Forget Al Gore, Why Can't Jimmy Carter Move On?

Despite getting the Nobel Prize for Anti-American Rhetoric, the President of Malaise seems to think that George Will cost him the election against Reagan in 1980 and lies about it still. George Will kicks Carter's big dumb teeth down his throat today in response.

A quarter of a century has passed since 44 states said "No, thanks" to Jimmy Carter's offer to serve a second term, yet he still evidently thinks his loss is explained not by foreign policy debacles, such as invading Iran with eight helicopters, and a misery index -- inflation plus unemployment -- of 22, almost triple today's index. Rather, he seems to think approximately this:

Ronald Reagan won because he won the only debate. He won it not because of Carter's debate performance ("I had a discussion with my daughter, Amy, the other day, before I came here, to ask her what the most important issue was. She said she thought nuclear weaponry . . .") but only because Reagan had Carter's briefing book. And Reagan had it because this columnist gave it to him.

That last accusation, for which there is no evidence, is, as he has been told, false. But he is a recidivist fibber. Last Oct. 21, on National Public Radio, he said: "We found out later that one of Ronald Reagan's supporters inside the White House had stolen my briefing book, my top-secret briefing book that prepared me for the debate. And a very prominent news reporter was the one who took the briefing book to Ronald Reagan and helped drill him on the things that I might say if he said certain things." Asked who that reporter was, Carter replied, "It was George Will, and it was later known that he did that."

But one cannot know what isn't so, and "top secret" is a government classification inapplicable to campaign fodder. Still, Carter continues to retail -- and to embroider -- his fable. Recently in a Plains, Ga., church, he illustrated his aptitude for the virtue of forgiveness by saying that once, after columnist Will read a report of his telling his briefing book tale, Will wrote to him "asking for forgiveness."

He then details the letter. Go read it and wish that Carter would stick to something useful, like building houses.