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Pious the First

McNuggets of wisdom from the 39th president.

Mar 20, 2006, Vol. 11, No. 25 • By STEVEN F. HAYWARD
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Our Endangered Values
America's Moral Crisis
by Jimmy Carter
Simon & Schuster, 224 pp., $25

IT IS DIFFICULT, WHEN confronting the miasma of tired bromides strung together in this book, to point to a single childlike sentimentality that fully expresses the smallness of Jimmy Carter's soul, but this one comes close: "[Rosalynn and I] have been amazed at the response of people to these new latrines, especially in Ethiopia, and to learn that the primary thrust for building them has come from women."

If Carter merely confined himself to digging latrines in countries that lack the common sense to dig them for themselves, he would deserve many of the public accolades he receives. But he trades on his humanitarian good works to burnish his image as an elder statesman, brimming with oracular profundity. The result, as in his current book, is as empty and embarrassing as the naked emperor's new clothes.

What Garry Wills once called Carter's "willed narrowness of mastery" is on full display in Our Endangered Values, which offers a complete inventory of current liberal clichés. But it is so weakly executed that, had the manuscript come across the transom from an assistant professor named John Smith instead of St. Jimmy of Plains, it could only have found print with a vanity publisher. Our Endangered Values makes Al Gore's Earth in the Balance read like the Critique of Pure Reason by comparison.

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