Jimmy Carter once again refuses to shut up

Our 39th president just can't seem to shut up.

The Washington Post runs a short AP item today with the following headline: "Carter 'Disturbed' by Direction of U.S." The headline should have been truncated to "Carter 'Disturbed.'" Because he is.

Former President Jimmy Carter, on a tour to promote his latest book, is sharply questioning the direction the Bush administration has taken the country.

"Everywhere you go, you hear, 'What has happened to the United States of America? We thought you used to be the champion of human rights. We thought you used to protect the environment. We thought you used to believe in the separation of church and state,'" Carter said Friday at Unity Temple.

He should have added: "What happened? We thought you used to do nothing when you were attacked by Islamic fundamentalists."


And you know Carter's right that the people he speaks to everywhere he goes -- college campuses, left-wing churches, third-world dictatorships -- liked it a lot better that way.

So Carter says (annoying registration required):

We now have a new policy called pre-emptive war…We’ve reserved the right to go to war with another country if they have an unsavory leader we want to remove or sometime in the distant future our security might be threatened.

The distant future? How about November 1979, on his presidential watch, when the Iranians took our people hostage in the embassy in Tehran, and he did nothing for the last 14 months of his presidency, other than to send a handful of under-armed and under-staffed troops on a hopeless rescue mission? If he couldn't bring himself to do anything in response to an actual attack, day after day for 444 days, he's got no business talking about how imminent the threat has to be now.



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