Jimmah Wants To “Hep”

Former President Jimmy “The Peanut Farmer” Carter has offered his services to the Trump Administration ahead of a meeting with North Korea to discuss denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

The 93-year-old bonehead sweetened the pot by citing his “20 hours of experience” working with previous senior officials in the hermit nation.

After Carter returned from talks with the North Koreans in June 1994, the New York Times reported, “Mr. Carter, who returned from his trip late Saturday, unabashedly provided an encouraging and unqualified account of his accomplishments. ‘I personally believe that the crisis is over,’ he said.”

In the summer of 1994, North Korea began the process of removing their spent fuel rods from the reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear facility. The idea was to provide them with enough plutonium to build a nuclear weapon. As a result, the global community demanded inspections, but North Korea wasn’t having any of that. 

Hans Blix, UN weapons inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who was a cross between Mr. Magoo and Inspector Clouseau, gave up any notion of carrying out inspections and the Clinton Administration was forced to push sanctions through the UN. North Korea viewed any sanctions as an act of war. It got so bad that then-Defense Secretary William Perry actually thought war was on the horizon.

Then in stepped the resplendent Jimmy Carter. Carter had acted as a mediator before with Pyongyang, but never at the invitation of the State Department. But the crisis of 1994 changed that calculus. 

Carter entered North Korea and met personally with Kim Il Sung. Going far beyond his instructions, he described the American effort to impose sanctions as a serious mistake and reached out to Kim with specific proposals designed to end the standoff. 

Carter’s intervention averted a possible war, one that would likely have had tremendous consequences, and it became the basis for what would become the 1994 Agreed Framework. 

Yet, those who now celebrate his post-presidential legacy of peacemaking need to consider the long-term consequences of his actions in North Korea. The immediate ramifications of the Yongbyon strike or even a tight sanctions policy in 1994 would likely have been severe. The costs of inaction that summer, however, proved to be far more severe over the coming decades.

The Kim family remained in power in the North, perpetuating one of the most brutal totalitarian regimes in modern history. The country continued its nuclear efforts in defiance of the 1994 agreement and is now believed to have 15-20 nuclear weapons and significantly improved delivery systems, along with a massive collection of chemical and biological weapons. It continues to harass the South and threaten the stability of East Asia and is an active player in the international black market for nuclear technology, narcotics and counterfeit American bills, among other things. 

Carter’s belief in the moral superiority of choosing diplomacy rather than force is a mistake that, two decades later, the world is still paying for.

Carter was a bumbling fool.  The worst president this country ever had until the ascendency of The World’s Most Dangerous Community Organizer.

Who can forget the gas crisis of 1979 when lines formed from Maine to Hayne just to buy gas for the car? Or Jimmah’s conservation program to discourage oil consumption and his comical suggestion Americans should wear sweaters to offset turning down the thermostat in the winter?

Who can forget him ceding control of the American-built Panama Canal?  Or the 444-day-long Iranian hostage crisis? Or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?  What about my very favorite─the killer rabbit incident?

On Monday the New York Times reported a video “appearing to show the arrival in Beijing of an old-style green train of the kind used by North Korea’s leaders fueled intense speculation on Monday that a high-level North Korean delegation, perhaps even one led by Kim Jong Un, was meeting Chinese leaders ahead of Mr. Kim’s planned meeting with President Trump and South Korea’s president.”

On Monday as well, good ole Jimmah demonstrated his madcap naiveté on CBS This Morning saying, “I think John Bolton is a disaster for our country.  Maybe one of the worst mistakes that President Trump has made since he’s been in office.  He has been advocating a war with North Korea for a long time and even an attack on Iran.”

I think “Mr. Gutless Wonder” would do well to sit this one out.

Jimmy Carter's Cardigan

Remember the seventies? Remember the energy crisis of the seventies, with its long gas lines and high prices? 

Remember the picture of Carter, sitting in the Oval Office in a cardigan sweater, telling us to turn down our thermostats to conserve energy?

Carter claimed to the press that he was saving energy by having solar panels installed on the roof of the White House to heat hot water. "It would not generate enough hot water to run the dishwasher in the staff mess," a White House staffperson says. "It was a fiasco. The staff mess had to go out and buy new equipment to keep the water hot enough. That blew any savings." Carter did not manage to broker an adequate energy policy. He tried to promote conservation by example, turning down the thermostats at the White House and in other government buildings, wearing cardigan sweaters, and installing solar panels and a woodstove at the White House. He also deregulated energy prices, launched a program to develop synthetic fuels, and successfully legislated fuel-efficiency standards. But in an era of soaring oil prices and long lines at the gas pumps, it did not add up to a policy.

I thought about our friend Jimmah today, when I heard yet another variation of "I'll start getting serious about global warming, just as soon as its proponents do". You have to hand it to Carter, that at least he made a show of turning down the thermostat* and wearing the Charlie Brown sweater, and installing the not-ready-for-primetime solar panels** on the White House roof.

