I wonder what the evil and vile Jimmy Carter is up to:
A global campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease is tantalizingly close to success. The parasitic infection, caused by a worm that can grow three feet long before it emerges from a patient’s body, now affects just a few thousand people per year. Almost all of the remaining cases are in Southern Sudan. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who has helped lead the campaign, went there in February. The World’s David Baron was there too.
***Doctor Donald Hopkins launched the global Guinea worm eradication campaign 30 years ago. It started at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, but he soon moved the campaign to Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta-based Carter Center. Ever since, the Carter Center has helped countries set up national programs to defeat the disease.
Boy, the wingnuts have this guy dead to rights, don’t they?
Mike Kay
ana Marie Cox is on Maddow’s show right now. Man would I love to take that fire-haired minx to a hollywood lesbian dominatrix club (SWAT!).
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
Bu..bu….but…cardigans! Malaise!
Mike Kay
I love how the PUMAs hate Jimmy Carter because Jimmy doesn’t like Clinton.
These sad little BillBots, worshiping at the alter of Clenis.
Cerberus
I don’t think we’ve ever had a greater ex-president. He’s singularly amazing.
(Of course, I’m also of the opinion that he was a far better actual president than anyone gives him credit for, but his work as an ex-president has been just something else entirely)
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Some worms have two legs and big mouths. Maybe Carter can free us of those, when he gets the time.
Mike Kay
But isn’t the Guinea worm part of God’s plan? Should The New World order really be intervening in God’s will?
geg6
Jimmy Carter is a LOOOOSER! On a more serious note, he truly is an international treasure. Other than Bush I (who is still not comparable), is there a GOP ex-president that has done a fraction of the good Carter has done with his post-presidency? Bueller? Bueller?
Mike Kay
@Cerberus: How dare you discount the importance of Bill Clinton’s strategic sexual affair with Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild.
Uloborus
Holy crud, they’re going to wipe out the Guinea Worm? Man, that rocks. It’s no filarial worm or schistosomiasis, but it’s still a nasty little parasite that no one will cry for once it has gone the way of smallpox.
C Nelson Reilly
I was just at the grocery store and in the checkout line I was informed that history’s greatest monster is Jesse James.
Sly
You know who else hated three-foot worms that use the human body as a mating ground and infect people by contaminating local supplies of drinking water?
Hitler.
beltane
Jimmy Carter is one of the very few people who make Christianity look good these days. I know he’s not Catholic, but I nominate him for Pope anyway.
Mike Kay
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
Can we have at least one thread that doesn’t mention Hanoi Jane Hamsher?
Jon H
New Rasmussen poll reports 57% approval rating for Guinea Worm.
Mike Kay
@C Nelson Reilly: Worse than Saint John Edwards?
Cliff
Who has the courage to stop this monster before he strikes again?
Liberty60
Did he manage a hedge fund?
Is he a Producer of Wealth, a Creator of Jobs?
Hmm, I didn’t think so
Gromit
Be fair. W has done the world incalculable good by the simple act of entering his post-presidency.
Jon H
I would like to request that they save some for AIG FP.
C Nelson Reilly
@Mike Kay: This week Jesse James is way worse than John Edwards
Kerry St. Clair-Golding
He was the smartest president. That was the singular problem. He was like Obama, meant well, but I think Obama actually has more political smarts than him.
I do like Jimmy. Never stops. I think he’s done more good out of office than in & maybe it’s a good thing he ended up out of office. He’s helped a lot of people.
Mike Kay
@Kerry St. Clair-Golding: jimmy carter is a rotten bastrid who snubbed our greatest president, Bill Clinton. He should burn in hell for that! [/PUMA]
http://www.google.com/search?q=carter+snubbs+clinton&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
PaulW
Carter may have been smart but he was also bull-headed. Dad told me tales about how he behaved as governor (public feuds with the Lt. Gov), and from what I’ve read about his interactions with Congress as President showed that he didn’t exactly play well with others… even in his own party.
