Jimmy Carter was a bad president for the exact opposite reason that George W. Bush is a bad president: he was too eager to please everybody, which led to solutions so watered down they didn’t please anybody (when he could even make a decision at all, that is). That’s a contrast to the George W. Bush “dive head-first into the pool before checking to see if someone bothered to fill it” approach. Disaster has followed in both of their respective wakes. Goddamn, I got some mileage out of that metaphor.

Anyway, none of that is particularly relevant to today’s news. What is relevant is Carter has developed a penchant for sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong after retiring from the Oval Office (see: lunching with Castro). I, like most Georgians who read this story (login), could only instantly react, “What was he thinking?” In fact, that was Governor Sonny Perdue’s exact reaction.

Former President Jimmy Carter was the target of scorn in his home state after he lobbied to save a Connecticut submarine base at the expense of thousands of jobs in Georgia.

One member of an independent panel said Carter was part of the reason it voted to reverse a Pentagon recommendation to close the Naval Submarine Base New London, which would have shifted six subs and 3,367 jobs to Georgia’s Kings Bay base.

Surely, there must have been some practical reason. Let’s read further…

The Pentagon estimated that shifting fast-attack submarines, a maintenance facility and the Naval Submarine School from Groton, Conn., to Georgia would grow the overall work force in St. Marys, a coastal town of 14,000, by 22 percent. That was the largest predicted percentage gain for any military community in the nation.

But Carter — a former Georgia governor and the only president ever to serve as a submariner — sent a letter to the Base Closure and Realignment Commission last week, pleading to keep open the Connecticut base where he had been stationed as a young engineer in the 1950s.

In his appeal, Carter said he feared that closing the Groton base would result in “a loss of some of the proud submariners heritage of our historic association with service and training in New London.”

Umm, a museum could be housed anywhere. How would moving the base have any effect on the quality of training submariners receive? It’s not like submarining is an indigeounous skill that can only be soaked in by osmosis from the hallowed Groten soil.

Carter is a former Georgia governor and a current Georgia resident. If he’s going to stick his goddamn nose into the country’s affairs, the least he could do is work to help his fellow Georgians. Please crawl into the peanut fields and stay there, you washed up old bag.