JIMMY CARTER, RIP

I have to say that on Election Night, November 1980, I was so damn mad at Jimmy Carter that, if someone had shot him that night, I would have said “The sonofabitch deserved it.”

Jimmy Carter, the most painfully honest man to ever sit in the White House, at least in my knowledge of the presidency, announced at 8:10pm EST - 5:10pm PST - that he was conceding the election to Ronald Reagan. There were nearly three hours before the polls closed in California, and the damned idiot had conceded! People turned around and left polling stations; what’s the use, he already lost. And three good Democrats in tight House races in California lost their elections that night, after leading in the polls through the whole campaign; they were replaced by Reaganauts who fucked things up royally for the 18 years it took to rebuild the Democratic vote in the state and get rid of the last of them.

That wasn’t the only reason I thought Jimmy Carter was a sonofabitch in 1980. Back the year before, when it became clear that my least-favorite California governor ever - Jerry Idiot Brown - intended to challenge Carter in the 1980 primary, people from big name accounting and management companies back east started arriving in California to “review” the state’s administration of various federal programs. And lo and behold, their “reviews” revealed that California state agencies were not administering the programs correctly, and f ingers got pointed at Jer’. Except that the “reviews” were complete and total bullshit. And over the next year, many California state employees and some legislative assistants - including me - had to go around the state to the community groups that ran the programs the state administered and gather the actual information, which demonstrated the bullshit nature of the “reviews” by companies like Arthur Anderson (I remember theirs in particular since they were so incompetent) and others. Which was done, and the Carter Administration had to back down on all the claims California was fucked up, and admit that they had sicced those companies - in multi-million dollar contracts - on the state government to score points against that damned asswipe Jerry Fucking Brown (the man whose stupidity and lack of focus resulted in California being saddled with Proposition 13, which has fucked the state in the ass every year since it was passed in1976, when he could have stopped the whole thing the year before, if he’d had the brains to listen to Willie Brown). I told people that we’d managed to prove those Georgia Peaches in D.C. couldn’t find their ass with both hands on a clear day - I was no fan of Carter’s staffers. Between Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter I couldn’t decide which Democrat was dumber - the one in the Governor’s Office in California or the one in the White House.

So I was not a fan of Jimmy Carter in 1980 and I rued the day I had voted for him in 1976. I didn’t vote for Reagan that year - having met that dumbass in person and discovered that James Garner’s two word description of that phony-ass bastard - “Amiable Dunce” - was dead-on accurate. But I also didn’t vote for Carter.

That was then, and 44 years later, I still hold those opinions of the man’s time in office, but I also am sad to see him gone, because while he was not a very effective President in office, Jimmy Carter is the Best Ex-President we ever had. The man not only talked the talk, he walked the walk, and he was tireless in working to make the world a better place, in small ways and large, and always coming from a place of personal humility. He’s an exemplary human being and I don’t think any American President was ever more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize - and all the other honors he received for all that tireless work in the service of the people of this planet.

Carter looks better and better when you consider what came after: Reagan, who committed treason with the Iranian mullahs to get into office in 1980 and then to finance the Contras in 1982-84; George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s co-conspirator; “cracking trader” Bill Clinton, about whom the less said the better; Junior Bush, about whom the much less said the even better; Obama, who proved you don’t really want to elect a President who had as little experience as he had when he ran for the office; lifelong buttwipe El Jefe Del Motel-A-Lardo; and Joe Biden, who accomplished more than all of them combined, and then couldn’t see that not running for re-election was the way to give the Democrats the opportunity to re-defeat The Asswipe.

Jimmy Carter, the last mostly-completely-honest politician to occupy the White House. In retrospect, he looks more and more like our Marcus Aurelius.

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