remake/remodel

not funny

The Onion, “Former President Carter to be Tried for Peace Crimes,” August 2003:

“Jimmy Carter’s political career includes a laundry list of anti-war-making offenses,” said chief prosecutor Charles B. Simmons. “Carter’s record of benevolence, diplomacy, and respect for human life is unrivaled in recent geopolitical history. For millions, the very sight of his face evokes memories of his administration’s reign of tolerance.”

FAIR, “Jimmy Carter and Human Rights: Behind the Media Myth,” September 1994:

… A decade after Carter left the Oval Office, scholar James Petras assessed the ex-president’s actions overseas — and found that Carter’s image as “a peace mediator, impartial electoral observer and promoter of democratic values… clashes with the experiences of several democratic Third World leaders struggling against dictatorships and pro-U.S. clients.”

From Latin America to East Africa, Petras wrote, Carter functioned as “a hard-nosed defender of repressive state apparatuses, a willing consort to electoral frauds, an accomplice to U.S. Embassy efforts to abort popular democratic outcomes and a one-sided mediator.”

Alexander Cockburn, “Starring Jimmy Carter, in War and Peace,” October 2002:

In October 1979, a coup by reformist officers [in El Salvador] overthrew the repressive Romero dictatorship and pledged reforms, including land reform. But within weeks, it became clear that the reformers among the new rulers had been outmaneuvered, so they resigned en masse as the real leaders stepped up frightful repression in the countryside, killing close to 1,000 people a month. Some 10,000 were killed in 1980, most of them peasants and workers.

The Carter Administration sent millions in aid and riot equipment to the Salvadoran military, dispatched US trainers and trained Salvadoran officers in Panama. The Administration cast the conflict as one between the “extremes” of left and right, with the junta trying to steer a “moderate” course. In fact, 90 percent of the killings were carried out by the army or paramilitary death squads acting under army or government supervision.