Investor's Business Daily gives us 97 reasons why Democrats can't be trusted in the War On Terror.
Today's Democrats are nothing like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, who with courage and decisive action kept on top of their jobs and aggressively confronted one national defense crisis after another.
Jimmy Carter, elected during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and (1) believing Americans had an inordinate fear of communism, (2) lifted U.S. citizens' travel bans to Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia and (3) pardoned draft evaders.
President Carter (4) also stopped B-1 bomber production, (5) gave away our strategically located Panama Canal and (6) made human rights the central focus of his foreign policy.
That led Carter, a Democrat, (7) to make a monumental miscalculation and withdraw U.S. support for our long-standing Mideast military ally, the Shah of Iran. (8) Carter simply didn't like the Shah's alleged mistreatment of imprisoned Soviet spies.
The Soviets, (9) with close military ties to Iraq, a 1,500-mile border with Iran and eyes on Afghanistan, aggressively tried to encircle, infiltrate, subvert and overthrow Iran's government for its oil deposits and warm-water ports several times after Russian troops attempted to stay there at the end of WWII. These were all communist threats to Iran that Carter never understood.
Carter (10) thought Ayatollah Khomeini, a Muslim exile in Paris, would make a fairer Iranian leader than the Shah because he was a religious man. (11) With U.S. support withdrawn, the Shah was overthrown, and (12) the ayatollah returned and promptly proclaimed Iran an Islamic nation. (13) Executions followed. Palestinian hit men were hired to secretly eliminate the opposition so the religious mullahs couldn't be blamed.
While we've been focused, of late, on Bill Clinton's failure to nab Bin Laden, we mustn't forget that modern Muslim terrorism was given its first foothold by that prince of preternaturally priggish policy, Jimmy Carter, who believed that the Ayatollah Khomeini would better represent Iranians than the pro-American Shah. But within a year of his Carter-aided installation the Ayatollah had presided over the kidnapping of America's Tehran embassy personnel who were subsequently held hostage until Ronald Reagan was finally elected -- whereupon they were mysteriously released.
Carter made his idiot decision over 25 years ago, but Democrats to this day still want dearly to believe that, in his heart, he not only lusted but was right about foreign policy, too. But just as Neville Chamberlain will forever be remembered as allowing Hitler to conquer Europe, Jimmy Carter's legacy will be the war against Islamic terrorism we have to fight now.