I'd love to offer former President Jimmy Carter the kind of quiet respect his office ought to deserve, but his weirdly vindictive and plainly untrue comments as he hawks his new new book shouldn't be left alone. It would have been nice to forget the nightmare of his presidency, and the wasted opportunity his election was for generations of Americans, but if he's seriously going to say in public that it was Ted Kennedy's fault health care reform didn't pass, then I'm going to say what a fraud and waste his entire career was.
They like to say that Carter has been a better ex-president than president. Which frankly, isn't that hard a post to pass. But the man does not get nearly enough blame for obnoxious trends in national politics that he introduced. These are things many of us think may have come from Nixon, or Reagan, but are in fact his unique contribution to American culture.
