Ah, good old CNN. Just when even us die-hard conservative/libertarian types thought the whole vast "liberal media conspiracy" might be on its way out (what with the New York Times now praising Clarence Thomas and Phil Donahue's show tanking faster than even a Seinfeld alumnus's sitcom), Ted Turner's network has quickly reminded us that the liberals are still at the media reins.

No, I'm not talking merely about Paul Begala's nauseating ode to Jimmy Carter on Crossfire the other night. (Though, I suppose that was bad enough.) Nor am I talking about my favorite conspiracy theory: that CNN purposely keeps the sputtering, past-his-prime Bob Novak and the overly nice and polite Tucker Carlson on Crossfire because both, while intelligent, are completely ineffective against bullying spin-masters Begala and Carville, and the network would never want to see real debate. What I'm talking about is a CNN interview with Jimmy Carter that I didn't even catch, given that it aired at four in the morning this past Wednesday, but whose disturbing contents, as reported by the Media Research Center, are worth commenting on.

The interview with the former President took place shortly after the humble peanut farmer "who asks nothing more from life than good health, peace, and the world?s fawning attention" accepted his Nobel Peace Prize. In it, CNN's Jonathan Mann told Carter: "Mr. President, you are arguably the most respected American on the planet today."

I?ll let that just sink in for a moment before going on, but let's just say that arguably has got to be the operative word in that sentence.

O.K., have you thought about it? Played around with the idea a little? James Earl Carter the most respected American on the planet? Surely Mr. Mann must have made some kind of mistake. Perhaps he was thinking of James Earl Jones, whose voice is indeed the stuff of power and can elicit reverence and veneration even when it's only advertising a phone book. Or perhaps Mann was confusing the former President with basketball great Vince Carter whose performance in the NBA All Star Game slam dunk competition did inspire awe all across North America, if not the planet.

But he couldn't possibly have been serious in suggesting that Jimmy Carter is the most respected American on the planet. The same Jimmy Carter whose most aggressive move as President came in 1979 when he was attacked by a killer rabbit and raised a paddle in self-defense? The same Jimmy Carter who failed to show similar protective mettle (or any action at all) when it came to the Iranian hostage crisis that saw 52 Americans detained inside the embassy in Tehran for 444 days (ending only after Carter left and Reagan entered office)? The same Carter so many Americans still associate with inflation and immeasurably long lines at the gas pumps during the oil shortages of the late 1970s? The same Carter whom Fidel Castro conned into embracing thousands of Cuban crooks and welcoming them into the U.S. as refugees?

Apparently, yes. Astonishingly enough, Jonathan Mann must have known whom he was talking about because a) Jimmy Carter, a freckly white old guy, was sitting right in front of him during the interview, bearing no resemblance to either Vince Carter or James Earl Jones, and b) all the Carter "successes" Mann mentioned were indeed issues with which Carter concerned himself.

Yes, that's right, there were many successes for which Mann congratulated the former President, including Carter's achievements in North Korea. "The people who know the subject and know the region say that if you hadn't succeeded in North Korea, there would have been a war," Mann told Carter triumphantly. Thank goodness for Jimmy Carter's victory! But, hang on, a sec. Is Mann talking about the same North Korea to whose totalitarian government Carter showed no resistance as President? The same North Korea that has been enriching uranium for use in nuclear weapons despite the framework they signed with the United States under Jimmy Carter's guidance? The same North Korea that, in fact, continued working on a nuclear bomb while chitchatting with amiable peacemaker Carter? I don't know, but one has to wonder how many North Koreas there could possibly be.......................

Mondale, Carter and Radical Islam

"And I'd also like to say that this election is about the future. It's not about the collapse of the Shah in 1979, and it's not about Afghanistan in 1980."
-- Former Vice President Walter Mondale, debate with Norman Coleman for United States Senate, November 4th 2002.

