Former president Jimmy Carter considers it a compliment that Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain thinks Barack Obama is an even worst chief executive than Carter, bitterly blasting the war hero and veteran lawmaker as a "warmonger."
The shocking name-calling came during an interview on
"Ronan Farrow Daily" aired by MSNBC Friday. The sit-down was conducted Thursday.
"That's a compliment to be coming from a warmonger," Carter said in the interview at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
"I was lucky enough, when I was president, to keep our country at peace and provide peace for others,” said. “I was lucky enough to go through my four years — we never dropped a bomb, never fired a missile, we never shot a bullet."
Early this year, McCain, who’s expected to become chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said
Obama's handling of the civil war in Syria made him a worse president than Carter.
"I have never seen anything like this in my life. I thought Jimmy Carter was bad, but he pales in comparison to this president in my view," McCain told a Phoenix radio station in January.
But other conservatives have also compared unfavorably the administrations of Obama and Carter, whose foreign policy crises included the taking of
American hostages in Iran in 1979.
Carter, however, has criticized Obama’s foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, because the strategy
"changes from time to time," and scolded Obama for waiting too long
to take on the Islamic State group (ISIS).
"We let the Islamic State build up its money, capability and strength and weapons while it was still in Syria," he said in the interview. "Then when [ISIS] moved into Iraq, the Sunni Muslims didn’t object to their being there and about a third of the territory in Iraq was abandoned."
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