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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 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.
Adding more fuel to the fire as we sat there in your box was the fact that in 2,000 theaters across the country that summer, audiences were making Fahrenheit 9/11 the only documentary in history to become the #1 grossing movie in North America.
Right wing media went bananas over the shot on live TV of you wanting me to sit beside you as we watched over the nomination of the Democrat who would almost remove George W. Bush from office.
I had a great conversation that night with you and Rosalynn. Your running commentary on the Democrats was priceless. Your sense of humor was making it all bearable for me.
Rest of letter at link below.
