Thank God for Jimmy Carter.

But I still have to wonder why it’s Carter’s job to report facts – wasn’t that supposed to be the job of journalists?

After the “9/12” protests last week, the news media tried to convince us that this represented a legitimate argument again Obama’s policies. We were told these were “real” fears Americans had: of socialism (cause those Scandinavian countries have it so bad…), universal healthcare (which Obama never has suggested), fascism (seriously, these people comparing Obama to Hitler need to just read the definition of fascism in the dictionary…), and big government (uh…creating jobs for Americans is “big government” but starting two wars and pumping billions of taxpayer dollars into private weapons and security corporations isn’t?).

But what the media never pointed out – and which, apparently, Carter had to do for them – was that these “protests” were driven by race.

Seriously – no reporter ever cared to note that the 50-70,000 people in front of the White House were white? Given that we have our first black president, isn’t that fact kind of, um, relevant?

Yet until Carter brought up race, these facts were ignored. These nutcases were presented as people with legitimate policy concerns (and one woman’s claim that “Muslims are taking over this country” was actually edited out of subsequent NBC Nightly News broadcasts…).

But now that Carter has exposed their underlying motives, the right wing is claiming someone played the race card.

Yes, Carter played the race card.

BECAUSE IT’S TRUE.

Hiding behind the race card isn’t always a good defense – especially when you actually are racist.

Carter – at his old age – continues to amaze me. He was truly a president ahead of his time. He’s chastised by the conservatives, but those are usually the same right-wing nut jobs that blame Obama for the economic recession (not the guy who was charge for the last 8 years): the same conservatives that think dropping bombs on non-white, non-Christian people is always a good solution. Carter’s critics are the same people who play the “anti-Semite card” because they think Israel should be allowed to ghettoize Muslim Palestinians; they are the same screwballs that think evolution and carbon-induced climate change are conspiracies.  Hardly a crowd with credibility.

Looking back, it’s quite clear that Carter saw the writing on the wall.

On February 2, 1977, the president appeared on television wearing a cardigan (indoors! What kind of heathen does that?):

“We must face the fact that the energy shortage is permanent. There is no way we can solve it quickly…

All of us must learn to waste less energy. Simply by keeping our thermostats, for instance, at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night…”

And in April 1977, Carter again demonstrated his ability to foresee real problems:

“…[The energy crisis is] unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.

It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century…

I know that some of you may doubt that we face real energy shortages…But our energy problem is worse…because more waste has occurred, and more time has passed by without our planning for the future. And it will get worse every day until we act…”

In July 1979, Carter identified the curse of the 80s that remains with us even today – but also offered a solution:

“…[Too] many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning…

There are two paths to choose. One is a path…that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure…

To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation’s history to develop America’s own alternative sources of fuel…”

I wasn’t old enough to vote (or read much beyond Dick and Jane) in 1980, and can’t pretend to understand the national mood at that time. Perhaps I would have also felt, as many Americans did, that Carter was taking us down the wrong path. Maybe Ronald Regan would have looked appealing. But consider how far ahead of the game we might be now if we had heeded Carter’s call for a massive push toward alternative energy.

Thirty years later and with the benefit of hindsight, it’s become quite apparent that Carter was a man ahead of his time.  His ideas of conservation and alternative energy innovation (not to mention his penchant for bringing attention to human rights violations without regard for “political allegiances”) are more pertinent today than they were in the late 70s. (There’s also the little matter of Carter’s role in the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country…)

This week, by publicly pointing out the obvious (thereby doing the media’s job for them), Carter has, once again, shown that he is still a leader – and still not afraid to take on life’s real challenges.

“[Protesters equating Obama to a Nazi] are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care. It’s deeper than that.”

Well said, Jimmy.  Once again, you’ve said what no one else was willing to admit.

But looking deeper requires, well…intelligence. And the “tea party” protesters are obviously in short supply of that.