Some years ago, I swore off all comment about Jimmy Carter, simply because I had done so much of it. But, every now and then, I fall off the wagon. I do so again in my Impromptus today. This is because he came up in a conversation between Jeb Bush and me last week, which I have a few notes on.

Want to share part of a reader letter — quite amusing: “Carter does serve at least one good purpose for me. Not only did I vote for him twice, but in 1980 I did some work for him . . . This means that, no matter how spotless my behavior is, or how stainless my thoughts are, I always have something to atone for on Yom Kippur.”

He says that he supported Scoop Jackson in the ’76 primaries. (Sensible man.) (The reader, I mean, although Jackson was too — certainly on foreign policy.) “Everywhere I went, UAW people told me that they had to support Carter to fend off the Wallace problem. I told them of the island in the Caribbean where they had a problem with fer-de-lance vipers. They imported mongooses to take care of the fer-de-lance problem — and then they had a mongoose problem.”

A wonderful analogy. I’ll have to remember it.