Pious the first

Our friend Steve Hayward administers justice to Jimmy Carter’s new book in the new issue of the Weekly Standard: “Pious the First” (subscribers only). Steve writes:

IT IS DIFFICULT, WHEN confronting the miasma of tired bromides strung together in this book, to point to a single childlike sentimentality that fully expresses the smallness of Jimmy Carter’s soul, but this one comes close: “[Rosalynn and I] have been amazed at the response of people to these new latrines, especially in Ethiopia, and to learn that the primary thrust for building them has come from women.”
If Carter merely confined himself to digging latrines in countries that lack the common sense to dig them for themselves, he would deserve many of the public accolades he receives. But he trades on his humanitarian good works to burnish his image as an elder statesman, brimming with oracular profundity. The result, as in his current book, is as empty and embarrassing as the naked emperor’s new clothes.
What Garry Wills once called Carter’s “willed narrowness of mastery” is on full display in Our Endangered Values, which offers a complete inventory of current liberal clich

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses