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The Nice Guy Ex-President I’m Not Idolizing

June 6, 2025

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Department Of Has It Been Long Enough?

It’s been almost six months since the death of Jimmy Carter, the #39 US President.  Carter served in the tumultuous, smack-dab-in-the-middle-of-the-1979 Energy Crisis,    [1]  post-Watergate years of 1977 – 1981

Yeah, Watergate.  Not even gonna attempt a summary, except to say to those readers too young to remember it, that I never thought I’d miss having a president who goes on national television to defend himself thusly:  “…people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.”   Contrast that with the Current Occupant who has raised crookery to an art form, and who doesn’t give an orange-toupeed rat’s ass if anyone or everyone knows about it.

Ah, but, once again, moiself  digresses.

“We told the truth, obeyed the law, and we kept the peace.”
( Walter Mondale, vice president, summing up the Carter presidency, as quoted in
“Jimmy Carter: Watergate’s final victim,” HNN 12-22-19  )

 

1976 carter-mondale campaign poster

 

After Carter’s death in December (2024), the usual pros and cons of Carter’s public life were listed and discussed by pundits and historians.  Pros including Carter

*brokering the 1978 The Camp David Accords (signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin);

* championing diversity in the justice system by pointing out judicial inequities in representation and appointing more minority judges to the federal judiciary than all previous presidents combined;

* working with human rights organizations and engaging with foreign governments to free political prisoners in countries around the world  [2] 

* shifting US foreign policy to build diplomatic relationships with African nations (his 1978 visit to Liberia and Nigeria were the ITAL first ever state visits of a US president to sub-Saharan Africa.  

But during Carter’s term the country struggled with a new-to-most-folks-in-the-Western-world neologism:  stagflation   [3]   – which was aggravated by the afore-mentioned oil crisis – then the Iran hostage crisis.

Carter was an ethical breath of fresh air after the dishonesty and criminality of Nixon and his henchmen.  Still, critics noted that his much acclaimed “outsider’ status made him ineffective when it came to working with the politics-as-usual members of Congress, many of whom resented what they saw as his “above-it-all” (read: holier than thou) presentation of his political self.

“… James Earl ‘Jimmy’ Carter came out of nowhere to capture the Democratic nomination for president, eventually winning the presidential election…. Carter’s ‘I’ll never lie to you’ pledge resonated with voters disgusted with the corruption of the Nixon administration….

Jimmy Carter…was an unlikely president who served in difficult times….Being an ‘outsider,’ not part of the Washington D.C. political establishment, was a great asset in the everything-inside-the-beltway-is-corrupt estimation of the public. But what helped him get elected came back to haunt Carter as his inexperience with beltway politics was, in part, his undoing….

As president, Carter attempted to de-pomp the imperial presidency that had blossomed under Nixon. Downsizing the presidency seemed a good idea at the time, but world events conspired to demand a stronger, more in-charge president. Post-Watergate, the public was in a president-bashing mood, and Congress began to flex its muscles, leaving the presidency weaker and more vulnerable than at any time in the previous two generations. Governing in the best of times is difficult enough, but governing in an ‘Age of Cynicism’ and declining trust was all but impossible.”

( excerpts, “The Outsider President,” LMU Magazine, January 2025 )

 

The first former peanut farmer president.

 

Carter is often referred to as “the most successful ex-president,” if by successful you mean someone who tries to do good in the word.  Many of Carter’s predecessors (also and especially his  successor, Reagan) leveraged the ex-president card as a way to make millions in post-presidential speaking gigs.  But Carter used whatever cache he had to establish, fund, and promote NGOs that worked on a variety of national and international human rights causes, from  affordable housing (Habitat for Humanity) to nonpartisan and collaborative conflict resolution, monitoring of elections, and parasitic and infectious disease ratification (The Carter Center).

 

 

Waging peace.  Moiself  loves it, and admires the work Carter  [4]  engaged in post-presidency.  And what a legacy!  here’s just one example: thanks to Carter’s decades-long advocacy, Dracunculiasis, the crippling parasitic affliction aka Guinea-worm disease, is on the brink of being eradicated.   [5]

As much as I admire Carter’s humanitarian work, when I heard all the rush-to-praise that accompanied his death – which accompanies the death of any former leader – I found moiself  biting my tongue about a few of my less-than-charitable-so-close-to-his-demise  critiques of some of his methods.

I admired Carter, but do not idolize him (or anyone); thus, it’s not a feet of clay thing.

 

Nope, not like this at all.

 

’Tis uncomfortable to pick nits about someone who did a crap-ton of good work (and who had cancer).  But equal opportunity picker, that’s moiself.  And when I ran across this several months back – it was not new, but new to me – those nits just begged to be picked, or at least nudged.

