Jimmy Carter is responsible for the pullout from Iran; it was he who ignited the Iranian revolution back in 1978. Failure to back Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, America’s friend in the Middle East, Carter pulled up stakes which allowed the self exiled Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to seize power. Prior to Khomeini’s return, mass protests erupted, many deaths resulted, shocking the country and damaged any attempt at reconciliation between the Shah and the opposition. Khomeini immediately declared that “4,000 innocent protesters were massacred by Zionists“, and gave him a pretext to reject any further compromise with the government.Add in the taking of American hostages under the watch of Jimmy Carter allowed the Iranian Mullah power grab to cement the theocratic rule by the Supreme Ruler. Additionally, the American embassy was seized and 52 hostages taken which united the country. Not until Ronald Reagan rode into office did Khomeini take heed. After 444 days the hostages were released. From then on Iran became a soviet type state in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards.
Today we Barack Hussein Obama bowing to, subservient to, supporting, guiding, patronizing, cheering for and most of all lobbying for the Iranian theocracy. For the past two years the Iranians have played the North Korean card; negotiate in bad faith while developing the nuclear weapons you swear on Allah not to develop. Obama is another Jimmy Carter by allowing the Iranians to enter the nuclear club.
Israel will not allow this to happen negotiations fail this is obvious; even if there is a deal only to save face. Iran will continue to centrifuge its way into the nuclear age. Don’t expect Israel to sit idly by while all this happens. Expect an Israel missile to take out Iranians capability by leveling the Arak heavy water plant and the Fordow underground uranium enrichment facility. In essence the blame will lie with Obama for increasing the possibility of a nuclear confrontation.
A flashback to Jimmy Carter and the election of his friend in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. By now everyone knows that the election which brought Chavez to a third term was a bygone conclusion – the fix was in. Jimmy Carter saw to it; with a warped mind bent on the destruction of capitalism Carter sanctioned the massive fraud. Did any freedom loving American believe that Chavez would cede power?
The Carter Center, founded by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter in 1982, is a non-profit human rights organization with a self-described emphasis on âseeking to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve healthâ around the world. Founder and former President Jimmy Carter recently stated âAs a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.â Hector Vanolli, director of the Carter Center in Venezuela, says that the automization (is this a word?) of every step of the process, from pre-election voter registration, to election day voting, to post ballot tallying, along with its auditability, is what sets the Venezuelan electoral system apart from other countries.
As reported by independent media before the election; polls diverge widely, with some predicting a victory for Mr. Chávez and others showing a race that is too close to call, there is wide agreement that Mr. Chávez is vulnerable as never before. Handicapping the election is complicated by the angst felt by many Venezuelans that a vote for the opposition could bring retaliation. Adding to that anxiety, the government recently introduced a new electronic voting system that many Venezuelans fear might be used by the government to track those who vote against the president. Electoral officials and opposition leaders defend the integrity of the system, but there is significant distrust, and a big part of Mr. Capriles’s campaign has been to reassure voters that their votes will remain secret.
When the Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez passed away back in March, one notably unctuous commemorative tribute came from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. “Although we have not agreed with all of the methods followed by his government, we have never doubted Hugo Chavez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen,” the statement,carried on the website of the Carter Center, intoned. Carter then praised the “positive legacies” of a man famous for embracing genocidal dictators like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, before ending with a vague plea to Chavez’s successors to forge a “new consensus” in taking the country forward.
“Venezuela probably has the most excellent voting system that I have ever known,” Carter began, referring to the electronic voting machines that require voters to select their favored candidate on a touch screen, before collecting a paper receipt which is then deposited in a ballot box. Well, yes, we can all agree that technology is great. But it’s what you do with it that matters.
CARACAS— April 2013. Ruling party candidate Nicolas Maduro narrowly won Venezuela’s presidential election on Sunday, the electoral authority said, allowing him to continue the socialist policies of the late Hugo Chavez.
The National Electoral Council said Maduro won 50.7 per cent of the votes, compared to 49.1 per cent for his young rival, Miranda state Governor Henrique Capriles. It said more than 99 percent of the votes had been counted and that the result was “irreversible.”
Chavez, who ruled for 14 years, anointed Maduro as his political heir in his last speech to the country before succumbing to cancer on March 5.
That gave his former vice-president and foreign minister a huge advantage but Capriles narrowed the gap in the final days of the campaign and the result was much closer than many had expected.
Then there was this gem: “So far as I know, Maduro did get 1.5 percent more votes than his opponent, [Henrique] Capriles,” Carter told Oppenheimer, “and that has been substantiated by the recount of paper ballots.” And finally, the clincher: “Asked… whether Venezuela’s election process was clean, Carter asserted that ‘the voting part’ of it was ‘free and fair.’”
Actually, it was anything but. On election day, opposition monitors recorded around 6,000 violations, including red-shirted Chavista activists shepherding voters into polling booths, threats both physical and verbal against voters deemed to have opposition loyalties, and, most ludicrously, several polling stations in which Maduro’s vote was astronomically higher than that achieved by Chavez in the previous, October 2012, election, which the ruling United Socialist Party won by a comfortable margin of 11 points.
Contrary to Carter’s claim, there was never a comprehensive matching of the ballot papers to the votes registered electronically. There was, earlier this month, a cursory, partial recount whose sole purpose was to validate the original announcement of a Maduro victory.
“the Venezuelan government did not allow independent international election observers for the elections. It only allowed electoral tourists from friendly regional groups who arrived shortly before the voting.”
There are those who will say that however outrageous Carter’s views are, they don’t really matter. In fact, they do. Much of the Carter Center’s work involves international election monitoring, since, as the Center itself says, “more governments than ever recognize democratic elections as essential to establishing their legitimate authority.”What’s therefore shocking in the Venezuelan context is that Carter, whose organization didn’t monitor the April election, has now issued Maduro with a clean bill of health.
As a result, the chavistas now have even less incentive to admit observers to monitor the forthcoming municipal elections, currently scheduled for December. Given the likelihood that the opposition will attempt to turn this next contest into a referendum on Maduro’s rule, we can confidently expect a repeat of the violations of this past April. And we can be just as confident that Jimmy Carter will emerge, once the dust has settled, to assure us that the ballot was “fair,” “legitimate,” “free” and all the other words that give succor to those autocrats who decide what the result of an election will be before they hold one.