Leelee for Obama
I only know that I loved Jimmy Carter the minute I heard that goofy campaign song of his. He reminded me of the kind of Dad I wished I had, and a previous poster is correct that he was, actually, a better President than he gets credit for being. He spoke truth to power, to us and to both Parties, and that, unfortunately, never buys you any friends.
I am not a religious person as you all know, but Jimmy Carter is a saint.
Jon H
@PaulW: “Carter may have been smart but he was also bull-headed. Dad told me tales about how he behaved as governor (public feuds with the Lt. Gov)”
Isn’t that a requirement for public office in the south?
Janet Strange
This is an amazing accomplishment. From 3.5 million cases in 1986 to 3,190 last year.
Great video from the Carter center.
(I teach microbiology so I love love love this story. My students hear a lot about the Carter Center.)
HeartlandLiberal
Jimmy Carter’s foundation and Habitat for Humanity are the only two organizations that I reliably write checks to at the end of each year with a clear conscience the money will be used for true good works.
And I treasure the Christmas card I get as a result signed by Jimmy and Rosalind every year. I post it on the door to my study.
JSD
@ John,
Carter’s work helps brown people ergo it doesn’t count.
SiubhanDuinne
For a number of years, I have been immensely privileged to work as a volunteer with staff at The Carter Center on Guinea Worm eradication. Former President Carter is a treasure, absolutely humble and generous with his time and person and energy. Rosalynn is also just great — her particular focus is on mental health issues, but she travels around the world with Jimmy, showing villagers in Africa how to do the simplest things like straining their water before they drink it so the GW larvae can’t enter the human host.
Guinea Worm is an ancient affliction. It’s thought to be the “Fiery Serpent” mentioned in scripture, literature and documents of antiquity. It’s one of the most disgusting, gag-inducing conditions you could imagine, yet it is simple and cheap in the extreme to treat, control, and eradicate. If it weren’t for Carter and volunteers not being allowed into war zones in Sudan for so long, GW would have been eliminated years ago.
Whatever his merits as a POTUS (personally, I don’t happen to think he was so terrible), Carter has been and is a living saint for the work he has done in bringing improved health and democracy and sustainability to people around the world. I secretly hope that Obama regularly consults him behind the scenes. As far as I’m concerned, “the black Jimmy Carter” line is a great tribute to Obama, not an insult.
Cain
Jimmy Carter is our national treasure. It’s too goddam bad people don’t know what a real christian looks like because Jimmy is it.
cain
feebog
If the mission to rescue the Embassy hostages in Iran had suceeded, Carter would have been re-elected and this country would be in a far better place. No Ronald Reagan, no run up of the debt, and we would no longer be dependent on foreign oil. What Carter has accomplished since he left office has been amazing, but I often wonder what kind of world we would be living in if he has won a second term.
Linda Binda
I wonder if it’s a trend for plagues to meet their end in eastern Africa? They ended smallpox in Somalia way back when. :D
But, yeah, go Jimmy, go. I wasn’t alive during his terms of Governor and President (I’m 26), but he’s always sounded like a good guy. :)
JSD
@ feebog
It’s hard to imagine we’d be independent of foreign oil. There’s just no good replacement for it. What would we be driving with otherwise? Flying our planes? What would we be using to grow our crops (from seed to shelf)? Manufacturing our medicines and plastics with? It’s a unique product with no truly viable substitute products.
Even in the face of peak oil, as we are now, we’re not taking the steps (like a massive investment in rail and electric vehicle research) that are needed to prepare for the loss of worldwide oil production predicted to start in the next 5-10 years. We face hard times ahead.
wag
Any President who thumbed his nose at Big Oil in the 70’s by putting solar panels on the White House is OK in my book. It only took Reagan a couple of months to pull the panels off and get us deeply in bed with BO again. House of Saud calling!!!!
