An Open Letter to Jimmy Carter

By Michael Moore

Dear President Carter:

I know you told me to call you Jimmy, but I couldn’t then. And I can’t now.

In 2004, you invited me to sit next to you in the presidential box at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. It was truly one of the great honors of my life. It also did you no favors, and in that moment I wondered why would you want to suffer the attacks for placing beside you the person who just a year earlier was booed off the stage at the Oscars for dressing down the commander in chief as a war criminal on the fifth night of the Iraq War.

But you didn’t care about the political reaction to you cozying up to me, the backlash you’d get from the 70% of the American public who

Columnists/Reporters Melina Paris Assistant Editor/Arts Hunter Chase Community News Reporter

Fabiola Esqueda Visual Journalist/ Social Media Director supported the invasion of Iraq. You weren’t offended by me who had stood in front of a billion people stating that we were being lied into this war, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, that we would find zero weapons of mass destruction, and that thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were about to die.

In fact, you agreed with me.

The news last weekend that you’ve decided to enter hospice — an “end of life” hospice as the news reports called it — was devastating. I broke down and cried. People will say that at 98 years old you’ve been blessed to live such

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