“Former U.S. President Carter said on Sunday he believes ‘Jesus would approve of gay marriage.’

“I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else,’ Carter, who describes himself as a born-again Christian, told HuffPost Live…..

(Carter) spoke at length in the HuffPost Live video about how his faith has informed his politics. He is promoting his new book, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety. ”

( excerpts, “Jimmy Carter Says Jesus Would Approve of Gay marriage,”
The Huffington Post )

To repeat: I greatly admire the humanitarian work of former President Jimmy Carter. More ex-presidents would do well to follow his example of using his influence and connections to advance human rights and eschew temptation to pursue lucrative speaking opportunities (yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, George W. Bush). Just as I would pooh-poo a wingnut claiming to speak for what their god would or would not do, sorry, Jimmy, if you use the same tactics you get the same reaction. Doesn’t matter if I approve the message – the idea that anyone thinks that what their deity would or would not approve of should influence civil rights is antithetical to a rational, secular government.

Carter used the same methods – the appeal to what their deity *really* wants or intends;  [1] the selecting citing of scriptures to support their position – that his opponents used to refute his claims.   I recall him doing that several times, regarding several human rights issues, over the course of his post-presidency public life.  For example, while I’m glad he supported women’s rights I cringed when he cited his faith for justification.   [2]

Now, y’all keep in mind that moiself, as a Freethinker-atheist-Bright-Secular humanist, don’t believe in any of these deities I’m about to use in a For The  Sake Of Argument®  example:

Moiself  has to insist that, in fairness, regarding your support for or claims about the political/human issues I might happen to agree with (as in, your positions on social or other issues):   you must appeal to evidence and reason, and not your opinion of some silent deities’ likely take on the issue.  I insist on the same standards from those whose positions you oppose.

An actual comment moiself  read on FB, regarding a human rights issue ( think LGBTQ rights, immigration reform, women’s bodily autonomy….):

“Any true Christian who understands the life of Jesus
would believe this as well.”

You could put this on any side, of any argument, citing any religion, in the form of a Mad Libs®  Doctrine of applying faith to politics:

* any true ___
(Christian; Muslim: Jew; Hindu; Prosperity Gospel believer)
who reads and understands the ___ _______
( life of Jesus, words of Mohammed, Torah, Bhagavat Gita; Wall Street Journal )
would ______
(believe this as well; believe as I do; feel the same way )
about _____
( insert whatever cause).

While I’m usually glad when liberal religious believers support causes of social justice, I cringe to see them use same tactics/justifications as their conservative counterparts; that is, extrapolating what a “just god” thinks about  Issue X.

Support your causes – fight the good fights based on reason, justice, human rights and realities, utility of existence – not by citing the unprovable notions of an illusory, or fickle at best (given the causes attributed to said deity for a millennium) deity:

* god made separate “races” and segregation – just look at these verses….;

* our god made us equal and supports civil rights – just look at these verses….;

Your arguments and advocacies should stand on their own evidence, and on their own intellectual, physical, and scientific merits, and not on the fluctuating, consistently-behind-the-times, illusory precepts of theology.

 

 

*   *   *

Department of Employee Of The Month

 

 

It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself.  Again. The need for which I wrote about here.   [8] 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [9]

 

 

 

*   *   *

May you not need justifications for treating people kindly;
May you never support your opinions with Mad Libs theology;
May we all be wagers of peace;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Aka (in the USA) as The Oil Crisis, a drop in oil production after the 1978 Iranian revolution, which led to speculation and hoarding and not nearly enough self-examination re our dependency on non-renewable energy sources.

[2] After he left office, Carter continued to work on freeing political prisoners through The Carter Center.

[3] rising inflation paired with a high unemployment rate and sluggish economic growth.

[4] and his fellow activist and humanitarian and the love of his life, his wife, the late Rosalyn Carter.

[5] Which would make it only the second disease in human history, after smallpox, to be eradicated.

[6] Only in this case he didn’t, because there aren’t any Christian scriptures which support – or oppose – gay marriage.  Not matter the translation, the words gay and homosexual do not appear in those ancient texts.  In those times what later folks termed “homosexual acts”  were considered to be just that – acts – and not an outward expression of a sexual orientation, the concept of which didn’t even exist until the late 1800s.

[7] Just as his opponents cited their faith as to, for example, why women shouldn’t be ordained in their churches.

[8] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg.  Until I did.

One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens.  No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.

[9] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.  No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Posts I’m Not Reading

March 2, 2018

Robyn Parnell community, current events, general ruminations, music, politics, sports, Uncategorized, YEE HAW! , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Posts I’m Not Reading

Although my number of FB contacts is growing at a moderate pace, the number of posts to my home page seems to be growing exponentially. Even so, it is taking moiself less time these days to do my read/nod/skim (of the posts) and say, move along.  The number of political posts re Cadet Bone Spurs and his band of (Global) Village Idiots….  I. Just. Can’t. Do. It. For. Very. Long.

