Reverse Angle on Jimmy Carter

Some things to remember when all the celebration stops

According to the late Malcolm Muggeridge, author of Jesus Rediscovered, the twin pitfalls of religious experience are unctuousness and spiritual exhibitionism. That’s Jimmy Carter all over, as another Brit was quick to spot.

Novelist Auberon Waugh (Brideshead Benighted), son of novelist Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited), once appeared on the Dick Cavett show and pronounced Carter an “unctuous rattlesnake,” which might have been too kind. Carter’s sanctimoniousness was fully apparent to novelist Bruce Bawer (The Alhambra) who says “I didn’t trust the son of a bitch as far as I could throw him.” Carter was never a “nucleah engineah” and on his watch the jihadists had their way.

The Ayatollah Khomeini, a belch from the ninth century, invaded the US Embassy in Tehran, took 52 Americans hostage and held them for more than a year. That is an act of war but the invertebrate Carter basically did nothing. On the other hand, he gave us double-digit inflation, quantified in the “misery index.”

As “pissed-off cracker” Jimmy Carter (Dana Carvey) said in “Dukakis After Dark,” “I was a downer, a liberal downer, a malaise-ridden liberal downer, a free-spending malaise liberal downer.” Bureaucrats rolled him with the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which created the Senior Executive Service, a squad of overpaid elitists now embedded in 75 federal agencies.

As Steve documented in The Real Jimmy Carter, the Georgia Democrat was the worst ex-president, and as Daniel Greenfield explains, Carter was “never a good man.” Joe Biden and the composite character known as Barack Obama give Carter a run for worst president. If anybody thought all three are better ranked with the worst people in America it would be hard to blame them.

To honor Carter, Joe Biden has proclaimed January 9 a holiday for federal workers. They will surely miss him the most.