Meaningless Endorsements

Here's an odd or an end to clean up from last week:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, has endorsed Barack Obama. I doubt that this development is sending shivers down any spines at Hillary Clinton headquarters. Indeed, Clinton has just picked up a more consequential endorsement - that of Wesley Clark.

I'm baffled as to why Brother Meringoff considers Ashley Wilkes' endorsement "more consequential" than Brzezinski's - and that's no defense of Zbig. Clark is a notorious coward, a bully to his subordinates and an ass-kisser to his superiors (which helps explain why he rose so high under Bill Clinton), whose bumbling during Mr. Bill's 1999 post-impeachment rape of Serbia nearly ignited a major military confrontation with the Russians. His endorsement of Hill is as inevitable and unnewsworthy as it is inconsequential.

What caught my eye about this post was a detail I did not previously know:

Noah Pollack at Commentary's Contentions notes, however, that Brzezinski is touting his "record in the Middle East," bragging that "I’m part of the only administration that brought about peace between Israel and its neighbors.” He's referring, of course, to the peace agreement that Israel and Egypt reached in 1978.

But in truth, if the Carter administration had had its way, this agreement would never have been reached. As Pollack correctly recalls, "from the outset of the Carter administration, the American commitment had been not to a deal between Israel and Egypt, but to a comprehensive resolution of the Palestinian question. . .inclusive of the Soviet Union, Israel, and the PLO. . . ." Indeed, Carter insisted that any deal would have to be comprehensive.

Fortunately, Egypt and Israel remained focused on their own interests. They thus ignored Carter and worked out a bilateral deal, the details of which were finalized at Camp David. In essence, then, the deal occurred not only independent of the Carter administration, but in defiance of it.

And for thirty years Mr. Peanut has touted the Camp David Accords as his lone foreign policy accomplishment, when what he really had in mind was another Munich, with Israel in the role of Czechoslovakia.

How much would you wager that if you dig deep enough into this "Ahmadinejad at Ground Zero" uproar, you'll find Jimmy Carter's fingerprints on it somewhere? Or was he there this morning to help escort the Chief Hostage-Taker on his self-appointed pilgrimmage?