Defending Jimmy Carter Against Philip Klein

I am not one to believe that you cannot speak ill of the dead, but all I ever demand is that these attacks be accurate. Still, when responding to those who do hold this philosophy, National Review Online writer Philip Klein said:

I have always striven to write the truth, and there is no way I could have written about Carter without reminding people, in detail, that he was a terrible president and an even worse former president.

This caught my attention because the article being talked about “Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former President” is full of errors. The article begins by discussing the economic failure of the United States under Carter, but it is impossible not to notice how Klein never cites a specific economic proposal of Carter’s which caused this to happen. Much of the bad economy under Carter was simply a continuation of what was going on under Nixon and Ford, and the situation hardly improved under Reagan, with Mark Ames writing in Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond:

The truth is that on a macroeconomic level, the difference between the Carter era and the Reagan era was minimal. For instance, economic growth during the Carter Administration averaged 2.8 percent annually, while under Reagan, from 1982 to 1989…