Do you know how an obituary is supposed to work in America?
When a public figure dies, you're supposed to write nice things about him or her. If the person in question is popular, but had some criminal activities on the side, you wait a few days to remind the populace that the person in question wasn't perfect.
Unless the public figure in question IS a public figure for being a criminal, in polite society you stay silent on negative press as the first wave of grief passes.
As tributes pour in across the nation for the 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter has been remembered as a good and decent man. Was he the best president? No, but in his 100 years of life, he lived an honorable and purpose driven life.
And I didn't realize it, but Jimmy Carter... you know what? Let's quote the Associated Press here: "Jimmy Carter spent nearly four decades waging war to eliminate an ancient parasite plaguing the world’s poorest people. Rarely fatal, but searingly painful and debilitating, Guinea worm disease infects people who drink water tainted with larvae that grow inside the body into worms as much as 3-feet-long. The noodle-thin parasites then burrow their way out, breaking through the skin in burning blisters.
Carter made eradicating Guinea worm a top mission of The Carter Center, the nonprofit he and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, founded after leaving the White House. The former president rallied public health experts, billionaire donors, African heads of state and thousands of volunteer villagers to work toward eliminating a human disease for only the second time in history."
Wow! That's actually really awesome. If that was the ONLY thing Carter did in his life, his death would have made headlines across the world.
And in this scandal driven political environment of today, arguably, Jimmy Carter's biggest scandal as president was that his brother drank a lot of beer at the White House
So what did Jimmy Carter do, that Nancy Armour, who is a sportswriter by the way, took a hard run at him for? She said that Carter's decision not to send American Athletes to the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow "punished hundreds of athletes, robbing them of the moment and opportunity for which they had trained and sacrificed."
Okay.
Is she not aware of the Guinea Worm?
For those not familiar, way back in 1980, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the world was worried, but not so worried that anyone considered boycotting the 1980 Olympics. Then Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov implored World Leaders to boycott his home country, and Jimmy Carter and about 60 other Western Leaders listened to his plea.
Carter tried alternate ideas, like moving the games to Greece, but to no avail.
Now I'm not saying that Carter's decision was right or wrong. What I'm saying is, if the worst thing Jimmy Carter did in his whole life was prevent a few hundred athletes from participating in One Sporting Event, in the grand scheme of life, that's not really that bad.
Hundreds of elite Track and Field Athletes couldn't go to the Olympics, but were 'forced' to go Liberty Bell Classic instead? Uh....
Jimmy Carter lived a hundred years and Nancy Armour wants to hold his feet to the fire about that? On the day he died? And, again, she didn't include that fact as a small paragraph in a Jimmy Carter Tribute. She dropped the article, that I would classify as a revisionist hit-piece, like a vulture, not including anything else good, or bad, Carter had done in his life.
That just shows that Nancy Armour is a callous, agenda-driven bitch.
Comments