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Originally posted by cstreit
I dunno... Perhaps he didn't do too much, but the real measure of a President in my mind is what he does AFTER his presidency. Unlike most ex- Pres who went off and built themselves statues and libraries, Carter used his position to help the less fortunate...

It's precisely what Carter's been involved with since leaving the white house (with the exception of habitat for humanity) that is especially sickening. For example:

As Joshua Muravchik wrote in the New Republic in 1994 - when Carter was bollixing up then-President Clinton's efforts to stop nuclear proliferation in North Korea - "Jimmy Carter, for all his heroic advocacy of human rights, has a long history of melting in the presence of tyrants." At the time, Carter said of Kim Il Sung, a brutal Stalinist dictator, "I found him to be vigorous, intelligent, surprisingly well-informed about the technical issues and in charge of the decisions about this country." As for the North Koreans, Muravchik wrote, Carter said the "people were very friendly and open." The capital, Pyongyang, is a "bustling city," where customers "pack the department stores," which looked like "Wal-Mart in Americus, Georgia." North Korea, it should be noted, has suffered from such government-imposed mass-starvation that millions have been forced to live off grass. While the first President Bush was trying to orchestrate an international coalition to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, Carter wrote a letter to the U.N. Security Council asking its members to stymie Bush's efforts. As the "human rights president," Carter noted that Yugoslavia's Marshall Tito was also "a man who believes in human rights." Carter saluted the dictator as "a great and courageous leader" who "has led his people and protected their freedom almost for the last 40 years." He publicly told Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, "Our goals are the same. ... We believe in enhancing human rights. We believe that we should enhance, as independent nations, the freedom of our own people." He told the Stalinist first secretary of Communist Poland, Edward Gierek, "Our concept of human rights is preserved in Poland." Since Carter has left office, he's been even more of a voluptuary of despots and dictators. He told Haitian dictator Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras he was "ashamed of what my country has done to your country." He's praised the mass-murdering leaders of Syria and Ethiopia. He endorsed Yasser Arafat's sham election and grumbled about the legitimate vote that ousted Sandanista Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. And, I learned from a devastating critique by my National Review colleague Jay Nordlinger, Carter even volunteered to be Arafat's speechwriter and go-fer, crafting palatable messages for Arafat's Western audiences and convincing the Saudis to continue funding Arafat after the Palestinians sided with Iraq against the United States. So, yes, it's unfair to say that Jimmy Carter was history's greatest monster. But it's a safe bet that if Carter could shake the hand of history's greatest monster, he'd leap at the opportunity.

Read the whole thing in:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/jonahgoldberg/2002/05/15/163222.html