I’m trusting (a hard thing for me to do, trust me  [1]  ) the FBI and investigative journalists (both here and internationally) to do their respective jobs. When I despair, I try to remember Watergate, and how long it took to detect, understand, and expose the Nixon administration’s tangled web of deceit, criminality and paranoia. In one of life’s many nasty paradoxes, it often seems to take only months for greed, incompetence, criminality, racism, misogyny, and treason to slime their way to the top, yet years to bring the purveyors of such to justice.

 

 

Note the date. The Watergate break-in was June 1972. It took more than two years of evidence-gathering, investigation and testimony….

 

 

*   *   *

A Blast From The Olympic Past

Dateline: Friday, February 23, NY Times sports section. My attention was captured by the following headline, for a story about a Public Address system announcer at the Winter Olympics being told to stop using French pronunciations for some of the Canadian hockey players:

Kerfuffle Erupts In Canada Over French Pronunciations

My first thought was, What a great name for a band!  I need a bit of help – not only am I wavering between just what music genre/kind of band would be most suitable, but the name itself…there are so many opportunities:

 

Kerfuffle Erupts

 

 

 

The Erupting Kerfuffles

 

They Might Be Erupting Kefuffles

 

 

The Artist Formerly Known as Kerfuffle Erupts

 

 

Bruce And the E- Street Kerfuffles

 

Stand by Your Erupting Kerfuffles

 

 

The Kerfuffle Family Eruptions

 

 

 

Please, somebody, stop me.

 

*   *   *

Department Of Fuck You, Coca-Cola  [2]

I know it’s nutritional rubbish, moiself would often acknowledge, even as I engaged in my longtime diet cola habit. I justified it because I didn’t have one every day, and when I did it was (usually, only) one a day, at lunch (if I was out for lunch, which I often was during the week and almost always on Saturday and Sunday). Besides, I liked it.  “Sodas” were a rare treat when I was growing up. I loved the taste, and especially the bubbles, the carbonation – and the flavor of mineral water  [3]  is, to moiself, what I imagine licking the sidewalk would taste like.

And the diet products…I justified them with, at least I’m not getting the over NINE TEASPOONS of sugar that’s in an average can of Pepsi or Coke.  Then came the mounting evidence against diet sodas, which indicates that people who drink them are at greater risk of developing Type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome – the latter of which is responsible for the seeming conundrum which is that consumption of diet drinks is linked to increased weight gain.

Yep, Evidence reared its fearsome head.

 

 

 

Knowledge is both power and willpower for me (even if it takes a while to sink in, when it comes to altering longtime habits).  It is difficult for me to not know something once I know it. The clincher for me, in my successful swearing off of the Soda Habit, was the Ick Factor ® realization that came with recent revelations: every time I consume a Diet Coke or its rival equivalent(s), I am supporting the soft drink beverage companies’ morally reprehensible – and disastrous, to public health – campaign of obfuscation and deception.

These revelations include that the Coca-Cola company, as far back as fifty years ago, began a campaign to hire scientists to attempt to shift the blame/public attention for increasing obesity and type 2 diabetes rates away from sugar consumption by blaming dietary fat. Their scheme to divert attention from the mounting evidence linking soda consumption with weight gain and poor health included funding the Global Energy Balance Network, an “astroturfing”  [4] organization purporting to research diabetes but whose employees were actually being paid to promote the idea that insufficient exercise, not bad nutrition, was the primary cause of weight gain. [5]

 

 

 

 

 

The evidence is out and, like diet soda drinkers’ waistlines, it is increasing. Whether due to health concerns, or the encroachment of beverages other than sodas into the market (or some combination of those and other factors), soda pop consumption in the US has been gradually declining…leading the soda beverage industry with a marketing challenge: How, in the face of increasing awareness that their products are a health sinkhole, can they keep pushing the young happy healthy looking people have even more fun drinking our fizzy stuff images?

Of course, beverage corporations are not the first to deal with this issue. Tobacco companies can no longer (directly) market their death-by-stick products as part of a carefree or even healthful lifestyle – they can’t even market them at all, in certain venues.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But they can still, through print ads and entertainment placement – and with the unwitting [6]  cooperation of music and movie stars and other celebrities – try to play the Bad Ass Cool Card ®.  The ultra hip Rebel, defiant of convention and evidence, does what he wants to do simply because he wants to do it, his lungs (and your and my) air quality be damned.

