FOX News Channel host John Gibson unleashed a vitriolic personal screed against former President Jimmy Carter on the September 27 edition of The Big Story with John Gibson, calling Carter “a calamity”; claiming that Carter's “presidential years shall live in infamy”; suggesting that Carter “angled for the Nobel Prize”; and declaring that Carter's presidency “created the worst and most bitter years of my life and the lives of every American I knew.” Gibson's attack, issued during his program's concluding “My Word” editorial segment, was a response to Carter's September 27 Washington Post op-ed, in which the former president asserted that “a repetition of the problems of 2000 now seems likely” in Florida.

In his op-ed, Carter -- who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts” -- pointed out that “some basic international requirements for a fair election are missing in Florida.” Carter then listed “the two most significant of these requirements” (a nonpartisan electoral commission and uniformity in voting procedures) and explained how Florida has failed to meet them.

Recent events validate Carter's concern about Florida's voting practices. In May, Florida Secretary of State Glenda E. Hood, an appointee of Florida Governor Jeb Bush, “distributed a secret list of 48,000 alleged former felons and instructed county election supervisors to remove them from the voter rolls,” according to The Guardian. After a judge ordered that the list be made public, it was discovered that “about 2,700 people who had received clemency were still on the list” and that it included “about 28,000 Democrats and around 9,500 Republicans,” according to USA Today. And as the Guardian reported, the list contained the names of over 20,000 African Americans (who tend to vote Democratic) and only 61 Latinos (who tend to vote Republican). In addition, Miami Herald executive editor Tom Fiedler agreed on the September 28 edition of CBS's The Early Show that Florida has indeed failed to meet the two fair election requirements Carter outlined in his op-ed.

From the September 27 edition of FOX News Channel's The Big Story with John Gibson:

GIBSON: Jimmy Carter is at it again. The former president -- whose presidential years shall live in infamy, as far as I'm concerned -- is now warning U.S. voters that Team Bush is preparing to steal the Florida election this year.

[...]

This is the same ex-president who angled for the Nobel Prize as an overt rebuke to President Bush for ignoring Jimmy Carter's advice and proceeding with a war against Saddam Hussein. This is the same Jimmy Carter whose presidency created the worst and most bitter years of my life and the lives of every American I knew. He was a calamity as a president and yet he has maintained the gall to sit in judgment of elections and those elected?

[...]

Jimmy, you're getting on in years. Don't drive at night, don't write for the op-ed page. Reading it will be quite enough.