Welcome Back Carter, Now Please Go Away

09/17/09

Jimmy Carter is a fool. That may not be the most civil of descriptions, but it is the most fitting one. Sometimes it’s more important to be factually correct than to be politically so.

Carter’s statement that Rep. Wilson is a “racist” for calling out Barack Obama on a mistruth is as troubling as the needless and petty resolution passed by his party, if not more so. And in making that statement, Jimmy Carter brings hypocrisy to a new art form.

The Democrats’ own Senate president pro-tempore, Carter’s own Senate majority leader, is an unrepentant former member of the Ku Klux Klan who as recently as 2001 used the n-word on national TV in one of the most tasteless and sickening exchanges since, well… since the Carter administration. Yet Democrats and Jimmy Carter have the temerity to call us racist - we Republicans who have stood up against racism since the very founding of our party.

Republicans have always been the civil rights party. This was true in both the 1860s as well as the 1960s. Charlton Heston was a great civil rights leader and Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican. In the meantime, the Democratic Party has gone from being led by the likes of Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan to boasting such luminaries as Diane “Castro” Watson, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Jimmy Carter among its highest ranks and to being organized on the ground level by the likes of Louis Farrakhan.

Carter’s tactic is as dangerous as it is shameful. Those who use the smear of “racism” lightly only increase paranoia and further divide the citizens of this great nation. Using accusations of racism as a political weapon is shameful.

Far worse still is the use of false accusations of racism to stifle political dissent. There can be few things more harmful to the health of a democracy. What’s more, holding someone above reproach because of his or her race is the very definition of racism. Such an attitude also allows for the unchecked growth of federal power.

I asked Bernard Sansaricq, the GOP’s first Caribbean-American congressional candidate, what he thinks about the situation. Sansaricq is the former President of the Haitian Senate and a renown human rights leader. He is running against Alcee Hastings, a Carter appointed judge who was impeached by the entire Congress.

Sansaricq’s answer was unequivocal and shows what a powerful candidate the GOP has in him: “Lack of decorum or not, Representative Joe Wilson shouted the honest truth, a cry from the heart of a great American. You can be sure that before too long, you will see signs popping up all over the country calling for ‘Joe Wilson for President 2012.’ We need straight shooters in Washington, DC and lack of decorum or not, Joe Wilson is a straight shooter and will have my vote for whichever office he chooses to run for, including the presidency.” Amen to that, Senator Sansaricq.

As far as Carter is concerned, some people should just stick to planting peanuts – no insult to the intelligent and hard working peanut farmers of America. We should only ridicule demagogues who plant peanuts.