Equivalencies?

The extra helpings of disastrous screwups that are being dealt out by our current presidential administration have brought pundits to employ some truly dark language and evoke very very troubled times for our nation.

I refer, of course, to the Carter administration. Our oldest living former President set benchmarks for futility and error. Some were errors that were thrust upon him by circumstance, such as the Iranian hostage crisis, and the errors came from choosing a lousy option from a range of lousy options. Carter did seem to have a knack for picking those lousy options from the ”more lousy” end of the group, but he didn’t have very many good choices before him. Other errors he committed all on his own. He also gets dinged for not handling lunkhead relatives in the best way, such as his brother Billy.

I think the comparison is unfair. For one, President Carter’s approval of the botched raid to rescue some of those hostages signaled that he was actively interested in getting Americans out of unfriendly territory. He didn’t have a very good plan to do so, but he did think a U.S. president ought to do more than shrug when U.S. citizens — according to the Constitution, the people he works for —were surrounded by unfriendly and violent persons with more than a passing interest in doing them harm.

For another, the current president’s lunkhead relative is his son Hunter. As mentioned, former President Carter’s lunkhead relative was Billy. From Hunter we’re getting half-million dollar paintings made by a guy with zero history in the art world. From Billy we got beer. And although I was way too young to have tasted it, one look at Billy Carter tells you he knew a little something about beer.

On the other hand, even if “Billy Beer” was a direct product from skunk central it’d have to be better than one of Hunter Biden’s paintings.