As a follow-up to his earlier posts on the subject, Big Trunk at Power Line writes an extensive and detailed rebuttal to former VP Walter Mondale's eccentric and unbalanced criticisms of the Bush administration's foreign policy at Macalester College last week. I had addressed this to some extent in my post earlier, which Big Trunk is kind enough to mention. However, his exposition explains in much greater detail why Mondale is the wrong messenger with the wrong message at exactly the wrong time:

Those of us who lived as adults through the four years of the Carter administration in which Walter Mondale last served as a public officeholder will find the manifestations of BDS in Mondale’s statements especially strange. Although Mondale seems to believe that the Carter administration foreign policy in which he played such an active role should serve as a benchmark, we may be excused for thinking that it was rather an unprecedented disaster.

We recall, for example, how Carter proudly announced that the United States had overcome its "inordinate fear of Communism," famously planted a kiss on the cheek of Leonid Brezhnev, and then reacted with shock when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

The essay describes in devastating detail how Carter deviated from the long-established policy of containment until the Afghanistan invasion, and how Carter's ineptitude caused American prestige to suffer an unprecedented drop. He quotes Henry Kissinger:

Henry Kissinger observed at the time that the Carter administration had managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.

Read the entire essay. It is a grim reminder of the dark days in modern American history when defeatists held power and America was in full retreat in global politics. While the post-office careers of both Mondale and Carter demonstrate the forgiveness that makes America great, it also demonstrates the historical amnesia that constantly puts America in danger.

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