Bush admin fires back at Carter

Yep, they called him "irrelevant." This from an administration that is routinely surrendering its key figures to federal authorities while erasing as many emails as possible. And this is where I get to clarify something I wrote yesterday. Yeah, it was funny when I wrote it, and subsequently I saw that great (?) minds think alike; others had written similar jokes comparing Carter's attack on Bush to, say, Bill O'Reilly accusing Bill Bennett of moral hypocrisy.

But Carter is right about one thing: "We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war...a radical departure from all previous administration policies," he says, in reference to the fact that, well, the U.S. now claims the right to attack any country it deems a threat, before said threat is even close to being realized. Following Bush, the U.S. can even do so on the flimsiest of evidence, using a perverse "magnitude massively outweighs actual risk" calculability that requires only that possible magnitude be increased in proportion to lack of evidence concerning risk.

That Bush the Younger was the President who did this is obviously not attributable to his unique identity as Bush the Younger. Political, social, material, economic, yes even "cultural" forces had to converge a certain way. But Carter is right: That policy has now been endorsed, even if subsequently (and nearly universally) condemned. That is unprecedented.