Raise Your Glasses High For Jimmy Carter, Wonkers, May He Live Forever

Trouble No More

Jimmy Carter has liver cancer. Jimmy Carter is 90 years old. Jimmy Carter is one of the great Americans, if you count a globetrotting sense of adventure coupled with near-constant service to his nation and our earth. And he is fer fucking sure the greatest ex-president alive today.

We're not linking to any of the bullshit from the professional agitators on Twitter; they can have a fine old time on their lonesome. We don't need any outrage, or anger, or even sadness. Jimmy Carter having liver cancer means we can toast him while he's still alive, and throw him a rousing wake while he can still attend one. He's had a fine long life.

We raise our glass high to a man of contradictions: a conservative Democrat but a liberal fundamentalist, a man with the foresight to put solar panels on the White House just to have them removed by that dick Ronald Reagan, but who was, while humble (for a president), a bit of a dick himself.

Apparently, things kind of sucked during the '70s. There was disco -- THANKS JIMMY CARTER -- and the Ayatollah or something. (Jimmy Carter invented Middle Eastern conflict as well as Middle Eastern terrorism.) We remember sitting in the gas lines with our mom, and then sitting in them with her again as she gassed up dad's car too. (Women did shit like that then.) So when Ronald Reagan came along and did his whole adorable senile grandpa routine while promising to sell Iran weapons if they'd be so kind as to keep our hostages just a little bit longer -- how about inauguration day, does his inauguration day work for you? -- America was ready. It was ready for shoulder pads and those awful bows women wore with their suits. It was ready for Morning in America and trickle-down and 22 pages of help wanted ads in the Washington Post. America was ready for Donald Fucking Trump.

And Jimmeh left the White House in his Mr. Rogers-style cardigan. He left behind the sniping press corps that treated him like he was Al Gore or something. He left the flat-out evil of the Beltway lobbyists. He didn't make a hundred million giving speeches. He left Washington and with his wife, Rosalynn, began living out loud the precepts of Christ: a carpenter like Jesus, he builds shelters, for what you do for the least among us you do for Him. He goes to Haiti to minister to the poor not with words but with deeds, and by his fruit we know him. He goes to Jerusalem -- Jesus Christ, still! -- no matter how crazy-making that fucking mess is. The older he gets -- and presumably he's not getting much older from here on out -- the more he leaves behind the moderate conservatism he embodied. Instead, he yells at people to be better to women, and gay people, and people of color, and then he goes and builds another house, and writes another book. He's up to 31 by our count, buy one for your grandma today.

A few years ago, when I was teaching poli sci at UC Irvine, Jimmy Carter came to speak about the Middle East and the Two-State Solution. My students got extra credit for attending, and my dad and my then-young son came too. Afterward, high on a rollicking speech, I asked what my father, a certified Jewish, thought of Carter's proposal for peace. " Every serious person thinks there should be a Palestinian state," my dad said. My son didn't say anything, but his eyes shined. He just thought Jimmy Carter was a fuckin' cool guy.

I have been told Jimmy Carter did some pre-Reagan fucked-up shit in Latin America. I'm not sure he was great on race. He was kind of crusty, and America hates that unless it's aimed at Rosie O'Donnell I guess. But he was and is an honest man, and whatever the sins of his administration might have been, he's spent 40 years atoning. I invite you to join me in a drink for Jimmy Carter, whom I love, and if you're not a piece of shit on Twitter, you do too.

To our friend, the president.