John McCain is calling former President Jimmy Carter a "lousy" commander-in-chief.

That is just plain harsh.

Maybe if Mr. Carter's abortive attempt to rescue the American hostages from the embassy in Iran in October of 1980 had not been disrupted by the back-door dealings of Republican candidate Ronald Reagan and his running mate, former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, history would have worked out a whole lot differently.

At the very least, President Carter never illegally sold the theocratic loons in Tehran weaponry that, to this very day, might be in the Iranian arsenal our current President claims is being handed to insurgents in Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers.

Neither was Mr. Carter in command when 241 U.S. Marines, sequestered in their barracks in Beirut, were slaughtered in 1983 by jihadist suicide bombers.

Talk about a "lousy" commander-in-chief.

Oh, wait a minute. Wasn't George W. Bush the commander-in-chief when a handful of crazed jihadists with nothing more than box cutters managed to circumvent the entirety of our NORAD air defense system with four commercial jetliners and blast two giant skyscrapers and the very nexus of our Department of Defense at the Pentagon?

Mr. McCain, the word "lousy" doesn't even begin to describe Republican commanders-in-chief of recent American history.