Jimmy Carter

Yes, there is a pro wrestling connection. Carter and his mother were big fans of Mr. Wrestling II. He also was invited to the White House, but his mask was an issue as the Secret Service didn’t want a masked man near the president and II, like a lot of wrestlers back then, was living the gimmick.

II also was a registered sex offender. Imagine the controversy today if a president invited a sex offender to the White House.

https://slamwrestling.net/index.php/2020/06/10/mr-wrestling-ii-johnny-walker-dies/amp/

 

I remember when Vladimir Putin tried to assassinate President Carter with a killer attack rabbit.

 

Bill’s a registered sex offender?

 

I didn’t see registered in the second sentence of your post.

 

Carter pissed off Tip O'Neill because because he cut back on the legislative breakfast to save money at the WH.
O'Neill said he wasn't eating doughnuts and fruit, and he wouldn't return until he got fed a full meal.

 

Exactly. As is almost always the case, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

 

Credit someone named James Moore on Facebook, whose post I somehow cannot embed.

 

I mean, if we want to engage in the "appeal to authority" fallacy, here's James Fallows, who was Carter's chief speechwriter for the first couple years of the administration -- and who completely eviscerated the administration in the Atlantic right after leaving his post -- talking about how Carter never changed and was pretty much exactly how he presented himself.

People are complicated. Nobody is perfect. Nobody here is claiming Carter is or was perfect or deserving of sainthood, though I see him as a good man, a somewhat ineffective but somewhat underrated and underappreciated president and someone who has done a lot of good and is worthy of admiration. Besides, everybody knows that he engaged in messaging compromises when he ran for governor -- he did what you had to do to win a statewide election in Georgia in 1970. Yet when he ran for president, he got 83 percent of the Black vote and had the endorsement of every surviving leader from the civil rights movement and from MLK Sr. (and Andrew Young became his ambassador to the UN). I still find your whole take that he was this horrible person in real life who was only doing good works for the cameras -- and aside from Nixon and Trump, perhaps the worst person to hold the office in modern times -- to be somewhat strange and quite cynical. But as someone else here said, you do you.

Edit: I realize I forgot to paste the link (worth a read):

An Unlucky President, and a Lucky Man

 

In his controversial "Malaise/Crisis of Confidence" speech from July 1979, President Carter ripped materialistic Americans who had no faith in God.

"Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose."

Carter was an "eat your vegetables" POTUS. Reagan was a "you can lose weight by eating ice cream" president.

 

I met Jimmy on Election Day in Jamaica in 1998. He brought down Evander Holyfield, Colin Powell, a former president of Costa Rica, and a few others to observe. Jimmy gave me a few minutes just before canvassing began at 6 o'clock.