Yeah, I couldn't believe it either, but that is what Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun claims in his defense of Jimmy Carter. Actually, it's not so much a defense of Jimmy Carter as an attack on the right wing fanatics who don't appreciate the importance of being told when you are wrong.

Sometimes we can be our own worst enemy.

Meanwhile, in The Daily Tidbit, a very good rebuttal.

That's about what I expect out of Lerner.

How can someone be so blind?

There was a very good opinion piece in Arutz-7 yesterday by Bennett Zimmerman - Jimmy Carter: Not Just Peanuts. A few excerpts:

Southern segregation was bad. Real bad. And the guilt of it has driven Jimmy Carter's political outlook ever since. Reaching out with love to Black Americans, descendants of slaves who wanted nothing more than to be part of the USA, was long overdue.

But every issue in the world is not defined in the same terms. Or in South African terms. And Jimmy Carter's provincialism is what made his the worst presidency of our lives. His contribution laid the seeds of the current crisis faced by the world today, a crisis he continues to fuel with his current book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Even as a high school student, something struck me as wrong. President Carter explained US leadership as the result of historic anomaly after World War II. Power would soon be shared with other nations, including the Europeans, the Soviets, China and Third World blocs.

Before he could yell, "Retreat!" the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The formerly peaceful nation entered into a blood revolt led by the Mujahadeen, the precursor to Al-Qaeda. The Shah of Iran, an ally of both the US and Israel, and a counterweight to the Arabs, flew from capital to capital in search of support, and finally into exile. A cleric named Khomeini living in Paris was welcomed by Jimmy Carter with a note, "religious man to religious man," who understood revolutions in the natural order of progress. It wasn't long before the gas lines started, the misery index exploded, and Americans were taken hostage in their own Embassy. Jimmy Carter hid in the Rose Garden to manage a crisis he had created.

I was in Panama in December 2004. You see homage everywhere to Omar Torrijos, the strongman selected by Jimmy Carter to receive the Panama Canal. In the national museum, there he is in all his glory, smiling "my name is Jimmy Carter" with the beaming eyes of a lunatic, as he embraces a dictator, while fulfilling their mutual dream: the USA giving strategic assets to bad guys. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a Democrat at the time, caught Ronald Reagan with this clear thinking: "When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies... they blame America first." She could not have penned anything more accurate about Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter, you are responsible for the madness in the world today: The Islamofascists plot our destruction, with a near-nuclear, insanity-based government in Iran that thinks G-d will be pleased if they use their weapons. And while it's almost axiomatic to describe the Camp David Accords as a success, the multi-billion dollar shakedown by Anwar Sadat will never aid the US in Iraq, and might well be seen by history as a disaster if the Egyptian army you've modernized, bought and paid for ever shows its true purpose.

With a record like that, sir, you would be best not to lecture anyone on anything. You've screwed up the world and have no authority, moral or otherwise, to judge anyone.

Your time is through.

It's worth reading the whole thing.

If only you had babysat for *him*.

Would have straighted him right out...

With friends like these...

Sometimes, with some people, I feel like the abused woman's concerned friend.

"Honey, he's not GOOD to you!"

"But he really loves me! He's trying to help me!"

"Sweetie, you've got to kick him OUT! You know he's hurting you!"

And so on and so on.

But then, I have the feeling that some of our friends overseas quite often feel the same way when we Americans exhibit Battered Spouse Syndrome in public forums like the Iraq Study Group report.