Came the energy crisis of the late '70s, caused in large part by government punishment of the energy companies via regulation and taxation. How did Carter propose to lead us out of this crisis? By further punishing the companies -- confiscating their "windfall profits" from the higher oil prices that supplied the capital requisite to finding more oil and gas.
The moralist-in-chief had diagnosed the problem. It was less an economic or foreign policy problem, he told the American people, than it was a "crisis of the American spirit." We Americans "needed to have faith in each other." And the government needed to order utility companies to use less oil.
Then there was foreign policy. We cut adrift the Shah of Iran, a reliable American ally, because presumably the clergy trying to overthrow him were more moral than he. Then the Ayatollah Khomeini took over, and the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis followed. The Carter administration twisted, turned, agonized -- and failed utterly to retrieve the hostages. Almost the minute the tough-talking Ronald Reagan took over the reins, Khomeini decided the game was up. He set the hostages free.
Carter's psychic need for post-1980 redemption must be profound beyond reckoning. He was a good boy for a while, promoting fair elections and democracy abroad -- for which he got the Nobel Peace Prize (in part probably because the judges wanted to show up Bush).
Why, then, the ant-Bush tirade? With Jimmy Carter one never knows. It suffices, perhaps, to know that he's smarter than all of us put together. That much you figure out just by listening to him.