It is one of the great ironies of history that these words were spoken on November 4th, exactly to the day the 23rd anniversary of the storming of the American Embassy in Iran by radical Islamist students during the presidency of Walter Mondale's former boss President James Earl Carter. It's an odd political cliché when politicians say that this or that election is not about the past but about the future. It's an even odder political cliché when mouthed by someone who has not been elected to public office in more than two decades. Of course that's not the point; the point is that elections are and should be about the past. Elections are the process by which the voters attempt to protect the actions that will be taken by the prospective politicians after they are voted in office, and they do this by looking at the past behavior of the hopefuls.

Of course, people can change, and it may not be fair to throw a past mistake into the face of your political opponent, especially if that mistake was made in the distant past. But that only holds true if your political opponent has learned from his mistakes. That Walter Mondale does not see the connection between our contemporary war against international terrorism and the mistakes of the Carter administration shows that he has not learned from his.

We are still living now with the direct consequences of the failure of the Carter administration to understand the nature of radical Islam and with its botched Iran policy in general. Before the Ayatollah and his followers seized power in Iran, radical Islam was nothing other than an unlikely dream. For the most part, this cause was championed by ideologically driven and idealistic students and seen by serious men in Central Asia and the Middle East as unrealistic. Ideologies are often like this; people avoid them when expectations are low, but flock to them more and more as their prospects improve. Most people, in short, avoid political movements that they see as losers and embrace political movements that they see as winners, regardless of ideology.

That's why the Iranian revolution is so important to the rise of radical Islam. In the same way that Marxism was energized as a movement when the Bolshevik's seized Russia, radical Islam was able to draw propaganda value and financial support from the nation of Iran once it controlled an actual nation-state. Its most significant barrier to ascendancy—its reputation as a hobby for clerics and radicalized students—was razed with the fall of Tehran. Radical Islam was unleashed upon the world of nations.

A decade before the vanquishing of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War, the West’s next great enemy began its ascendancy (too bad they don’t give out Nobel Peace Prizes for starting World War IV, then Carter’d have two of them.)

Any failure this large must be the result, not of a small technical misstep, but of a grand intellectual fallacy. The Carter administration suffered from what Jeanne Kirkpatrick at the time called "dictatorships and double standards." In November of 1979 she wrote this:

"Examples abound. In Iran and Nicaragua the Carter administration and the State Department withheld economic aid, weapons, ammunition, moral support and urged the departure of the Shah and Somoza because the administration had a theory that these acts would promote human rights and build democracy in those countries. It is not necessary to believe that the United States lost Iran and Nicaragua to understand that our policies failed to produce the expected consequences. Policymakers acted on the belief, widely held in enlightened circles, that there existed in Iran and Nicaragua moderate Democratic groups which represented a progressive alternative to traditional and revolutionary extremes, and that the moderate groups had a good chance of achieving power. Get rid of rightist dictators, support the Democratic left, promote reform, preempt the radicals, build democracy and development: thus went the theory that gave us the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Ortega Brothers. The Ayatollah's policies mocked Western expectations that this anti-American holy man was some kind of (moderate) saint… once again, good intentions and a mistaken theory produced results as destructive as they were unintended. Ideas have consequences, bad ideas have bad consequences."

In practical terms this meant that it was a dangerous thing to be an ally of the United States while Carter was president. If you were aligned with the Soviet bloc then you were indifferent to American disapproval and could pursue terror and repression against your people without restraint. But if you are an ally of the United States you found yourself constantly the subject of disapproval and ultimately financial, military, and food supply disruptions. The consequence, of course, was that U.S. allies with moderately bad human rights records began to fall, and they were replaced by radicals who would go on to accumulate perfectly bad human rights records. Iran was no exception: harassed, jostled and ultimately eased out of power at the word of President Carter's special emissary, George Ball, the Shah was replaced by something far worse for the people in Iran and certainly for the people of America -- especially the 90 people who were kidnapped on November 4th 1979. We are still living with the consequences of those bad ideas and probably will be for many years to come.

Source: JerryBowyer.com

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