"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," President Jimmy Carter is quoted in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me."
White House (or, more properly, presidential ranch) spokesman Tony Fratto replied: "I think it's sad that President Carter's reckless personal criticism is out there. I think it's unfortunate. And I think he is proving to be increasingly irrelevant with these kinds of comments."
(Both paragraphs modified from those at www.cnn.com .)
Whether or not former President Carter is becoming "increasingly irrelevant" strikes me as itself an irrelevancy. The question is not whether he is irrelevant but whether he is right. I'd tend to say "yes", but with the following caveat:
I have lived through this sad excuse for an administration, and certainly, of those I can remember (maybe Truman, very vaguely; certainly Eisenhower to the present), Bush's administration qualifies as the worst, and not by a few percentage points, either. But I didn't live through the administrations of Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding (both Republicans, incidentally), both of which also have a very bad reputation among historians, particularly for the kind of corruption whose stink we have smelled coming out of Washington since January of 2001, and particularly since 2003. (1) And I should point out, to liberals like myself who find themselves distressed by the Patriot Act and warrant-free wiretapping, that it was that icon of modern liberalism, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who authorized the incarceration of thousands of Americans who had done nothing more sinister than mistakenly choose ancestors who happened to be Japanese. Bush has at least refrained from carrying out a similar pogrom against Americans who happen to worship Allah, something many of our fellow countrymen would be happy to see. Given his record with appointment of blacks and women to high-ranking posts (think Colin Powell, Condi Rice), I suspect that his heart is in the right place (well, sort of), though he might want to consider spending fifteen minutes each day, singing, along with The Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, "If I Only Had a Brain ..."
Nonetheless, there is little question in my mind that, overall, Carter's assessment of the Bush administration is not too different from the one that historians of the future will assign to it (though they may also relegate it to a footnote, something that those of us living through it may find hard to imagine).