RIP Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter survived to vote for Kamala Harris. It looked like he would die some time ago, especially after he went into hospice care. 

He died at 100, after his beloved wife, and an unfortunate election. It was his time to go. I know that is a somewhat silly statement but it is sometimes true. No reason for him to linger on any longer. 

I provided my modest take on Jimmy Carter. (Photos and final edits are the responsibility of the website owner.) A more educated historian provides his obituary here. I think overall Erik Loomis did well there.

Overall, his take is that Jimmy Carter was a good man and led a good life, but was a bad president. Still, even there, Carter did some good. 

Read through the obituary. His foreign policy overall had multiple highlights. He commuted the Vietnam resisters. There were multiple good domestic policy moves even without referencing his Biden-esque court diversity project. 

(Both Breyer and Ginsburg first were nominated under his tenure.)

Yes. We can list his problems, including the independent-minded stubbornness which ironically helped him win in the first place. There is a chicken-and-egg quality there -- if you wanted someone else who could have done more with the liberal majority, who would be elected? 

I will leave that to people more familiar with the field.  His libertarian sentiments were also a sign of the times as we saw in the 1980s and internationally.

Carter served as a nuclear technician in the Navy so was not just some peanut farmer. He was able to win state and federal office so had some political chops. He had his limitations. 

Shades of John Quincy Adams, who like his father was a one-term president, but unlike him had a long career afterward. And, though his anti-slavery stance is quite admirable, Carter did a lot more concrete good in human rights and health care. 

Jimmy Carter lived his Baptist faith by following Micah's basic rule of humbly doing justice and loving goodness. He withdrew from the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000 because of its stance on women being subservient and not being pastors or deacons. 

They followed pseudo-Paul on that. The actual Pauline letters have repeated praise for women in ministerial roles.

Sarah Weddington, of Roe v. Wade fame, served in his administration. Carter has had mixed positions on abortion. I read in one of his books that Carter opposed criminalization, citing how it was counterproductive in Latin America. 

I am not sure if he was always consistent in his public statements on that matter but that is the right take for those personally against abortion. He supported the Hyde Amendment, an unjust and unconstitutional denial of Medicaid funding.  

Still, his judicial picks were generally liberal, Breyer eventually co-writing the dissent in Dobbs. 

Rest in peace, Jimmy. 

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I regularly see some trivial bit of news when I check online, including such and such relatively minor person dying. Now, this is not a complete dis on such things. History and life are filled with such people. But, the amount of "who the heck is this person?" I see is a bit silly.  

Other times, the person is someone people are likely to know for certain roles. A sort of fifteen minutes of fame, even if they did other things.

Olivia Hussey generally fits the bill. She had various roles but what she really is known for is her role as Juliet in one of the leading film versions of Romeo and Juliet. I saw some of the film in Catholic school, leading me to wonder if the principal realized there was an actual sex scene with nudity.  

It was brief but still -- we were a Catholic school after all. The Wikipedia page notes that nudity became controversial, particularly because they were actually about the age of the teenage characters.