Gracias, Jimmy!

posted at 12:13 am on September 22, 2006 by Bryan
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Jimmy Carter has never met an enemy of the United States that he didn’t want to give a big, wet kiss.

Yeah, he does the noble Habitat for Humanity gig. But the goodness of that is dwarfed by the Habitat for Hugo Jimmy helped restore two years ago.

President Carter will no doubt be on Hugo Chavez’s Christmas card list this December. It was certainly a gift for the Venezuelan leader this year when Mr. Carter certified without reservation an election that opposition newspapers were quick to denounce as a fraud. No sooner had the former American president handed this gift to the Venezuelan Marxist than, as our Eli Lake reported last Thursday, the coalition of labor unions, business groups, and political parties brought forward a list of serious complaints about the process leading up to the elections and how the votes were counted by new electronic machines purchased by the state’s election commission.

Exit polling from the American firm of Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates suggested the inverse of the results Mr. Carter blessed last Monday that showed Mr. Chavez survived the recount referendum by a margin of 59% to 41%. Nor does the list of concerns for the opposition end with rigged voting machines. Many parties say they have names of government employees fired after their names were disclosed on the Internet by a pro-Chavez legislator as signers of a petition calling for the referendum. Some Venezuelan papers even reported that the paper records of the votes were found in rivers and vacant lots. Finally, many Venezuelans question why Mr. Chavez was so quick to issue citizenship to some 2 million persons, many living abroad, in the months and weeks leading up to the vote.

Given such questions, why would the Carter Center so quickly confirm the official vote count of Mr. Chavez’s election commission and recommend that Secretary Powell accept the official results? As Venezuelan journalist Fabiola Zerpa asked, “Why did it rush to back the results? Why couldn’t it wait a day or two until all the results were ready and the auditing process was finished?”

It’s amazing how much lefties will make of that photo showing Don Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam, yet they`will completely ignore Jimmy Carter’s role in saving Hugo Chavez’s political career. Well, other than to note that they like Chavez.

Read the rest of the article to see that the 2004 Venezuelan election was probably rigged from the beginning, the Carter Center accepted pre-election restrictions on monitoring that should have alerted it that the fix was in, yet they not only stayed in the game but rushed to certify the election results as legitimate after the fact. Chavez survived the vote and has been a menace ever since.

That two-bit punk who called the President of the United States “el diablo” on American soil, and who used his country’s natural resources to buy the love of American citizens in Harlem today, kept power through the acquiescence of a former American president. All of the alliances with Iran and China, all of the deals Venezuela has struck with Castro and other US enemies, have Jimmy Carter’s fingerprints on them.

Democrats rushing to condemn Chavez as the thug he is might take a moment to note that one of their own helped Chavez keep the power he’s using as a soapbox to slam Bush.

Yeah, I was dreaming there. Back to reality.

There’s no photo for us on the right to wave around like that pic of Rumsfeld, but the fact is Jimmy Carter’s actions in Venezuela helped an enemy of the US retain power, and probably against the will of the Venezuelan people.

(h/t bWb)

More: How could I forget? Of course there’s a photo we can wave around. But it won’t have the same staying power as that shot of Rummy and Saddam.

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