JIMMY CARTER: A Highly Moral Man Can Still Make An Awful President

December 29, 2024 9:28 pm

This may sound odd, but every time I think of Jimmy Carter I think of the scene in National Lampoon’s Vacation where the well-meaning but gullible Clark Griswold gets his family lost in St. Louis.

So lost that they end up in a dangerous part of town. Clark’s wife realizes they are in peril and urges him to hightail it the hell out of there. But Clark tells his wife “Look at it this way, honey, this is a part of America we never get to see. We can’t close our eyes to the plight of the cities.”

For the record, this movie came out in 1983, roughly 25 years before most of us had GPS devices to tell us how to get from Point A to Point B.

Clark stops to ask a group of shady-looking people how to get back on the interstate. He gives in to their demand to fork over $5 for directions. And as they help him, other men out of his line of sight steal his hubcaps and spray-paint his car, completely unbeknownst to him. Clark Griswold, like many liberals, was too willing to trust anybody and everybody and didn’t have a clue about the dangers of the world or the many shortcomings of human nature.

Clark Griswold, to me, was a metaphor for Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter got us lost in a bad part of town…and bad things followed.

Carter passed away this weekend at the age of 100. Carter was an incredibly decent man, but he was too nice. And gullible. So much so that a lot of unsavory people out there would have (and probably did) see him as an easy mark and took advantage of his good nature.

Iran took advantage of his good nature when they held American hostages (whom they only released moments after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office…because, unlike Carter, they actually feared Reagan). Carter gave away the Panama Canal (which President-elect Donald Trump wants to take back because it put the U.S. at a disadvantage). Carter lectured Americans — during a time of peace, not war — that they consumed too much energy and told us to cut back.

As an ex-president, Carter insinuated that Trump and his supporters were racist.

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Carter was a bad president. You can live your life as a good person but still make for a bad president (and vice versa).

Speaking of Carter’s morality, the Left really needs to stop juxtaposing Trump’s moral failings against the fact that so many evangelicals support and voted for Trump three elections straight. Carter was probably the most moral person who ever lived in the White House. He taught Sunday School. He was nice to everybody. He never cheated on his wife. But, again…he was a bad president and, later in life, he endorsed and enabled other Democrats who forced down policies that were counterproductive for Christians and honest, hard-working Americans.

Sometimes America needs Rambo to fix its problems….and not Mr. Rogers (or, for that matter, Clark Griswold).

Special thanks to Warhammer’s Wife proofreading this story before publication to make certain there were no misspellings, grammatical errors or other embarrassing mistakes and/or typos. Follow Warhammer on Twitter @Real_Warhammer