Ambassador Ross Accuses Jimmy Carter of Property-Theft

Jimmy Carter has continued his track record for bumbling and incompetence. This time it concerns what may have been an inadvertant misuse of a proprietary map devised by Ambassador Dennis Ross.

In addition, Kenneth Stein, the director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel, resigned Tuesday as Middle East Fellow of the Carter Center of Emory University, citing:

"President Carter's book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments."

Besides the statement above, Dr. Stein pointed out a gross factual error that Carter used to bolster the argument that people "weren't listening to [him]."

Stein alleged an inaccuracy on page 131 in the book of a 1990 White House meeting where Carter cites that Washington was mostly preoccupied with the Iraq/Kuwait conflict. Stein said that was in 1980, not 1990.

"He makes it appear that the reasons people didn't pay attention to what he was saying was because of the invasion," Stein said. "How was that possible? I was there."

"Carter can disagree with me. I don't think if you're president of the United States you have a specific privilege to overstate," he added.

Carter claimed that people "in the real world" have been buying his book. However, Carter's allegations that people don't listen to him may indicate that he is aware of the fact that most Americans regard him as hopelessly addicted to self-promotion, mouthing platitudes of ultra-left sloganeers and sounding like Cindy Sheehan on a particularly bad day. His statements are disregarded because of his foolish policies and incompetent administration during his [thankfully] short tenure in the Oval Office. He managed to get double-digit inflation and interest rates at the same time as running the country into a recession after his seven economic plans---a true Trifecta of ineptitude.

His foreign policy was so badly-conceived and poorly-executed that Iran spiraled into Islamic Revolution, largely because this inept peanut farmer's Human Rights chief in the State Department, Pat Derian, refused to sign off on allowing the Shah's police rubber bullets---months later the Shah's police used live ammunition on students, killing hundreds, and then even the bazaari middle class opted for ridding Iran of the Shah. Another tale of Carter's serial brainlessness.

And his fact-checking makes even the third-rate New Yorker look competent by comparision, although Carter does not commit the solecism of "Saudia Arabia" in a Hertzberg column a while back.

And I must, while I'm at it, again express my sadness at the passing early this year of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who was one of the sole sane influences at Columbia University's Middle East department and was my mentor on the Middle East while I served as a Middle East consultant for John Anderson in the [ultimately successful] national effort to rid the country of the bane of the Carter Presidency.

I thank God every day for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who saved the US and UK from eventual capitulation to the Eurocommunism that Carter and his Labour analogues in Britain aspired to. And greased the skids for the final downfall of the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history.