Former President Jimmy Carter has once again demonstrated the absurdity that helped him accomplish his impressive slide into irrelevance. From USA Today:

Former president Jimmy Carter called Republican presidential candidate John McCain a “distinguished naval officer,” but he said the Arizona senator has been “milking every possible drop of advantage” from his time served as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Carter ... said he was bewildered by McCain’s performance at the Saddleback Presidential Forum hosted by pastor and author Rick Warren in Lake Forest, Calif., earlier this month.

Carter said that whether he was asked about religion, domestic or foreign affairs, every answer came back to McCain’s 5½ years as a POW.

“John McCain was able to weave in his experience in a Vietnam prison camp, no matter what the question was,” Carter said. “It’s much better than talking about how he’s changed his total character between being a senator, a kind of a maverick … and his acquiescence in the last few months with every kind of lobbyist pressure that the right-wing Republicans have presented.”

(Read the article and see the complete interview here.)

You know, I haven’t spent five and a half years being tortured in a dark prison cell in North Vietnam, so I’m just guessing here, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that for people who have, that experience permeates their entire being and bears on everything they do.

Jimmy Carter has set a new bar for presumptuousness—and with his record, that’s saying something.