Jimmy Carter is at it again, making his best effort to muddy and confuse things in Nicaragua by coming to Sandinista party leader Daniel Ortega’s assistance for the third time in less than two decades. In 1979, Carter helped Ortega fight his way into power and establish a Communist dictatorship worse than the Somoza tyranny that preceded it. When Ortega was voted out of power in a 1990 landslide, Carter and his assistant Robert Pastor brokered a deal that allowed Daniel’s brother to keep the army under Sandinista control. Ortega was buried in yet another landslide last week, and like the Communist he is, he refused to concede his defeat and complained of fraud. Carter, who had been photographed laughing and smiling with Ortega before the vote, legitimized Ortega’s ludicrous complaint by calling for a reexaminatlon of the ballot count. And so, thanks to Jimmy Carter, Ortega still has never had to accept the results of a democratic election.
Carter and Pastor take credit for bringing “reconciliation” to Nicaragua, but all they’ve brought is misery.
Maybe the Nicaraguan people should vote on whether they ever want to see Carter and Pastor in their country again. We think we know how that vote would turn out, too.
But another American behaved in a genuinely praise-worthy fashion in the walkup to the Nicaraguan election: the State Department’s usually diplomatic spokesman, Nicholas Burns. He proved very undiplomatic, indeed. When he was asked whether the U.S. government believed Daniel Ortega was a democrat, Burns replied that he would not use the word “democrat” to describe Ortega. Pressed further by the shocked gathering of journalists, Burns went on to say that the American people “remember the 1970s and ’80s. . . . We remember anti- American acts; we remember outrages against the American people. . . . I don’t believe if you took a survey of the American people that 99.8 percent of our population would describe him as a good democrat not with friends like Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein.” Bravo.
