Article: Bush Censure Efforts – The Looney Right strikes Back with… a campaign to Censure Carter!?!?

You have to hand it to the Freepers! They are anything but boring. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there, particularly in the sanity department. On the one hand, we have the desire by people on the left to take the sitting US President to task for multiple potentially unlawful actions of his administration, to include what even staunch Republicans acknowledge may be unlawful warrant-less wiretapping of potential suspects. On the other, we have someone who has been and continues to be utilized as a diplomatic tool by Presidents on both sides of the aisle for the past 25 years who has committed no crime. So, what have the Freepers and other nutcases on the Right come up with as justification to censure Carter?

The campaign to censure him contends that Carter has met with some unsavory characters in his multitude of diplomatic efforts and thus has brought discredit upon the United States and undermined US Diplomatic policy and efforts. In particular, the website that is the center of this effort has huge pictures and makes a bid deal of Carter's meetings with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, the late Yassir Arafat and leaders of Hamas. As always, these Republican protagonists have not thought things through. In the first week of January, 2002, Republican Senators Lincoln Chafee, and Arlen Spector met with Castro in Cuba as part of a bi partisan congressional visit (see http://www.cnsnews.com/foreignbureaus/archive/200201/for20020110g.html ). On January 10, 2005 another bipartisan congressional group visited Hugo Chavez, see http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1464 . On April 5, 2002 George W. Bush sent US special envoy Zinni to meet with Arafat, http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/dailynews/thenote_april5.html . Thus far, to my knowledge, no Republican or administration officials have met with Hamas, but they have promised to do so if Hamas recognizes the right of Israel to exist, but the point is made. If we include the pictures of Donald Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam Hussein in the 1980's, the hypocrisy of this effort to censure Carter becomes laughable.

Those wanting to dishonor Carter would do well to remember that he is a former officer in the US Navy and a graduate of Annapolis. The Synagogue Council of America awarded Carter with the International Human Rights award in 1979 and of course, he won the Nobel Peace prize in 2002 just to mention a few of a long list of accolades from various countries and organizations on a variety of subjects. Carter is in no way a traitor, would never work in cross-purposes to the United States and has the respect of people and governments in all countries around the world. This baseless effort to censure him is a blatant knee-jerk reaction to the efforts to censure President Bush and should be condemned by all thinking people everywhere.