Is there no end to the 39th President’s ability to embarrass himself and his country:

“In a democracy, I realize you don’t need to talk to the top leader to know how the country feels,” he said over the weekend, responding to a question from an Israeli journalist who noted that Mr. Carter had been snubbed by most of Israel’s top leadership and reprimanded by its president, Shimon Peres. “When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that’s the dictator, because he speaks for all the people.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens dissects the insanity of this particular statement:

Taken at face value, this is a reflection of every dictator’s conceit: that his will is also the general will, whether the people agree with him or not. This is what Fidel Castro meant when he praised Cuba’s elections, in which only the Communist Party is on the ballot, as “the most democratic in the world.” Perhaps Mr. Carter has harbored similar views about the relative merits of his opinion versus the people’s since he was turned out of high office by 44 states. Yet a dictator does not speak for the people. Properly speaking, a dictator speaks for none of the people. A dictator speaks only for himself, while “the people” are transformed, through force and fear, into an abstraction, an instrument, a rhetorical trope. On the contrary, it is only in a democracy where the government can morally and lawfully be said to speak for the people, since it was morally and lawfully chosen by the people to speak for them. Which means that Mr. Carter has matters precisely backwards: It is in democracies such as Israel where the views of the leadership matter most, and in dictatorships such as Syria where they matter least.

So tell us, Mr. Carter ?

Did Joseph Stalin, who murdered millions on a whim, “speak for” the people of Russia, or himself ?

Does Kim Jong Il, who surrounds himself in luxury while his people starve and live under mind-numbing Communist conformity, “speak for” the people of North Korea, or himself ?

What about Hitler ? Idi Amin ? Pol Pot ? Mao ? The Burmese Junta ?

It is fairly clear that, notwithstanding his rhetorical homages to human rights, this man is more comfortable sitting down with dictators and terrorists who speak for nobody but themselves than he is with democratically elected leaders who would dare point out that he’s a hypocrite.

H/T: The Right Wing Liberal