Joe Queenan with a bottle of vinegar

Anybody see Joe Queenan‘s hackneyed attack on Jimmy Carter in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal?

The column is headlined “Jimmy Carter: Can’t Stop the Typing,” and it refers to the recent publication of Carter’s White House Diary… which was just published but was of course written — uh, not even typed — more than 30 years ago. Queenan hates Carter so deeply, it seems, that he’d rather he have served a second term than suffer through the publication, observed at a distance, of his 26 books. Twenty-six books? Yes, that’s right, says Queenan, “more books than James Joyce, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, Virgil, Homer and Jonathan Franzen.”

This is a classic case of being careful what you wish for. The American people wanted Jimmy Carter out of office in the worst way, and to this day they are paying the price. If we had to do it all over again, I think a lot of people would vote to amend the Constitution and allow presidents to run for five, six — as many terms as they wanted. That wouldn’t leave them much spare time to write books.

For a guy who fills his columns with such drivel, I’m surprised to learn that he finds Carter’s diary “exquisitely pointless.”