Jimmy Carter is back in the news again. The former president and peanut farmer has been stumping in Nevada for his son, Jack, who is running for the U.S. Senate. True to form, Carter is claiming that President George Bush has brought the United States international disgrace by having the temerity to defend the country against its enemies.

The former president told a crowd of about 300 on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno today that the nation is more sharply divided that it has ever been as a result of Bush's policies.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, he says he's deeply embarrassed that the American government now stands convicted around the world as one of the greatest abusers of civil rights. He continued the theme in a dinner speech to 700 at a Democratic fundraiser tonight, saying every past president has been a supporter of human rights, until this one.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! When will this moron shut up?

Carter's vociferous criticism of Bush violates a longstanding taboo in American politics. Bill Clinton, another failed Democratic ex-president, has eagerly followed this precedent, hurling his own barbs at the Bush Administration. In contrast, the two living Republican ex-presidents, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, have maintained a much lower and more dignified profile.

As Victor Davis Hanson noted earlier this week, "Carter and Clinton, as self-appointed moral censors, have a bad habit of campaigning for international approval (remember Carter’s embarrassing lobbying for the Nobel Prize) by ankle-biting current American Presidents, and by extension their very alma mater." VDH adds:

The truth? Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are both small-minded men, with a wide mean streak. And for all the smiles and deference to folksy Protestant religion, they display an un-Christian vindictiveness that makes us happy they are not in office. A psychiatrist would diagnose all sorts of neuroses of compensation and projection, their psyches finding overt ways of balancing (and hiding) some very dark emotions.

To this I would add only that the frantic exegeses of Carter and Clinton seem motivated by a desperate desire for approval. But what's done is done. In their hearts these men know that the judgment of History will not be kind.