Jimmy Carter to the Rescue

As President, he gave new meaning to the word "naïve." Now Jimmy Carter is outdoing himself wandering the Middle East to broker an end to decades of murderous hatred in the region.

Today Carter, an admirable man when he builds houses for the poor and helps refugees around the world, announces he has "no doubt that both the Arab world and the Palestinians, including Hamas, will accept Israel's right to live in peace."

"But," the New York Times reports, "some of Hamas's commitments to Carter, in talks he held with the Islamist group's top leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus, were short on details and remarks by a Gaza-based Hamas official suggested the movement was not abandoning long-held positions."

This is vintage Carter, recalling a White House briefing in 1979 after he had negotiated a treaty to reduce nuclear weapons. As Carter and Leonid Brezhnev, the leader of the Soviet Union, reached agreement, Carter, according to Time Magazine, seemed "to have developed a protectiveness, almost a fondness, for the older man, especially after he saved Brezhnev from falling" and later "held Brezhnev's left hand all the way down the front walk" of the Soviet Embassy.

Carter's kindness was rewarded months later when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, destroying any chances for the treaty's ratification by the Senate.

At the White House briefing, Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security advisor, was lauding their "calm, consistent, predictable" foreign policy when I asked, "How does this explain the President's embrace of Brezhnev as 'a good friend' and, when the Soviets make a predictably aggressive move, overreacting and scaring our people by reviving registration for the draft?" There was no answer.

During his term in office, Carter was humiliated by American impotence throughout the Iranian hostage crisis and during the Mariel Boat Lift, when the US failed to screen out criminals and the mentally ill Castro sent us among the 125,000 legitimate political refugees.

He ended his term in office puzzled by a "national malaise" and asking Americans "to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel" to combat rising gasoline prices.

Now, as an octogenarian, Jimmy Carter is going to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lots of luck.

The Right Choice for an Empty Oval Office

Fred Thompson may be onto something. Today's New York Times puzzles over his "sleepy, unconventional" approach to pursuing the presidency, noting, "Indeed, what has defined his campaign recently has to a large degree been his absence from the trail."

But the Senator/actor who got his start during the Nixon impeachment may be putting his experience to good use. After the trauma of an administration that tried to do too much, the country was ready for a vacant Oval Office or, failing that, an innocuous president like Gerald Ford and then a low-key Jimmy Carter, who was perplexed by the "national malaise."

With the high-energy Rudy Giuliani imploding in scandals, laid-back Fred Thompson may be foxier than he seems. As an antidote to Bush's imperial presidency, he may be showing voters how little he would do to make them anxious or fearful.

His ambling through primary states could be just the ticket for the times. Before the debate, he had a week with only one retail campaign event: a “meet Fred” in the back room of a Southern Carolina barbecue restaurant with no music, food or even chairs. A hundred voters stood for three hours before he arrived for a few remarks and half a dozen questions. Less than 30 minutes later, he left.

At the Florida state convention, other candidates blustered for half an hour or more. Thompson chatted for four minutes, leaving one supporter to say, “We were all hoping he would say something we could get behind, but there was nothing.”

Republicans, his campaign manager sums it up, will have decide whether they want "the Energizer Bunny or a consistent conservative."

At this rate, if Fred Thompson gets the nomination, he may nod off during debates with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama and doze all the way to the White House.

If voters want a restful President, he's their man.

The Nation as Head Case

Joe Lieberman and Frank Rich agree about something: America is mentally ill.

"We are a people in clinical depression," Rich writes in his New York Times column today. Sen. Lieberman dissents slightly, saying it is only Democrats who are “politically paranoid.”

Depressed or paranoid, according to the good doctors, we have to pull up our socks and get our heads straight.

But our mood disorder may be more like the "national malaise" Jimmy Carter diagnosed, which lifted as soon as he left the Oval Office.

After seven years of Bush-Cheney syndrome, who wouldn't be more than a little crazed? At Johns Hopkins University the other day, Dr. Lieberman presented “a case study in the distrust and partisan polarization that now poisons our body politic on even the most sensitive issues of national security.”

The Bush-Cheney quack cites "wild conspiracy theories" of left-winger bloggers that the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment was an excuse to attack Iran. After Iraq, he contends, only mad people could suspect that.

More evidence of political derangement, from the other direction, is Rich's equating the Democrats' confirmation of Martin Mukasey as Attorney General with what Pervez Musharraf is doing in Pakistan.

Rich, normally a voice of reason, goes off the rails today asserting that Sens. Schumer and Feinstein were "willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb" in approving Mukasey without his condemnation of waterboarding in a way somehow parallel to Musharraf's power grab in Pakistan.

Metaphors can stretch only so far without getting nutty. The Administration's madness should not become a contagion that keeps critics from making the distinction between the repression of a dictator and a political compromise over starting to undo some of Bush's damage to the US Justice Department.

That way lies madness.