The Truffle
@PaulW: I always thought Carter would’ve been a rockin’ Secretary of State.
MTiffany
First, @The Main Gauche of Mild Reason: “Bu.. bu.. but! Cardigans! Malaise!” ROFLMFAO
Second, “Boy, the wingnuts have this guy dead to rights, don’t they?” Well, yes, since he helps the two kinds of people the wingnuts hate – the poor and the brown.
Jackmormon
Awesome. Now anyone who criticizes Jimmy Carter can be maligned as “objectively pro-Guinea Worm.”
Splitting Image
August 7th is International Save the Guinea Worm Day, if anyone is interested. This thought-provoking website offers an alternate theory to the misguided notion that Guinea Worms are to blame for Guinea Worm disease.
Save the Guinea Worm Foundation
Ted Roosevelt. He ran against Taft as a Progressive and helped get him defeated in 1912. Other than that, I got nothing.
Yutsano
The man made quail with Paula Deen. ‘Nuff said.
Calming Influence
Hello? Defeat the Guinea worm? And you tellin’ me Carter ain’t a racist cracker? Sheeit.
Hart Williams
Yeah, I think that Carter was a lot better president than he’s given credit for, as well. But he had the bad luck to inherit a bunch of (seemingly) intractable problems: energy crisis, Nixon economy (with the wage & price control stuff still in place) and a huge mess left over from Watergate and the crazee crap from Ford’s two years of dithering.
Then, the Ronald Ray-gun buzzsaw of staged media ops, the whole Roger Ailes/Lee Atwater smear stuff that has now become the Roger Ailes/Karl Rove smear stuff, and, finally, the swiftboating of his presidency by the same people who have conscientiously swiftboated all memories of how SHITTY it was under Ray-gun and mythologized how GREAT it was with all the insane deficit spending and tax cuts.
But the solution to most of our economic woes was taking place in garages by out-of-work computer scientists who’d made the mistake of either smoking dope in college or protesting the war and couldn’t get Security clearance, which pretty much shut them out of the computer industry.
The auto industry continued to tank, and did anyone notice that they were saying for the last couple years “The WORST unemployment since 1984,” etc.” That was Ray-gun. The birth of the personal computer industry pulled the country out of its long economic malaise and, while Ray-gun gets credit for it, Carter had a vision of the future and Ray-gun had a vision of the past (including his space lasers, which he evidently got from old Buster Crabbe serials, ‘cuz they’ve never worked YET, and we’ve spent HOW MUCH on them?)
Carter is a superb human being, who actually tried to walk the talk, instead of talking the walk.
Hart Williams
Oh, and did I mention that Carter had a huge liberal majority in Congress that decided to go all Hamsher on his ass? (Sound familiar?)
Circular firing squad was what really did Carter in. Reagan’s people were masters of exploiting that, and terrifying congresspersons into going along with his batshit crazy agenda. (Now they pay big bucks to rewrite that miserable record. Successfully, too.)
Ravi Joshi
Jimmy, now that you got rid us of Guinea worms, when will you get rid us of Jim DeMints, Inhofes, Bushes?
Viva BrisVegas
Also the last President to actually achieve anything significant in the Middle East.
Hart Williams
Yeah. (Although, except for a fanatical nutcase with a gun, maybe Arafat and Rabin could have taken it the next step.)
Bob L
Oh that is so cool they are getting rid of that thing. Guinea worms are one of the most disguising diseases ever.
catclub
geg6
on Republicans, the closest one I know of is Hoover BEFORE he was president – quite the humanitarian. Less well liked after.
Kenneth Fair
This all sounds a little too much like “social justice” to me.
asiangrrlMN
I have always greatly admired Jimmy Carter. He may not have been the greatest president (though he was not anywhere near as bad as he’s been portrayed), but the humanitarian work he has done since leaving the office is amazing. And, I got to hear him speak when he came to my college! That was really cool.