“The Hannibal Lecter Of Mideast Diplomacy”

The New York Post's assessment of Jimmy Carter upon finding out that Carter's book tour is being filmed to produce a documentary by director Jonathan Demme, best known for The Silence of the Lambs. The Post joins the ranks of major media outlets that are attacking both Carter and Carter's pile of lies, distortions and fabrications that he published.

Stein says the Israel-bashing diatribe discusses several meetings at which he was present. Yet "my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book," he writes. Concludes Stein: "Being a former president does not give one a unique privilege to invent information."

Other respected scholars and political figures also are accusing Carter of distortions - and outright inventions.

Dennis Ross, who was President Bill Clinton's Mideast envoy, notes that Carter - parroting the Palestinian line - uses a map the ex-president claims demonstrates that Israel didn't really offer substantial and unprecedented concessions to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000. (Arafat rejected the offer.)

But Ross says that map was never used at Camp David - he created it for his own 2004 book, "The Missing Peace." Carter not only plagiarized the map, but misrepresents it to create his own skewed version of the Camp David talks.

It begins to look like Carter wrote his dishonest book in the deliberate hope of provoking a heated reaction from supporters of Israel.

It would be easy to just ignore Carter, who for years secretly served as a closed-door political and public-relations adviser to Arafat. But this book is getting an avalanche of attention: Carter has been given fawning interviews on all of the major talk and morning news shows - all to softball questions that don't challenge the myriad lies in this book.

Indeed, Carter's book tour is being filmed for a documentary by director Jonathan Demme, best known for "Silence of the Lambs." (Jimmy Carter as the Hannibal Lecter of Mideast diplomacy? Makes sense to us.)

As the Post editorial points out, the Democrats decided to politically rehabilitate this failed president. Now they are having to beat feet away from him as quickly as possible when they found out about this book. Carter was rightly considered a political failure for many years. It is only recently that he was brought back into prominence instead of being a secret weasel for Yasser Arafat. The Democrats will have to relearn the lesson of why he was kept at arm's length for so long. They already are to some extent.