And the winner is....

Jimmy Carter. Congrats to the former president for being the first ever winner of the G-T-W "WTF was he thinking?" contest. It wasn't really even all that hard to pick our winner.

The first nominee was Phillip Wellman, the minor league baseball manager who inspired it all. He gets a pass because, while he was completely obnoxious and way over the top, he was presumably trying to be entertaining.

The second nominee was Gary Sheffield of the Detroit Tigers, for his "Hispanics are more common in baseball because they're easier to control" lecture. He gets a pass because, as more people commented on the topic, it turns out that there is some degree of truth to it. I never knew that players from outside the US are not "drafted" in the normal way. The teams just find youngsters (Thanks to Ernie Harwell for that term), bring them to the US, and pay them whatever they can get away with. Given the desperation of these kids to make it and avoid going back to a life of poverty in Guatemala or wherever, the money is appallingly bad.

In fact, Sheffield might deserve a degree of praise. Perhaps his comments will bring this out into the open, and force MLB to change the way they do business in Latin America. Not necessarily likely, but it could happen.

Which brings us back to Dhimmi Jhimmi. There are no excuses for his particular brand of stupidity. I still shake my head in wonderment when I read this:

'In the Soviet Union, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko laughed at Carter's human rights record behind his back, but knew how to manipulate Carter in public. Gromyko browbeat Carter, telling him the USSR's health care and housing trumped America's. "I couldn't argue," Carter winced in his book, "Living Faith." "We each had a definition of human rights, and differences like this must be recognized and understood."' (emphasis added)

As I mentioned in the original post, there's no logical basis for Carter's statement here. The facts would be easy for anyone to discover, especially if one has the CIA, the NSA, Congress, and the entire US government to assist your research.

So congrats to our worst ex-president. I suspect we'll be seeing him a lot more in the next few years.

And as commenter Eduardo Stump said, Carter might even be a candidate for a "WTF was he thinking?" lifetime award. Maybe I'll hold off on that kind of prestigious award until the next time he opens his ignorant mouth.

Which will likely be another week or two.