DON'T DIS JIMMY CARTER IN MY HEARING

Just heard Newt Gingrich on the Greg Knapp Experience (Dallas talk radio KLIF). The morally deficient (check out this) former Speaker of the House had the gall to speak of former president Jimmy Carter, widely acknowledged as the "best former president in history": "Jimmy Carter's never gotten over being fired by the American people in 1980...he'll do anything to hurt America." Jimmy, you see, made the outrageous suggestion that we should close the Guantanamo prison camp and give the prisoners the benefit of Geneva Convention rights.

Jimmy Carter "hurt America"??????? ExcUUUSE me?

He was such a straight arrow that he thought "lusting in his mind" was just as wrong as a "sin of the flesh."
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Marred by high inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter lost in a landslide and quietly left town.

Two years later, he re-emerged and founded the Carter Center, a research group that seeks to "promote peace and human rights, resolve conflicts, foster democracy, and fight hunger and disease." In that endeavor, Carter has been tireless.

He has been building houses for Habitat for Humanity for 20 years. He has monitored elections around the globe to ensure that true democracy prevails. He has mediated crises from Haiti to North Korea.

He has rescinded his membership in the Southern Baptist Convention for its refusal to accept gays and lesbians. And he has traveled to Cuba to denounce Castro in his own back yard. While his focus has been broad, his acts contain the common thread of equality for everyone.

Unlike his fellow ex-presidents, Carter has never joined corporate boards for pay. He has never gone on the lecture circuit to make speeches for profit. In short, he has refused to cash in on the presidency for personal gain, choosing instead to use his status as a former president to advance the cause of "suffering people around the world," on whose behalf he accepted the Nobel Prize.

He joins Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as the only other American presidents to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. And it is hard to imagine he will be joined by any other American president, current or former, in the foreseeable future.

Jimmy Carter is one of my personal heroes. I will be joining him and others in the Jimmy Carter Work Project for Habitat for Humanity in Detroit a week or so from now. It is a long-standing tradition in our company, which has been Habitat's #1 corporate partner for nearly a decade. Republicans like to throw spears and arrows at Jimmy because he lives according to what they give lip service to: the teachings of Jesus Christ.