Matthew Yglesias: good point

A little while back I did a post which led a commenter (the most excellent Praktike, I believe) to suggest it was time to revisit "The Paranoid Style In American Politics" and with the news that the increasingly influential Power Line blog thinks "Jimmy Carter isn't just misguided or ill-informed. He's on the other side," I think that's clearly right. Jimmy Carter left office as one of the least-loved presidents ever, and you'd still be hard-pressed to find a liberal who'll mount a really full-throated defense of his tenure in office. But on the other side? Not some academic or blogger or activist type, but a veteran of the United States military and a former President of the United States. On the other side. A traitor. These are serious allegations, seriously demented.

I don't think it's at all unreasonable to say that Hindrocket owes Carter a serious apology. Flinging this sort of totally unsubstantiated allegation is disgusting and utterly destructive of any effort to have serious debate about anything. Is Jimmy Carter really in league with the jihadist forces responsible for the murder of thousands of Americas? Is this what Power Line's fans and those who link to them believe? That a jihadist agent managed to get himself elected president? That an ex-president turned traitor?

I can't think of anything to add.
He said it well. Apparently a bunch of trackbacks and some one hundred sixty-plus comments also are mostly in agreement.

(And I'm tired of hearing a lot of latter day moaning and cheap shots about the Carter presidency. I'm biased, of course, because I happen to think that Jimmy Carter's worst mistake was micromanagement. And in his attempt to do the right thing, he angered a lot of people by not being mean enough. I may be the only person who voted for him because he had Zbigniew Brzezinski as an advisor. I knew of Brzezinski from reading Alvin Toffler's Future Shock in 1969.)