Jimmy Carter’s Profile in Courage

“Power of Prayer, and a president.” It’s not often you read that kind of headline on the front page of the Washington Post. But the story—a powerful one of crushing political defeat and personal spiritual redemption—is what commanded our attention a couple of weeks ago.

The news of former President Jimmy Carter’s very somber cancer diagnosis took all of Washington by surprise. Carter, at 90, seems a hardy perennial. He maintains an energetic schedule that would leave men half his age panting.

We make no secret of the fact we questioned a lot of what Jimmy Carter did in the White House.

Nor have we, like most Americans, approved of his post-Presidential policy positions. But we remember the story told by John F. Kennedy in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage. When a powerful nineteenth century Missouri senator was asked why he had let up in his fierce attacks on a political enemy who had been suddenly stricken, Thomas Hart Benton famously said: “When the Almighty puts His hand on a man’s shoulder, I take mine off.”

So do we. Let’s remember one of those things we can sincerely praise in Jimmy Carter’s presidency. President Carter signed the Hyde Amendment in 1977. That measure was the first major pro-life victory gained by the nation following the infamous Roe v. Wade ruling of 1973.

Whether President Carter wished to reduce the number of abortions by signing the Hyde Amendment’s ban on taxpayer-funded abortions, or whether he simply understood that forcing millions of us to be complicit in an act we see as homicide was politically harmful, he never really said. The important thing is that he signed the Hyde Amendment.

And he stood firm on that principle at grave political risk. When Sen. Ted Kennedy challenged President Carter in the 1980 Democratic primaries, Kennedy’s liberal cohorts made sure full federal funding of abortion was a part of their attempt to unseat a sitting president of their own party. They wrote the plank for the 1980 Democratic National Platform. It called for full funding of abortion-on-demand.

President Carter—though hard-pressed by liberals and conservatives—remained true to the Hyde Amendment. He wrote to the Democratic National Committee explicitly stating his opposition to federally-funded abortions. That took courage.

Independent candidate John Anderson had obtained liberal mailing lists. To these donors, Anderson conducted an “under the radar” campaign assuring his liberal correspondents that he would make every American pay for the killing of unborn Americans. Wherever John Anderson was strong, he “tipped” the state’s Electoral Votes to the pro-life candidate, Ronald Reagan.

Thus, we saw such liberal bastions as Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, and Wisconsin (and six other states) go to the pro-life Republican, Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the beneficiary of Carter’s principled stand against government-coerced funding of abortion. Of Reagan’s own pro-life bona fides there could be no doubt. H.W. Brands, in his recent Reagan biography,notes that Reagan asked George H.W. Bush just two questions: Could he support, generally, the conservative Republican Platform. And, very specifically, could he endorse Reagan’s opposition to abortion? Bush answered both questions in the affirmative.

No small part of Reagan’s early political success as President derived from his stunning victory on Election Night, 1980. The election maps on the networks then showed Republican states in blue; Democratic states in red. When all of the Northeast went blue, the face of CBS News’ Dan Rather went green.

We need to appreciate how strong a part abortion and the federal funding of abortion played in that critical election. And none of that would have been possible without Jimmy Carter’s principled stand against federal funding of abortion.

How sad it is to see one of our major political parties wholly in the grip of Planned Parenthood. President Obama’s top campaign operative, David Axelrod. concedes that the secretly-recorded videos of Planned Parenthood operatives haggling for the hearts, lungs, and livers of the unborn children they have killed make people “very uncomfortable.” But it doesn’t make them uncomfortable enough to stop sluicing our money to these scavengers.

President Obama himself made history—admittedly of a horrible sort—when he addressed a Planned Parenthood convention. He had promised to veto any bill funding the federal government that took away even one dollar from Planned Parenthood’s bulging budgets. He would rather close the government than let it proceed without finding these killers.

“Thank you, Planned Parenthood. And God bless you,” Mr. Obama said to this gathering of abortionists. The irreverence and irony of this statement go beyond words.

So, now, we can thank Jimmy Carter for what he did so long ago. And praise him at least for this special act of grace. And we assure former President Carter and his family of our earnest prayers for him and for them. The yard signs in Plains look like a campaign: “Jimmy Carter for Cancer Survivor.” Amen to that!

Ken Blackwell really ought to get out of the business of trying to gloss over Carter's obscene behavior (which includes the most anti-semetic statements seen from any president prior to the current Kenyan sack o'feces) and just stick to the facts:

The legacy of Carter is one of cartoonish so-called 'leadership' and appeasement which makes Neville Chamberlain look like a raging warmonger by comparison.

Forget the Hyde Amendment. What did the Hyde Amendment effectively do to prevent the current American Holocaust of the unborn which we have finally seen recorded on video and exposed for what it is? Trying to salvage Carter's 'humanity' by invoking the Hyde Amendment is a lesson in utter shamelessness. Ken Blackwell should know better.

Carter turned Iran, from a loyal and dependable U.S. ally under the Shah, into a rogue state under the excretable Ayatollah Khomeini and his goons who seized our Embassy, imprisoned and tortured our fellow Americans for 444 days, all the while the Buffoon from Georgia wrung his hands helplessly, and sent his equally buffoonish National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to Amman Jordan in the spring of 1980 to meet with representatives of Iraq's Saddam Hussein (some say with Saddam himself) to convey the message that the U.S. would not look adversely upon Iraq pursuing it's territorial conflicts with Iran by direct military action.

Not long after that, Iraq attacked Iran, precipitating the 8 year Iraq-Iran War, the massacres of hundreds of thousands of people, all in the misguided belief that by instigating that war, it would somehow pressure the Ayatollah to release our hostages. In Plains Georgia, if someone steals your prize hog, it might work if you get some big local bubba to burn down the suspect's barn to 'send 'em a message' but that cornpone logic won't work in the middle east, in fact the only message they understand is overwhelming military force, which is why Carter's limp dick 'rescue mission' at Desert One failed and collapsed as it did. It wasn't until Ronald Reagan was sworn in on January 20, 1981, that the mullahs realized that if they didn't release those hostages, that the Gipper was going to unleash the dogs of war right on top of their raggedy heads. They feared Reagan, and laughed at Carter.

Ken Blackwell has deluded himself into thinking that in some obtuse manner, that it was Carter opposing abortion that put Reagan in the White House. How stupid does one have to be to think, let alone propose such an absurd theory?

Here are the reasons Reagan flushed Jimmy Carter like the turd he was in a 44 state landslide:

Inflation: Up and continuing up.
Unemployment: Up and continuing up.
Cost of Energy: Up and continuing up.
Interest Rates: Up, Up and Away.
Respect for America: Down, Down, Down.
U.S. Military Superior: Decimated by Carter (killed the B-1 bomber, remember?)

America said 'enough is enough', which is why they chose Ronald Reagan who has already gone down in history as the greatest President in the 20th Century:

And we sure did. And nothing Carter has said or done in the years following will erase the definition of him as the 'Skidmark in the Panties of America's History'

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