As 98-year-old Jimmy Carter continues in hospice care, the establishment media wants us to know that while he may have been a failure as president, he is a genuinely nice guy with impeccable far-Left credentials. As is so often the case, however, reality is different from what the media tells us.
Carter is far more to the Left than he is reputed to be, but new revelations show that he is anything but a nice guy. It’s no surprise anymore when a public figure turns out to be quite different from his public image, but in Carter’s case, the difference, and his hypocrisy, embody an important point about the contemporary Left. The gulf between Carter’s image and the reality mirrors the difference between the way the Left sells its agenda and what that agenda really looks like when it’s implemented.
The media is gearing up for an extravaganza of mourning for their most beloved (or second only to Saint Barack) living former president, building him up as a true man of the people, and – in an added bonus for media propagandists — a far-Left one at that.
CBS News says, “For Jimmy Carter, protecting [the] environment has been an ‘exhilarating’ challenge.” Axios chimes in with “How Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden built an enduring friendship,” as if that were a good thing. Vanity Fair gives us the improbable “Jimmy Carter, the Forgotten Movie Mogul?” The New York Times is, of course, greyer and graver, contributing the magisterial “‘Different From the Other Southerners’: Jimmy Carter’s Relationship With Black America.”
Sounding a discordant note amid this lovefest, however, is investigative journalist Ronald Kessler, who has revealed that the real Carter is worlds away from his homespun, man-of-the-people image, and is imperious, arrogant, and aloof. In fact, Kessler notes that Carter’s “icy demeanor would make him the most detested commander-in-chief by Secret Service agents of all US presidents in recent memory.”
Kessler wrote Thursday in the UK’s Daily Mail that while Carter is “being hailed as America’s decent, humble president who cared about the so-called little people during his time in office,” the Secret Service agents who worked for him during his disastrous presidency “saw an entirely different man.” One agent recalled that “Carter was just very short and rude most of the time. With agents, he’d just pretend like you were not around. You’d say hello, and he’d just look at you, like you weren’t there, like you were bothering him.” According to Kessler, the president who was renowned as a humble peanut farmer “actually told Secret Service agents and uniformed officers he did not want them to greet him on his way to the Oval Office.”