The LuLac Edition #5, 230, January 2nd, 2025

 

MAYBE I’M AMAZED

Our “Maybe I’m Amazed” logo

JIMMY CARTER EDITION

MAYBE I’M AMAZED….that Jimmy Carter’s much maligned malaise speech actually worked well for him at the time. Our memories of this ill-fated speech have been flawed.  At the time, it was insanely popular. Although it was well received by Carter’s supporters, it sent his popularity soaring. Polls conducted in the aftermath gave Carter an 11-point bounce. The White House was flooded with mail from supportive citizens who agreed with everything their president was saying. Far from being tone-deaf, Carter’s speech struck a real chord.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED……..that Carter was the victim of a press that blew out of proportion the rabbit incident. Taking an oar, Carter chased the creature off with a few flicks of water. It was the sort of absolutely trivial incident that no one involved would ever normally remember—until the press got hold of it.Across the nation, Carter was portrayed as a helpless laughingstock. A guy who couldn’t even win a battle with a rabbit. The Washington Post dubbed the creature “PAWS,” a play on Steven Spielberg’s shark in Jaws. A hit song was released. The incident is so infamous that comics still reference it today. Amazingly, it also changed the course of politics for the next 45 years.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED…….that Carter used UFO’s as part of his 1976 campaign. In 1976, as things were heating up in the race between the hopeful peanut farmer from Georgia and incumbent President Gerald Ford, Carter pledged to put UFOs on his White House agenda. His plan was to “encourage” the government to release every piece of evidence and information they had. While this included handing files over to the general public, Carter indicated that he thought scientists should be the major beneficiaries, presumably so the whole of mankind might learn something useful.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED……that every President of the United States has been religious.  But there’s “regular religious,” and then there’s “Jimmy Carter religious.” The former president had a level of theological knowledge more suited to an archbishop than a politician. Friends say that he could quote the Bible chapter and verse. And President Carter liked to do nothing more with that knowledge than share it.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED……that shouldn’t be surprising to hear that Jimmy Carter was an overachiever as a kid. By the age of 13, young Jimmy Carter was a property-owning landlord. As a child of the Great Depression, it was instilled into Carter from a young age to work hard. But while most kids would be happy getting a paper route and saving up to buy comics (or whatever the heck kids spent their money on in those days), Carter aimed his sights higher. From the age of five, he picked, bagged and sold his own peanuts on the streets of his hometown. By the age of eight, he’d saved enough money to start buying bales of cotton at a discount. When he turned 13, the price of cotton went back up. The teenage Jimmy sold his entire stock for a profit, bought five houses in his town, and rented them out to families. It was this same acumen that later helped him turn his family’s floundering peanut farm into a prosperous business.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED….that 48 years ago, this became a story. In mid-1976, the presidential race appeared to be a foregone conclusion. Carter was popular and riding high, while Gerald Ford was still taking flak for pardoning Nixon. Then Carter made a strangely ill-judged remark to a reporter. With one sentence, he nearly sank his presidential campaign. The reporter was working for Playboy magazine, which wanted a feature on the Democratic nominee. Unfortunately, Carter was a terrible interview subject. Uptight, rigid, and unwilling to comment on ordinary things, he seemed to be sabotaging his own press. So the reporter asked Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, to make his candidate say something—anything—that might engage the magazine’s readers. Powell agreed. The next day, Carter sat down with the reporter and declared: “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it.”

MAYBE I’M AMAZED……that there was an assassination attempt on Carter that seemed to be a throwback to the Kennedy attack. On  November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald aimed a rifle from a sixth-floor window, pulled the trigger, and changed history. Since then, presidential assassination attempts have become a fact of modern public life. Jimmy Carter was no exception. Only this time, the attempt had a twist that pushed it right into The Twilight Zone territory. It all began in 1979 when a homeless man, Raymond Lee Harvey, was arrested for carrying an old, blank-firing pistol where President Carter was due to make a speech. Harvey claimed that he was part of a four-man plot to assassinate the president. While he and an accomplice created a distraction, two Mexican snipers intended to shoot Carter from the crowd. At first, Harvey was dismissed as mentally ill. Then, police raided his hotel room and found a shotgun and boxes of ammunition. Now worried that Harvey was telling the truth, the police arrested his supposed accomplice. Then things got really weird. Harvey’s accomplice was a man named Oswald (or the Latino form, “Osvaldo,” in some versions). Two men who jointly shared a name with history’s most famous assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, apparently just happened to decide they wanted to kill the sitting president. Although their plan failed, it sparked countless conspiracy theories that the men were deliberately chosen to send Carning.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED….that Carter singlehandedly wiped out a disease. Here’s how. n the late 1980s, Carter took a trip to a small village in Ghana. Stepping into the square, he saw a horrible sight. A woman was holding her own breast, swollen up to nearly 12 inches (30 cm) across. A worm protruded from the end, writhing in the midday heat. The woman had Guinea worm disease, a hideously painful infection that affected 3.5 million people worldwide. Faced with that awful image, Carter vowed to do something about it. And he did. By the time he died, his foundation had nearly wiped out Guinea worm disease. In 2023, there were only 14 cases globally. By all accounts, his foundation should soon finish his work. It will be the first time that we humans have eliminated a disease since smallpox. (LuLac, ListVerse)