I regret every harsh thing I ever said about Jimmy Carter

Not that I necessarily take them back. Some aspects of his foreign policy as president were very questionable from a liberal internationalist perspective. Especially embracing the noble mujahadeen "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan as his administration did. (We now refer to them as "Muslim terrorists" or "Islamic jihadists".)

But it's a sign of how drastically American politics has succumed to robber-baron conservatism and the fanaticism of the Christian Right (aka, the American Taliban) that it would require a long explanation to describe how controversial Carter's presidency was among liberal democrats. Both Ted Kennedy and Jerry Brown ran liberal campaigns against him for the Democratic nomination in 1980, when Carter was the incumbent. His Secretary of State (Cyrus Vance) resigned in protest over a military strike against Iran with which he strongly disagreed.

It was long ago, in a (political) galaxy far, far away. And today, Carter is very clearly one of the good guys in current politics - and in American Christianity.

In his new book Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, which belongs to the literary genre of the "jeremiad", he writes:

[The Bush administration's] dependence on military force to expand America's influence and other recent deviations from traditional values have dramatically reduced the attractiveness of our [American] political, cultural, and religious offerings to the world. Although most Americans are convinced of the superiority of these attributes of our Western society, it has become increasingly obvious that a heavy-handed effort to impose them on other people can be counterproductive. ...

There are obviously sincere differences of opinion within the religious and political life of our nation, and this is to be expected. It is the unprecedented combined impact of fudamentalism in religion and politics that has helped to create the deep and increasingly disturbing divisions among our people. This is a basic challenge that the citizens of our country will have to meet and resolve, in order to shape the future heart and soul of America. (my emphasis)

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