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Jimmy Carter: A Very Good Man
This will be very brief and is obviously prompted by the news that former President Carter will be going into hospice care at home to spend his final days at home with his Rosalynn and his family rather than making the numerous trips he has apparently been making to the hospital of late.
When I heard the news, in addition to the obvious sorrow anyone feels for the person and the family when an announcement is made containing the dread words “his final days,” I felt a sense of enormous sadness at what has happened to our — it is necessary that, in these bleak days I repeat that word — our Presidency since President Carter and, obviously his successor in office, President Reagan, served us, each in his own way and with his own ideals, honorably and in good faith and with complete, unquestioned integrity and honesty.
While I do not question in any way whatsoever the basic honesty and integrity of the Presidents Bush, what came between their terms was nothing short of the beginning of the end of the dignity and honor of the office of the President of the United States as Bill and Hillary Clinton soiled the institution in more ways than defiling the very sacred space of the Oval Office itself and the space under the Resolute Desk in ways unthinkable before they disgraced that office, and us.
Later came Barack Hussein Obama and his “First” Lady, about whom I feel too much pain and pure chagrin to mention overbroadly except to note that I consider them to be the most dangerous people to ever occupy a position of power in our Beloved Nation. Little did we know how much worse it would get in 2020.
I need not spend a word on President Trump other than to say I think history will eventually deem him to be one of the most successful Presidents in history.
I only set out this brief little rant in order to look back from our vantage point of early 2023 to note our hope for President Carter as he rests in his home with Rosalynn and his family and that many of us who probably disagreed with him politically on every single point wish him not only well but also hope he will know we consider him a person of goodwill who served his country to the very best of his ability, in the best of good faith.
Jimmy Carter is a good man. How desperately we need his goodness in the corridors of power in our time. May his final days be those of peace and solace and tranquility.
May God have Mercy on him as he leaves this earthly sphere for his final rest.
Published in General
He pulled at mine, too. Is that it?
Point taken. The only difference I see is that I expressed similar views in this post. By the way, as to your comment about having way more days behind you than you have ahead of you, I’m approaching my 89th birthday, so I have the same feeling.
He’s not dead, so I feel no need to “not speak ill of the dead.”
Jimmy Carter was and is not a nice man. He has been displaced as our worst president in history, not by someone less competent, but by Obama wh0 acted against our nation and not merely incompetently. Of course, Biden came along and he is both incompetent and evil.
But I think Jimmy Carter has good table manners and probably is nice to his dog. That’s the best I can come up with.
Thanks for the response. Many of the things you mention are absolutely sad(dening), although “dismaying” would perhaps be a better word. They are all quite different in kind from a rich, accomplished (in his way), super-old dude dying quietly and comfortably in his home.
Thank you; much appreciated.
On the Jay Nordlinger link on Carter:
First Jay, at some point, decided to stop writing about him, and stuck to it. He hasn’t written about Carter for about 20 years. I suspect he’ll keep his silence, unless he has something good to say about him.
Actually, what I saw Jay doing was simply reacting to all the “Saint Jimmy” stuff that was going around at the time. I actually don’t see a conflict between calling Carter a good human being who was flawed. Jay made sure we knew what the flaws were. He didn’t need to point out his good points, because everyone else was.
As for the argument that he’s dying and he’s in his late 90’s, and why are people still saying bad things about him, that comes with the territory of being a former president who was unpopular. Maybe the last president to be held in high esteem at his death was Ike (Kennedy was a special case). And of course he was not celebrated as a politican as much as he was celebrated as a military leader.
I suspect that Reagan’s funeral wouldn’t have gone so well if he hadn’t had suffered from Alzheimer’s for so long. That made him a bit of a martyr in a way that Carter is not.