Taking a page from the tobacco industry’s vile playbook is what likely spawned the insidious Diet Coke commercial which ran during NBC’s telecast of the Olympic Games. Did you see it? I was slack-jawed at the ad’s blatant yeah, so what?-ism   [7] – and by its tacit acknowledgement that drinking a Diet Coke is not a good thing to do, but c’mon, you know you want it (and the company really wants you to want it). It was a basic, up yours to health: have a Diet Coke because you can.

Here’s the thing about Diet Coke; it’s delicious. It makes me feel good.
Life is short; if you want to live in a yurt, yurt it up…
(from the Diet Coke ad,” ‘Because I Can’ Featuring Gillian Jacobs”)

I like it; it makes me feel good.  Protested every junkie, ever.

Oh, and the equating of “living in a yurt” with not falling for corporate propaganda and acting upon information and actually caring about what you put in your body?  The ad’s cynicism and anti-intellectualism is so transparent…and, sadly, it’s also probably effective.

The attractive, mildly-sarcastic-enough-to-be-cool-young-woman ®  all but blurts out that she knows she’s putting liquid shit in her body, but she wants to do so, so there – an attitude which  appeals to the 13 year old in all of us who wants to give a Nyah Nyah Nyah Nyah to whatever authority is telling us to do (or not do) something.  Nice touch, Coke marketing douchebags.  [8]

The ad is titled, “The Diet Coke Ad ‘Because I Can’ Featuring Gillian Jacobs.  This leads me to assume I’m supposed to know who Gillian Jacobs is, other than the latest Pretty Young Thing Prostituting Herself for Her Ten Minutes of Fame Making A Buck Shilling A Product.

 

 

 

Young Lady, do your parents know of your low-class harlotry?

 

 

 

She’s most likely an actor…of some kind…appearing in some thing. I’ll waste neither precious time nor keyboard strokes Googling her.

I will, however, venture to waste keystrokes and do a cringe-worthy thing here: make a plea to y’all to stop buying and consuming the crap Coca-Cola et al are selling.  I’m talking baby steps here (at least, at first). If you are a soda junkie aficionado, please consider, maybe, giving it up when you dine out?  [9]  Water is the beverage our bodies need – order tea and/or coffee,  [10]  if you need to dress it up or just can’t imagine having “just water” with you meal.   [11]

Or, speaking of just, just do the math yourself: look up those reports I cited. After that, ask yourself why would you want to continue rewarding such atrocious behavior?

 

 

Book ’em, Danno: Criminal negligence and complicity in the second degree.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of I Guess Someone Was Running On Autopilot

Dateline: Sunday afternoon, at a grocery store’s express checkout line. It’s a busy day and the line is slow (express line?!  Fail); thus, I have a chance to observe the young checker-man. With every new customer, Young Checker-Man symmetrically and oh-so-briefly raises the corners of his mouth, like some AI approximation of a smile, as he asks them variations on the same questions (what kind of bag do they want, if they didn’t set their own in front of him, and do they play the store’s Monopoly game) before he dismisses them with Have a nice day.  I had only two bottles of sparkling juice, and when it was my turn I quickly and kindly told YC-M that I didn’t need a bag and did not play the store’s monopoly game, thank you. In the three seconds it took me to look down at my purse and extract my wallet I found that YC-M had double-bagged my items and given me three of the store’s Monopoly game tokens.

As the line was long behind me, I decided not to bring YC-M’s ignoring of my instructions to his attention.  Still, I couldn’t resist one more test to his attentiveness. As YC-M cheerlessly instructed me to Have A Nice Day I chirped, “No thanks, I have other plans.”

He didn’t even blink.

 

We give you a bag, whether you want one or not. It’s what we do.

 

 

 

*   *   *

May you always have other plans;
May you develop a (non-life-threatening) allergy – ethical or physical – to soda pop;
May you appreciate a kerfuffle worthy of the Olympic games;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

 

 

 

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

 

[1] Methinks I need to rephrase that.

[2] and PepsiCo and Dr. Pepper/Snapple and….

[3] Often suggested by friends and acquaintances as an alternative to soft drinks.

[4] Astroturfing is “…the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by a grassroots participant(s). It is a practice intended to give the statements or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source’s financial connection.”

[5] And we now know it’s the other way around – you can’t out-exercise a poor diet.

[6] I’m sorry to imply there is any association with any variation of the word wit with the word celebrities.

[7] But really, I shouldn’t have been.

[8] The Los Angeles office of the ad agency Anomaly and Ogilvy & Mather.

[9] Dining out is, according to one doctor I talked to years ago, when most people consume sodas. I’m not sure that this is true anymore (maybe it never was)…but it would be a start, to quit association soda consumption with the “treat” of going out to eat.

[10] Or, of course, a yummy Oregon Pinor Noir.

[11] The beverage and restaurant industries have worked for years to insure we feel somehow inadequate for having “only” water with our meals.