THE DRONE!

CNN has it as its lead headline. Can Howell keep spinning for de Villepin indefinitely?

PRECEDENTS FOR JIMMY: Thanks for your many emails. Here are two that cover the bases of post-presidential meddling:

Jimmy Carter is, fittingly, in the company of two other presidential runts: John Tyler and Millard Fillmore. John Tyler actively favored secession and went on to serve in the congress of the Confederacy until he died in 1862. After inadvertently destroying his own party and leaving himself no vehicle for nomination, Fillmore, a notorious bigot, left office in 1853. He returned three years later and ran for president on the anti-anyone-but-white-Protestants platform of the Know-Nothings. Shortly after Lincoln’s assassination, an angry mob, recalling Fillmore’s pro-slavery, anti-Lincoln machinations, surrounded Fillmore’s Buffalo, NY mansion and forced him to splatter the mansion exterior with black ink and to hang black crepe. (New York in those days resembled The Simpsons’ Springfield – angry mobs always at the ready and requiring little incitement.) Tyler and Fillmore are all but forgotten to history. I suspect the same fate awaits Mr. Carter.

Then there’s Teddy Roosevelt:

Before the Cold War/World War II, however, I can think of former President Teddy Roosevelt’s critiques of Wilson’s foreign policy decisions during the neutrality period (1914-1917). Roosevelt was much more to the right on the question of Germany’s attacks on our shipping and urged that Wilson use a firmer hand with the Germans. Wilson, not certain that he had the support of the entire country for war just yet, was not particularly interested in picking a fight just yet. Carter is not Roosevelt; TR was calling for firm action, not greater passivity. Still, the Wilson administration had a devil of a time placating TR’s supporters in Congress. After Wilson brought us into war in 1917, TR actually volunteered for form another unit like the Rough Riders. Wilson politely ignored this. Although it would be a massive public relations stunt, I can’t see Carter forming a brigade of human shields, however firm his convictions against Bush’s actions.

Carter as a human shield? Oh please, please.

EVEN PRETTIER IN PINK: Here’s an anti-Lysistrata chick-hawk. Who says you can’t make love and war?

FAIR-WEATHER HAWKS: The Mickster has a great post on all those Democratic hawks who have suddenly decided it’s getting far too nerve-wracking to stay in the game. So long, Josh! Been nice hanging for a while. That’s not to say I don’t respect Josh’s reasoning. Unlike others, he offers an actual alternative: keeping a quarter of a million troops in the Gulf for months, accepting Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons, and asking the French to help pay for it. But that alternative is so transparently pie-in-the-sky it’s hard to take it seriously.