WWJCD - What Would Jimmy Carter Do?

In Obama's fumbling response to the June Revolt in Iran, it was not hard to see that he was relying on the not particularly time-honored maxim of WWJCD, or What Would Jimmy Carter Do?

WWJCD is a handy tool for Democratic Presidents to make the worst possible foreign policy decisions at a critical time, with the worst possible consequences for the United States. Having picked up where Jimmy Carter left off by pandering to Islamic terrorists in general, and Iran in particular, it is little wonder that WWJCD is such a valuable guide for Barack Hussein Obama.

If your embassy is taken hostage by Islamic terrorists, WWJCD says that you should;

A. Kill the terrorists

B. Praise the terrorists

C. Apologize to the terrorists

D. Praise the terrorists, apologize to them and promise to never open an embassy without their approval again.

If you answered D. then you're really in tune with the spirit of Jimmy Carter and the ideals of WWJCD. If you answered C. you're only a Cindy Sheehan. If you answered B. you qualify for Patty Murray at most. And if you answered A. you haven't been eating your granola and arugula.

Now say that an Islamic terrorist group hijacks 4 planes, flies two into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and tries to fly a fourth into the White House, killing over 3,000 Americans.

Do you;

A. Kill the terrorists

B. Explain that the terrorists were motivated by justified anger at the foreign policy decisions of the Port Authority police and Cantor Fitzgerald Securities

C. Apologize to the terrorists for putting up towers that are larger than any Mosque, which is something that Sharia law forbids infidels to do.

D. Free the captured terrorists and send them home to commit new acts of terrorism against you.

E. All of the above, except A.

If you answered E. then the spirit of Dhimmi Carter is truly with you.

Finally, if an American ally is threatened by one of America's enemies, do you;

A. Support your ally

B. Oppose your ally

C. Demand that your ally make extensive concessions to terrorists in order to appease your enemies.

D. Apologize for having allies. Apologize for having enemies and terrorists. Apologize for your country even existing in the first place.

That's right, it's another D for Dhimmi. But these days it could just as well be an O or a big fat zero. Not that it matters much. Both the D and the O are a border without nothing inside, which is a good summary for both administrations.

Had Jimmy Carter possessed a sense of style and an abjectly worshipful press, we would be calling him Barack Obama, no Hussein please. Deprive Obama of his teleprompter and fuse him together with Joe Biden, and you'd get Jimmy Carter. Somewhere after Carter, Mondale, Jerry Brown and Howard Dean; American's leftists realized that they would have to repackage their socialist candidates in a less flaky package. That's why Obama is on the ticket and Joe Biden, a worthy successor to the lunatic likes of Carter, Brown and Dean, is in the background telling knock knock jokes.

When is Jimmy Carter not a punchline? When you harness all the resources of Hollywood and the dying dinosaur media to make him look good. Keep him slim, African-American and tethered to a teleprompter. Cover him in more haloes than all the frescoes in the Vatican, photograph him next to Superman, tall buildings and with his head tilted back as if he's waiting for the dentist to finally drill that tooth. Give him his own model to lip sync his praises on YouTube and his own logo and slogan. And when you've done all that and six months in, he still has no idea what he's doing because he's following WWJCD, then you'd better hope all the photo ops at local eateries can somehow save the day.

Somehow the left and the Democratic party drew the wrong conclusion from the Carter Administration's "One Term One Hit Wonder" which is that it wasn't Carter's policies that failed, but his public image. That Reagan beat Carter on style not on substance. And so with Obama they spent their time tinkering in the lab, swapping in Carter's brain from a jar, until finally they threw the switch, saw the lightning bolt flash, heard the thunder, and cried, "It's alive. It's alive. The defeatist policies of left wing socialism are alive at last!"

But it wasn't just style that failed Carter. As terrible and embarrassing as his public presence was, it managed to get him elected once. Carter's policies failed on substance, just as Obama's policies are. Obama has invested so much energy into the style of his presentation, that like an executive who has worked for months on the perfect pie charts, he puts it up on the screen, only to realize that there's no money to pay for anything on the pie chart.

Perhaps the worst disaster of the last half century of American politics and business has been to confuse presentation with performance. Smiling CEO's who went to the trendy self-help guru have tanked major corporations and parachuted away trailing a golden canvas printed on million dollar bills. Politicians who looked the part and acted confident talked their way into office and away with the national debt and anything else lying around the premises.

Obama is the culmination of that error, his election is a political fall from grace for American democracy into the mire of the politics of the mob, as had always been darkly predicted for the American experiment. And there he sits now, carefully conscious of his artificial pose, his lighting and his diction-- even as his own clue for what to do comes from WWJCD.