Carter: 10 minutes to change the world

It's become a Hay tradition, a game played in the biggest tent at the festival and always before a packed house: the game is Fantasy American President.

Two years ago, the key player was Al Gore, preaching a message on global warming that had the crowd mourning that he was in a wet marquee in Wales rather than where he belonged, in the White House.

Tonight Hay offered a new collective prayer: if only we could have a man like Jimmy Carter back in the Oval Office. Now 83 years old, the former president - so often mocked by his countrymen and a victim of what he called an "involuntary retirement" when he was booted out in 1980 - held his audience spellbound as he set out a radically alternative vision of America's place in the world.

"When I'm the president of the United States," he intoned, the voice still strong, "My country will never again torture a prisoner. When I'm the president of the United States, we will never again attack another country unless our security is directly threatened. When I'm the president of the United States, human rights will be the foundation of our foreign policy." He went on in that vein, with ringing declarations on global warming, a promise to honour international agreements and to bring "security and peace to Israel and all its neighbours and treat them all on an equal
basis." The audience thundered its applause, signalling that this was the American speech they yearned to hear. Carter insisted that a new president would not need a hundred days to change America's image in the world, just the "ten minutes" required to say those words.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_freedland/2008/05/carter_10_minutes_to_change_th.html

What a person! Covers all aspects with diplomacy and intelligence.

This was good too: The most intriguing exchange came when interviewer Philippe Sands QC pressed the former president on whether George W Bush, who recently admitted authorising interrogation procedures widely seen as amounting to torture, could face prosecution for war crimes. Carter replied that he hoped Bush would live a peaceful "productive life - in our country." Sands told me afterwards that he understood that as "clear confirmation" that while Bush would face no challenge in his own country, "what happened outside the country was another matter entirely."

& co. and would probably extend to mcshame. But we our candidate steps up and takes that oath the world will sign in relief.

a first-class world citizen.

K&R

Jimmy Carter has been a great person whose life will be recorded hundreds of years from now as truly an exceptional great man. GW Bush will be recorded, if even remembered as a evil and unintelligent puppet.

Go Jimmy Go!


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