There's a persistent truism out there that while Jimmy Carter was an execrable president, he was nevertheless a great ex-president.

It's balderdash.

He may have done some worthy deeds around the eradication of disease and the building of homes for the homeless.

But he was every bit as bad an ex-president as he was a sitting president.

It wasn't just his nasty, irritable personality, as described by newsman and AT contributor Peter Chowka here, and former U.S. diplomat Lewis Amselem from firsthand experience as bystanders in random events.

It was in his meddling political involvement abroad.

Amselem described in his long tweet-story how Carter paid a visit to Indonesia in 2004 and in his speech to the locals, launched into a series of verbal broadsides against U.S. foreign policy from the grounds of the U.S. embassy as the diplomats stared at each other, utterly stupefied.

He also became a self-styled election observer, supposedly in the name of promoting democracy, in which the dictator tended to win.

In Venezuela, his involvement with the Carter Center in 2004 certifying its likely fraud-filled recall referendum on Hugo Chavez served to seal Chavez's grip on power and create the Venezuelan hellhole we know today.

It was a mixture of arrogance and naivete. Here's the money-quote from the executive summary put out by the Carter Center certifying Venezuela's 2004 referendum as free and fair:

In the end, many of the threatened restrictions on the OAS and Carter Center observer missions did not materialize, and the CNE granted both organizations authorization for all of the observers requested, complete freedom of movement on election day, and access to all technical locations of the process, with the exception of the central totalization room.

So with the exception of what went on in the totalization room, all was free and fair.

Where do these boobs think election fraud happens?

Had Carter not given Chavez that veneer of democratic respectability with his "certification," of that fraudy vote, Chavez would not have lasted in power as he did and his successors still do, for Chavez had been about as popular as Carter was in the states in the Venezuela of his day.

Here's how bad the effect of that Hugo-dorsement was, according to Guillermo Ramos Flamerich, writing in the leftish but anti-Chavez Caracas Chronicles:

The figure of former President Carter may have become an endorsement and a democratic veneer for chavismo. His declarations that “the electoral process in Venezuela is the best in the world,” although referring to its technical robustness, were repeated countless times by Hugo Chávez as a description of the political environment as a whole, as if Carter’s words meant there was no danger of authoritarianism in Venezuela.

Had enough? There's also a photo in the Caracas Chronicle piece, showing Carter gripping and grinning with Hugo, telling the entire world that all was free and fair in that referendum and Hugo had the love of the masses.

It was such rubbish. Venezuelan voters reported flipped ballots, ballots that weren't there, ballots that had already been voted in, and strange election tallies. Data and computer scientists from about a half a dozen prestigious universities found the result to be statistically improbable. The opposition refused to go along with the idea that they lost the election because they knew they had won.

Jennifer McCoy, who was Carter's point woman at the Carter Center which called the referendum as free and fair, effectively called the opposition sore losers for being unhappy about her insistence that except for what went on in the totalization room, all was free and fair.

Writing for The Conversation last year, she made these ridiculous claims:

Although the opposition was initially skeptical of Carter, given that he was invited by Chávez, it came to value Carter’s entree with Chávez and held high expectations he could hold Chávez to any commitments.

When an eventual agreement led to a recall referendum petition process, Carter forcefully pushed a stalling Chávez and his team to acknowledge that the opposition had gathered sufficient signatures to hold the referendum to decide whether to end Chávez’s term early.

But when the vote finally happened in August 2004, Chávez had managed to turn the tide in his favor in the opinion polls by spending on social programs. He won the vote decisively. The opposition alleged the vote count was fraudulent, while the OAS and The Carter Center audits of the count did not detect fraud. I received many messages from irate Venezuelans blaming Carter and me for ignoring fraud and allowing Chávez to continue in power in Venezuela.

I learned then what a thick skin a public figure must have to withstand the fury of severely disappointed people.

Actually, it really was fraud. That's not me, that's what data and computer scientists at half a dozen major universities proved.

And what happened in the wake of that Carter-certified fraud is that every election that followed in that country was fraudulent in some regard after Carter. And in the eyes of many, the fraud was exported abroad, including to the U.S. where similar cheating charges prevail, as one would-be tyrant learned from another.

By 2024, the fraud in Venezuela was so practiced, so naked, so open, even the Carter Center had to say it was fraudulent as the authentic democrats in Venezuela had proved it beyond a reasonable doubt.

That the fraud was known to the opposition is why the opposition were ready for the Chavista cheating in Venezuela's last election this past July; they knew exactly where to look to find the evidence and thus demonstrate the fraud, which they did. It was only then that the Carterites finally admitted fraud.

Does McCoy really expect us to think that Chavez and his successors conducted free and fair elections all along and only decided to go fraudulent this year? Or did they have a lot of practice? Big fraud takes big practice, and Chavistas had 20 years of it.

Chavez died in 2013 of Cuban medical incompetence in treating his cancer.

Nicolas Maduro succeeded him.

Carter took lovey-dovey photos with Maduro, too, handing the dictator a copy of his book in 2015, which the dictator tweeted to show everyone he had Jimmy's admiration and respect:

According to Flamerich, in his Caracas Chonicles piece:

A part of the domestic public opinion lost respect for the former president and the Carter Center ended its work in Venezuela in 2015. Then they began to denounce the lack of transparency and refused to come as observers in 2021. In 2024 they agreed to attend with a minimal mission to the July 28 presidential elections. Two days later, in their official statement, the Carter Center informed that the elections did not comply with the “international parameters and standards of electoral integrity”, and therefore could not be considered democratic. Nicolás Maduro would respond that when Jimmy Carter was active such things did not happen.

What Maduro was unwittingly saying was that he's been doing things the way he's always been doing them, and only Jimmy Carter and his minions were stupid enough to be fooled, as well as certify him, coddling him and taking selfies with him instead.

McCoy explained the Carter mentality as though it were something noble:

In my view, Carter’s genius as a mediator is his belief that there is some innate goodness in every person, no matter the harm they may perpetrate. He strove to develop a connection with even the most detestable dictators because he knew their decisions could change the future of a society. Once he had a relationship with those leaders, he presented them with the hard choices they needed to make. And he always kept his compass. He focused on the well-being of the people in the countries he was helping, not his personal successes or failures.

His approach opened him to criticism that he cozied up to dictators. But, to me, he just exercised realism and persistence.

Now Venezuelans are paying the price, in lost democracy and a ruined country, scattering to the four corners of the globe in their millions, because there's no way to vote a tyrant with a taste for election cheating out of office.

That's not promoting democracy -- that's fostering dictators. That's disastrous for them as well as us, given that dictators in our hemisphere are costly problems in more ways than one. Had Carter wanted to wreck that place, he couldn't have done a better job. Maybe that's why there won't be too many respects paid to Carter after what he enabled. All he needed to do was tell the truth about what was happening and he didn't do it. He chose the selfies instead.

Image: Twitter screen shot