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 Jimmy
Carter's Values
A
national embarrassment...
[Roger
Aronoff] 2/27/06
While some
commentators took former President Jimmy Carter to task for
his misleading and political comments at the Coretta Scott
King funeral about wiretapping, his ridiculous claims about
the victims of Hurricane Katrina went largely unchallenged.
First, there
was the wiretapping controversy. During his tribute to Coretta
Scott King, at her funeral service on February 7, Carter said, "The
evidence of Martin and Coretta have changed America. They were
not appreciated even at the highest level of government. It
was difficult for them personally with the civil liberties
of both husband and wife violated as they became the targets
of secret government wiretappings, other surveillance, and
as you know, harassment from the FBI."
Clearly,
Carter was trying to slam Bush for his NSA surveillance program,
which has been prominently in the news, by suggesting without
saying so directly that it is somehow comparable to wiretapping
King. What he didn't mention—but clearly knows—is that the
people behind the wiretapping of King were President John F.
Kennedy, his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, President
Lyndon Johnson and his aide Bill Moyers, all icons of the Democratic
Party, plus FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The report,
one of the Senate's Church Committee reports from the 1970's,
still makes interesting reading to see how the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations viewed Dr. King and why they had him
under surveillance.
In regard
to the NSA program, virtually all leading Democratic Senators
say that they support the eavesdropping on the al-Qaeda calls,
but just differ with President Bush on the legal steps he must
take before engaging in such practice. Many Bush opponents
have said that he broke the law, suggesting the remedy is impeachment.
In fairness, they should be asked by the media for their views
on the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations having wiretapped
the Kings.
Jimmy Carter
also got a free media pass on Katrina, the consequences of
which have been mostly blamed by the national media on the
Bush Administration, not local and state authorities. Carter
said that the contributions of Martin Luther King and Coretta
Scott King remind us "that the struggle for equal rights is
not over. We only have to recall the color of the faces of
those in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Those who were
most devastated by Katrina know that there are not yet equal
opportunities for all Americans."
With this
statement, Carter was suggesting that people were destroyed
or left behind by the hurricane because the federal government
was racist. Those comments were directed at President Bush,
sitting just behind Carter as he spoke.
While clearly
there is blame to go around, as the recent Congressional report
and hearings revealed, what Carter said was false. According
to a Knight
Ridder story from December 30, which analyzed the data, "the
victims weren't disproportionately poor..." and "also weren't
disproportionately African-American." They determined that
the only group disproportionately affected was "older adults." The
Knight Ridder database found that 74% of the dead were 60 or
older, while nearly half were over 75, many of those who resided
at nursing homes.
Regarding
race, the study found that in Orleans Parish, 62% of known
Katrina victims were African-American, compared with 66% of
the total population. And in St. Bernard Parish, 92% of the
victims were white, compared to 88% of the total population
identified as white.
Jimmy Carter,
who has written a book about our "endangered values" and America's "moral
crisis," is a national embarrassment. When he opens his mouth,
it's the truth that is endangered. His phony moral posturing
should be exposed, not praised, by our media. -one-
copyright
2006 Accuracy in Media
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