No stranger to controversy, Former President Jimmy Carter, seems to have done it again. That is to say, he once again allowed his rather opinionated demeanor to get the best of him. After being lambasted in media and political circles for his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — Jimmy Carter is back in the news. Though I don’t necessarily agree with Carter on everything…I am, however, going to have to agree with him on this one:
Carter: Bush Administration “worst ever”
Posted by Frank James
An earlier posting noted that former President Jimmy Carter told BBC that the soon to be ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair was “subservient” to President Bush and by being so failed to stop what Carter viewed as a monumental foreign policy mistake, the Iraq invasion and its aftermath.
But Carter didn’t just blast Blair in the past 24 hours. In another interview, this one with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the former president called the Bush Administration the “worst in history” in terms of foreign policy.
Here’s the top of the ADG story. To see the whole thing you’d need to subscribe to the newspaper.
In a stinging rebuke to President Bush, former President Carter on Friday called the current administration “the worst in history” when it comes to international relations. During a telephone interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from the Carter Center in Atlanta, the ex-president also accused the current White House occupant of eliminating the line between church and state and of abandoning “America’s basic values.”
“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history. The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including [those of] George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me,” Carter said. The 39th president said that during Bush’s two terms in office, he has radically departed from every other U.S. president.
It’s an extraordinary thing to witness an ex-president speaking his mind so freely in his criticism of a sitting president. Another example in the modern era doesn’t quickly come to mind.
Notice, Carter didn’t label Bush the worst president ever. But can a president have the worst administration ever without being the lowliest chief executive to occupy the White House, at least in Carter’s eyes?
You’d probably have to go back to President Theodore Roosevelt who in 1912 ran against his one-time friend, the sitting President William Howard Taft, to find an ex-president speaking out so forcefully against an Oval Office occupant.
This Carter interview is likely to be a story for days.
Carter on Apartheid in Occupied Territories (Palestine)
