The Media Research Center’s longstanding grudge against Jimmy Carter for, well, existing exploded upon his death, driven by anger that people committed the offense of saying nice things about him. The hatefest continued in a Jan. 7 post by Alex Christy:
President emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass had an interesting take on Tuesday’s installment of Morning Joe on MSNBC. Ahead of former President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral, he claimed that Carter was actually the “forerunner” to Ronald Reagan.
Haass declared that “I actually think Jimmy Carter was a really interesting foreign policy person, who at one and the same time was both an idealist and a realist. In some ways, if you think about him, he was the forerunner of Ronald Reagan. He put human rights front and center on the foreign policy agenda, but he was still willing to deal with regimes like China and the Soviet Union, which to me, you know, was impressive, and he—by the end, he was increasing American defense spending significantly.”
The defense spending increases came after the failures of the first half of his term. Part of Carter’s human rights crusade included pulling the rug out from under the Shah of Iran, the consequences of which American presidents are still having to deal with. Reagan’s focus helped bring down the Soviet Union and its grip on Eastern Europe.
Christy didn’t mention that the main reason defense spending had dropped in the mid-1970s is because the Vietnam War had ended.
On the day of Carter’s funeral, Jan. 9, Curtis Houck whined that Donald Trup was being compared unfavorably to him:
While the liberal broadcast and cable networks largely behaved themselves Thursday in their coverage of the official state funeral for late former President Jimmy Carter, there were a few wacky exceptions with CNN using the fact that Carter’s FBI director is still alive to bash President-Elect Trump demanding change at the agency.
CBS also had a few moments in political toolery with one moment insisting Carter was anything but “a weak President” and then another invoking the apocalyptic Los Angeles-area wildfires as proof Carter has been validated in his environmental views.
[…]If it wasn’t already clear, Gangel would make the link to Trump: “Very different from today, where Christopher Wray is going to be resigning so that Donald Trump can appoint his own FBI director.”
The ridiculously partisan Abby Phillip — host of CNN NewsNight (aka CNN Thunderdome) — was all too eager to continue that saying that “[h]earing Jamie talk about his respect for the independence of the FBI, seeing Hunter Biden on the screen and some of those folks that we’ve just been discussing” struck a chord with her.
She added that Carter made “the independence of the FBI…a relatively new phenomenon,’ but still “so important for him to take those ideas and to hold fast to them so that they could become a part of the American system for decades after that.”
Unfortunately, Phillip argued, “we’re in another area” in which “all of [Carter’s values are] being revisited.”
Houck didn’t respond to Trump’s planned usurping of the FBI into an enforcement arm for Trump’s agenda. Instead, he whined that the right-wing narrative of Carter was being challenged:
Stahl argued the country has, decades later, “we’re really opening our eyes to what he accomplished and to what kind of a person, a man he was” and “accomplish[ed] so much more than we realized when he was president.”
“He turns out not to have been a weak president at all. He accomplished much more than we realized and you’ve talked about some of it. Some of it was that he brought human rights into the forefront of our foreign policy. He accomplished many acts that got passed on energy. He did the Camp David Accords and he stood for bipartisanship…[W]e need to remember the spirit that he brought to the presidency,” she said.
Tim Graham joined the whinefest in his Jan. 10 column:
In all of the somber coverage of Jimmy Carter’s death, the audience could and should expect the tone of kindness that wafts over wakes and funerals. Each president served as leader of our nation, shouldering a great burden over a large country with an ever-enlarging government.
But sometimes the tributes grow a little too treacly. CBS reporter Lesley Stahl mourned during the state funeral in Washington that Carter was already unpopular when she became a White House correspondent in 1979. But she claimed Carter “ended up accomplishing so much more than we realized when he was president. He turns out not to have been a weak president at all.”
America in 1980 was mired in inflation and a hostage crisis and the Soviet Union expanded into Afghanistan. But now we should pretend Carter didn’t project weakness?
This is quite different from CBS when Ronald Reagan died in 2004. Within minutes of the news of Reagan’s death hitting the television, CBS ran a canned piece by reporter Jerry Bowen that hammered Reagan for getting a cozy home loan and “cashing in” with personal appearances after his presidency was over. It was a very cheap shot. It looks even cheaper with the post-presidential cash-ins by the Clintons and the Obamas.
[…]To these journalists who tout Carter as keen and deep and prodigious, whenever Carter is maligned in retrospect, he is misunderstood.
For political purposes, these historical images are mostly useful in terms of the political parties shaping their own image. Carter has long been a drag on the Democrat image, so trying to “correct” it is unsurprising.
Mark Finkelstein raged against another commentator giving credit to Carter where it was due in a Jan. 10 post:
All that was missing was Joe Scarborough looking into the camera and saying—à la his recent claim that the current Biden was the best Biden ever and f-you if you didn’t believe it—that Jimmy Carter was the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln.
Today’s episode Morning Joe engaged in some world-class revisionism in praise of Carter. Incredibly, citing supposed Soviet views at the time, Scarborough credited Carter [and Mika’s dad Zbigniew Brzezinski] more than Reagan, for the fall of the Soviet Union.
While claiming Scarborough was engaging in “revisionism,” Finkelstein didn’t actually explain where Scarborough was wrong.