Reply #47: You see what Carter did at Camp David, plus a few other ideas of his

[Wetzelbill]

And you can understand that he was far, far ahead of the curve on this stuff than everyone else. Jimmy Carter was a president in a tough time, he had his flaws but now it's more than obvious that he did a solid job. How do you think Bush would have handle the Iran hostage situation? Do you think Bush or McCain would have gotten them back safely, or even kept working on the problem after losing an election? I doubt it. We know how Reagan dealt with a similar issue, he was oblivious and allowed Ollie North to sell arms to terrorists in a crackpot deal that was a national embarrassment.

People now are still trying to work on problems that he had ideas to solve decades ago. We're in worse positions now in the Middle East and with energy policy than we were when Carter realized we needed to heavily invest in solutions to these problems. If we had 28 years of intense fair diplomacy in the Arabic-Isreali conflict, and 28 years of viable policy focus on energy issues like Jimmy Carter was pursuing, we wouldn't have almost all of the problems we are facing today. With regards to those issues, I mean. Jimmy was, and remains, light years ahead of the curve.

About the only people I can think of that have Jimmy's foresight on energy and global warming issues, are Al Gore and, maybe, Brian Schweitzer. On the Arabic-Israeli conflict, Carter remains the standard for diplomacy. Nobody has done what he did at Camp David since.