russians interfered'.)

Poor Jimmy Carter. He could never accept that Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton amorally invented the whole Russian Collusion hoax any more than he could ever accept the fact that he alone was responsible for his miserably failed one-term presidency or that Communist dictators never have good intentions. He lived and died as fool in this regard.

Carter tried to stay in the limelight when he should have gone home to Plains and shucked peanut shells as his Carter Foundation was yet another effort to “solve” the problems of the world by naturalistic means without for one second recognizing that the problems of the world are caused by Original Sin and the Actual Sins of men and cannot be truly ameliorated until and unless men convert to the true Faith, repent of their sins, and to seek to make reparation for them. Every study and white paper produced by those employed at any presidential foundation can never contribute to the resolution of problems that are caused by fallen human nature.

Turning to the wisdom of Pope Pius XII on this matter:

4. If we weigh carefully the causes of today’s crises and those that are ahead, we shall soon find that human plans, human resources, and human endeavors are futile and will fail when Almighty God — He who enlightens, commands, and forbids; He who is the source and guarantor of justice, the fountainhead of truth, the basis of all laws — is esteemed but little, denied His proper place, or even completely disregarded. If a house is not built on a solid and sure foundation, it tumbles down; if a mind is not enlightened by the divine light, it strays more or less from the whole truth; if citizens, peoples, and nations are not animated by brotherly love, strife is born, waxes strong, and reaches full growth.

5. It is Christianity, above all others, which teaches the full truth, real justice, and that divine charity which drives away hatred, ill will, and enmity. Christianity has been given charge of these virtues by the Divine Redeemer, who is the way, the truth, and the life,[2] and she must do all in her power to put them to use. Anyone, therefore, who knowingly ignores Christianity — the Catholic Church — or tries to hinder, demean, or undo her, either weakens thereby the very bases of society, or tries to replace them with props not strong enough to support the edifice of human worth, freedom, and well-being.

6. There must, then, be a return to Christian principles if we are to establish a society that is strong, just, and equitable. It is a harmful and reckless policy to do battle with Christianity, for God guarantees, and history testifies, that she shall exist forever. Everyone should realize that a nation cannot be well organized or well ordered without religion. (Pope Pius XII, Meminisse Iuvat, July 14, 1958.)

The tragedy of James Earl Carter, Jr.’s., life was that he was born outside of the Catholic Faith and remained a rock-ribbed Baptist until he died yesterday, Sunday, December 29, 2024, the Sunday within the Octave of Christmas and the Commemoration of Saint Thomas a Becket. Although he is being praised after his death as a great “humanitarian,” being a “humanitarian” cannot save one’s soul unless his work is done as a son of Holy Church.

We will never know until eternity if any Catholic within his acquaintance (which would have included United States Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas P. O’Neil, Secretary of the then named United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Anthony Califano, Jr., who was one of six Cabinet secretaries fired in July of 1979 shortly after Carter’s malaise speech, or even then United States Senator Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., then his late thirties) invited him into the true Church or even gave him Our Lady’s Green Scapular. What we do know is that he died outside the pale of Holy Mother Church, and that, above and beyond the tragedy of his political life, his demagoguery, and his failed policies, is the greatest tragedy of the late James Earl Carter, Jr.’s., century long life.

This is all the more reason for us who have the true Faith to beg Our Lady to send us the graces necessary to persist in a state of Sanctifying Grace as we pray to her through her Most Holy Rosary for our daily conversion from sin and selfishness and also for the conversion of all non-Catholics, including all those in public life, to the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order within nations or a just peace among them.

We must always remember these words of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews lest we become the least bit haughty or gleeful over anyone’s death, including that of the late President James Earl Carter, Jr.:

[26] For if we sin wilfully after having the knowledge of the truth, there is now left no sacrifice for sins, [27] But a certain dreadful expectation of judgment, and the rage of a fire which shall consume the adversaries. [28] A man making void the law of Moses, dieth without any mercy under two or three witnesses: [29] How much more, do you think he deserveth worse punishments, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath esteemed the blood of the testament unclean, by which he was sanctified, and hath offered an affront to the Spirit of grace? [30] For we know him that hath said: Vengeance belongeth to me, and I will repay. And again: The Lord shall judge his people.

[31] It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10: 26-31.)

It is indeed a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Each of us must remember this truth, contained in Saint Paul the Apostle's Epistle to the Hebrews. We are, after all, in the penitential season of Lent, a time during which we must call to mind the horror of our sins as we seek to live more penitentially so as to make reparation for them to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Our Lord us that we do not know the day or the hour of the time He will visit us at the moment of our deaths:

Be you then also ready: for at what hour you think not, the Son of man will come. (Luke 12: 40.)

Many of us have much for which to answer. I know that I do!

The hour of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's visitation is something for which we must ask His Most Blessed Mother to prepare us each and every day as we examine our consciences nightly and make a perfect Act of Contrition in the morning and before we go to sleep, availing ourselves of the Mercy of the Divine Redeemer on a weekly basis, if at all possible, in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance. We must never seek to minimize our sins or the debt that we owe to God for them.

It is, however, one thing to sin and to be sorry for one's sins as one seeks to live penitentially in reparation for them. It is quite another to persist in sin and/or the support for grave sins unrepentantly until the moment of of one's death, which is what so many pro-abortion Catholics who have served in public office have been able to do while maintaining their "good standing" in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

May Our Lady help us to manifest the Sacred Rights of Christ the King at all times, keeping ever close to the mysteries of salvation contained in the fifteen decades of her Most Holy Rosary.

The Caligulas and the Neros and the Trajans and the Valerians and the Diocletians and the Cromwells and the Bismarcks and the French Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks and the Maoists all come and go. They have met the moment of their Particular Judgment. In the end, you see, these figures, much like the petty caesars and caesarettes of today, are forgettable figures, especially when you consider these words that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, Christ the King, Himself spoke to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque:

"I will reign in spite of all who oppose Me." (quoted in: The Right Reverend Emile Bougaud. The Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers in 1990, p. 361.)

Yes, Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.