In an age when public shame is practically unheard of, except for when you violate political correctness, there seem to be no excesses to which the global warmists will go, oblivious to the enormity of their own carbon footprints. Al Gore flies all over the world in a private jet, infamously having his limo drivers keeping the motors running in his limos while he delivers his phoney baloney message on global warming, so that he doesn't experience even any momentary discomfort between his plane and the air conditioned lecture halls.

Remember that Live Earth concert recently? They had to fly bands, and even the audience to Antarctica, just so that they could say they covered all seven continents. How large a carbon footprint did that require? For a mere symbolic gesture. I'm sure the penguins appreciated it! If the threat of catastrophe caused by man made global warming were real, don't you think that even one of these Apostles of Apocalypse might alter his life style accordingly?

Obama takes a gas guzzling, carbon spewing 747 from Andrews AFB to the swampland of Florida, so that he can address literally dozens of people on the perils of global warming. Haven't these people ever heard of Skype? Conference calls?? Go to meeting???

All of the scare mongering of the seventies and eighties that foretold the oceans dying, oceans rising, millions starving, ice caps melting, and after all the increases in manufacturing and farming and population increase over the last half century, the temperature needle barely wavered. Ted Danson was very specific. He said we only had ten years to save the oceans...about forty years ago now. How'd that work out for us, Ted? And the scientists whose funding is directed to locate global warming, find it only with the help of forged and faked data.

The extent that global warming did not occur forced its ardent disciples to try to change the name of the movement. Same doom and gloom, but now any "change" in the climate indicates the need for a Marxist curtailment of all capitalistic human activity. Record heat? Global warming, er, "climate change"! Record cold? Record snowfall? "Climate change"!

I guess the closest nod to some sort of show of modest travel by this president, is when he loads his Canadian built, campaign bus on a plane, along with his staff, Secret service and multiple car entourage and flies them to some location to where he can roll out the bus and show the peasants his humble roots. Because nothing says 'I'm saving energy' like flying your bus to meet you at a campaign stop.

Since Obama is taking the mantle of "Worst President Ever" from Jimmy Carter, couldn't he get the cardigan to go with it?

*As opposed to Barack Obama, who reportedly kicks up the thermostat somewhere between "toasty" and "parboiled"!

**As I have said elsewhere., I'm not opposed to solar energy where it is feasible.  My own solar panels generate more energy than I use, nearly every single day.

Bush Presidential Library Dedication

A note from our attorneys: This is not a real quote.

UNIVERSITY PARK—The journey starts simply enough.

"The presidency is more than an honor. It is more than an office. It is a charge to keep and I will give it my all."

Those words written on an entryway wall—first spoken by George W. Bush on Dec. 13, 2000 in Austin—greet visitors as they walk into the museum at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

A brief history of Bush, and his family life, is on display before the key moments of the Bush presidency are detailed in photos, news articles and video clips throughout the 14,000-square-feet of exhibit space in the center that will officially be unveiled during an invitation-only ceremony today.

Bush will be joined by President Barack Obama and the three other living ex-presidents—George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter—during an exclusive, 1 1/2 hour dedication ceremony marking the completion of the library, museum and political institute commemorating the 43rd president's eight years in the White House.

Via Star-Telegram

Empty Chair Day: The Good Old Days

Barry’s Killer Bunny Wunny

The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass asks, “Is President Barack Obama on the verge of being attacked by a bunny wabbit?”

He thinks so and provides his reasoning:

“All the signs suggest that Obama is in immediate danger of a rabbit attack. It would ruin what's left of his presidency. And it would horrify Democrats by ushering in, say, a President Bachmann.”

“It might happen while he's on that ridiculous vacation of his. Obama is chilling at some exclusive multimillion-dollar estate on Martha's Vineyard, even as thousands more Americans hit the unemployment lines, and as Republicans like Michele Bachmann make wild-eyed, crazed claims about bringing back $2 per gallon gas.”

"’I think it's a little too early yet for the president to be attacked by a rabbit,’ cautioned a veteran Chicago Democrat wise in the ways of Obama. ‘But it's close. Real close.’”

“Anyone who thinks Obama is safe from a rabbit attack has forgotten what happened to President Jimmy Carter In 1979. Carter was attacked by a swimming rabbit, and the subsequent ‘Killer Rabbit’ stories helped destroy his presidency. It led to the election of Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide and an unprecedented economic revival.”

“There are eerie similarities. Like Obama, Carter was at that point where he was constantly viewed as weak and ineffectual. His fellow Democrats had lost patience with him. Liberal writers who once fawned on him had turned against him.”

Folk singer Tom Paxton even wrote a tune about it, called "I Don't Want a Bunny Wunny."

Via Memeorandum and The Lonely Conservative.
Linked by The Other McCain.  Thanks Smitty.
Thanks to Vicki McClure Davidson of The Frugal Café for linking to this post.
Linked by The TrogloPundit.  Thanks Lance.