3 posts tagged “jimmy carter”

 

 

Have the “people” elevated President Barack Obama to the status of a “Living God” ?

 

Former Presidents do not have the courage to stand by our Constitution and criticize President Obama.

“Lyndon Johnson is directly responsible for the deaths of 58,000 Americans, but Nixon is vilified for covering up a break-in. Carter nearly bankrupted the country and his incompetence in the hostage crisis was stunning, yet Reagan brought down the Soviet Union, but he is ridiculed for being out of touch. Clinton brought sleaze and criminality to the Oval Office and stood idly bye while terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, the USS Cole, Kobart Towers in Saudi Arabia, our embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Kenya which paved the way to 9/11, but Bush is hated for declaring war on terrorism because he didn’t fight it the way the liberals wanted.”

--Ted West TedWest The Naked Conservative

I guess the cat’s out of the bag and hanging on your face if you're one of the many people living and dead who insisted in 1979 that only Robert Mugabe could possibly rule Zimbabwe. I mean, what normal, Times-reading person wasn’t just aghast at the way Ian Smith, the wicked white leader of Rhodesia, had engineered an end to the conflict that had decimated his country, the one we now call Zimbabwe.

Here, for the benefit of those too young to remember — or so old they forget — is how Mugabe was invented by clever officeworkers on West 43^rd Street in New York City:  After a long and ugly guerrilla war fought to preserve white rule, and desperate to end the sanctions that had devastated his country's economy, Smith convinced the white population that Britain would live up to its pledge, made in 1971, to end its financial strangulation of Rhodesia in return for an end to white rule. So, after lots of shooting — and the en-route destruction of a couple of commercial airliners — Smith called an election, which was held in January 1979. Mugabe, leader of a particularly violent faction of the Marxist-Maoists, refused to renounce violence and so he didn’t participate.

Nearly two-thirds of Zimbabweans — including many former terrorist leaders — did, however, and when a moderate named Abel Muzorewa won handily on a pledge to make an orderly transition to majority rule, then-U.N. ambassador Andrew Young and his boss, Jimmy Carter — supported avidly by The New York Times, along with every other left-leaning paper on the planet — flipped. Furious at the prospect of a less-than-immediate transition, they insisted that the election results not be recognized. Democrats and their allies in the press mounted a stiff effort to keep sanctions in place until Muzorewa's government collapsed, and a new, improved election could be held, one that guaranteed Mugabe victory. That solution, the Times calmly editorialized in June 1979, “preserves a hope for ending the civil war and keeping the Russians out.” Well, yes. Mugabe, of course, was more a client of China’s.

The manner in which power has been given to a generation of African tyrants is the subject of a wobbly New Statesman item this week. Generally, when the colonial power wanted out, they gave the keys to whoever had the most guns pointed at the most people, made up an excuse, and ducked out the back before the firing started. Think of it as a job search for heavily armed applicants, and you'll get the idea. Or just watch your TV:  You’ll see a remake in Iraq, if the Times has its way.

The “liberation” of Zimbabwe, following more than a decade of bad examples elsewhere in Africa, was certainly no different. The Times, like anyone else paying attention, knew perfectly well that Mugabe was a killer when they insisted power be taken from Muzorewa and given to him, ostensibly to gain “peace” — which certainly wasn’t what Mugabe’s opponents got. (Today, according to Michael Wines in the IHT, Muzorewa's government never existed at all.) On assuming power, Mugabe continued a bloodbath he had been waging against his rivals for years, including one genocidal rampage (a report from NewZimbabwe.com is here) that so far has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of civilians in Ndebele tribal areas, the source of much opposition to Mugabe’s rival Shona-led government.