Jimmy Carter: Bush may have been behind anti-Chavez coup

Another moment of lunacy from this nation’s biggest Oval Office mistake of the 20th century — which may be akin to saying “water is still wet,” but we should be keeping a tally.  While in Colombia, former President Jimmy Carter told an interviewer that the Bush administration “could have been involved” in the 2002 coup attempt against Venezuelan wanna-be dictator Hugo Chavez.  Dan Calabrese unloads on America’s worst ex-president:

On Sunday, Jimmeh told the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo that he believes the Bush Administration was likely behind a coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002 in Venezuela.

“I think there is no doubt that in 2002, the United States had at the very least full knowledge about the coup, and could even have been directly involved,” said the man whose favorite pastime these days is to huddle up with anti-American thugs.

This got picked up immediately by Iranian state media, of course, which has plenty of reasons to air this allegation.  The Iranians want to paint the US as hostile as well as justify its attempts to bolster Chavez in Venezuela.  Having an American ex-president give credence to Chavez’ paranoid conspiracy theories plays into memes propagated by leftists throughout Latin America and undermines American influence.

Oddly, they also repeated this rather belated observation of Chavez by our nation’s most clueless former executive:

However, Carter says Chavez is now consolidating political power, making it “almost impossible” for the Obama administration to establish friendly relations with Venezuela.

“International relations would be better if he [Chavez] would stop his attacks and insults against the United States,” according to the former US leader.

He also said he was worried by the Venezuelan president’s drift towards “authoritarianism.”

Drift?  Chavez has nationalized the oil industry, installed a puppet parliament, and rigged elections designed to make him president for life.  He has openly patterned himself after the region’s most successful totalitarians, the Castro brothers in Cuba, and has provided funding for leftist terrorists in neighboring Colombia.  That’s not a drift, that’s a march in double time, just like the march of Soviets into Afghanistan that this nuclear engineer managed to miss in his administration.

There’s only one word for a former US president who goes abroad to bolster the worst conspiracy theories about our country: despicable.  That’s nothing new for Carter, either.

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