CNN’s Scott Jennings Offers Harsh View Of Jimmy Carter’s Legacy

 CNN commentator Scott Jennings, the token conservative among CNN’s well-established leftist anchors and commentators, offered a different perspective on former President Jimmy Carter’s legacy than the hagiographic perspectives given by his colleagues.

Carter died on Sunday at the age of 100.

“Let me preface my take by offering condolences to the Carter family on his death. He was obviously one of the most unique post-presidencies we’ve ever had because he lived so long and he did so much,” Jennings began.

Then he segued into his assessment of the damage Carter had wrought during his presidency and political life: “That having been said, he was a terrible president. That’s why he lost in a landslide after his one term. And if it’s possible, I think he was even a worse ex-president because of his meddling in U.S. foreign policy, because of his saddling up to dictators around the world, because of his vehement views, anti-Israel views, and more than dabbling in anti-Semitism over the years.”

Carter befriended dictators such as arch-terrorist PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Daniel Ortega. His anti-Semitism has been amply documented in a spate of reports.

In 2002, Jay Nordlinger noted in “Carterpalooza!” that “No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter is. William Safire has reported that (Carter’s Secretary of State) Cyrus Vance acknowledged that, if he had had a second term, Carter would have sold Israel down the river.” Nordlinger noted of Carter’s close friendship with Arafat, “At their first meeting — in 1990 — Carter boasted of his toughness toward Israel, assuring Arafat at one point, ‘. . . you should not be concerned that I am biased. I am much more harsh with the Israelis.’”

Carter claimed Israel was an apartheid state; Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt wrote how Carter had “repeatedly fallen back … on traditional anti-Semitic canards.”

“He often vexed Democrats. Obama didn’t even have him speak at his ’08 convention,” Jennings continued. “He put Bill Clinton in a terrible foreign policy box on a North Korea nuclear issue. I think he was a guy who had a huge ego and believed that he was uniquely positioned to do all these things even after the American people had roundly and soundly rejected his leadership.”

“So, I respect people who run for president and get elected president, but in his particular case, I think he, time and again proved, why he was never suited for the office in the first place,” Jennings stated, then added, “In the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, he wrote letters to all of our allies and to Arab states asking them to abandon their cooperation and coalition with the United States of America. If it’s not treasonous, it’s borderline treasonous.”