WHICH IS UNFAIR TO JIMMY AND BILL...:

Liberals are forever fantasizing about militarizing social problems. In his first inaugural, FDR declared "war against the emergency." LBJ declared "war against poverty," and Carter said reducing energy consumption (by, for instance, turning down thermostats at night to a bone-chilling 55 degrees) was "the moral equivalent of war."

In his latest State of the Union, Obama said of our armed forces, "They're not consumed with personal ambition. They don't obsess over their differences . . . They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example."

Except if we followed their example, we'd all have to salute and say, "Yes, sir" to everything. That's not democracy. Generals who say the mission failed because the troops didn't follow orders shouldn't be surprised when the troops start to mock them. Blame deflection isn't leadership.

And that's why both Carter and Obama came to seem so tired, dull, repetitive, scolding, inept and irrelevant. Carter's poll numbers went up immediately after the malaise speech but retreated after a few days. His words gave him an anti-halo -- the shadow of a whiner.

"You can't castigate the American people," his vice president, Walter Mondale, told Carter, "or they will turn you off once and for all."

In his State of the Union, President Obama expressed wonderment that everything doesn't work like the Navy SEAL raid that got bin Laden. "No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves. . . . This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other's backs." Obama sounded as if he was pleading with us to get his back.

"Carter, Clinton and I all have sort of the disease of being policy wonks," Obama told Ron Suskind in the book "Confidence Men." He sounded as if he was pleading that he was too smart for the American people.

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