Ex-prez Carter works against US interests
And doing his level best to undermine the President at every turn. Via the NYSun:
President Carter personally called Secretary of State Rice to try to convince her to reverse her U.N. ambassador’s position on changes to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the former president recalled yesterday in a talk in which he also criticized President Bush’s Christian bona fides and misstated past American policies on Israel.
Mr. Carter said he made a personal promise to ambassadors from Egypt, Pakistan, and Cuba on the U.N. change issue that was undermined by America’s ambassador, John Bolton. “My hope is that when the vote is taken,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations, “the other members will outvote the United States.”
While other former presidents have tried to refrain from attacking the sitting chief executive, Mr. Carter’s attacks on President Bush have increased. The episode he recounted yesterday showed how he tried to undermine officials at lower levels in an effort to influence policy.
The story, as Mr. Carter recalled, began with a recent dinner for 17 he attended in New York, where the guests included the president of the U.N. General Assembly, Jan Eliasson; an unidentified American representative, and other U.N. ambassadors from “powerful” countries at Turtle Bay, of which he mentioned only three: Cuba, Egypt, and Pakistan. The topic was the ongoing negotiations on an attempt to replace the widely discredited Geneva-based Human Rights Commission with a more accountable Human Rights Council.
“One of the things I assured them of was that the United States was not going to dominate all the other nations of the world in the Human Rights Council,” Mr. Carter said. However, on the next day, Mr. Carter said, Mr. Bolton publicly “demanded” that the five permanent members of the Security Council will have permanent seats on the new council as well, “which subverted exactly what I have promised them,” Mr. Carter said.
Jimmy Carter: showing us once again one of many reasons why he was a one term president.
For those of you who are skeptics on NY Sun reporting, here’s the actual transcript of Carter’s remarks. Decision ’08 has posted the relevant portions of the speech.
Just when you think Carter couldn’t get any worse.
Betsy Newmark writes:
Carter has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity as those who oppose Bush, like the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, can have Carter come speak knowing that he can be counted on to bash Bush’s foreign policy.
How about having a forum assessing Carter’s foreign policy from his time as president? I’m sure that there are many lessons we can learn from studying his actions upon the world stage from both his presidency and post-presidency period. And his cultivation of dictators from Yasser Arafat to Kim Jung Il.
Indeed.
Read more via James Joyner, The Political Pit Bull, Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, McQ at QandO, GOP and the City
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