As predictable as mosquitoes in summer,

so is former President Carter, a cowboy who refuses to ride into the sunset.

Having schmoozed, broken bread and exchanged hugs with the horrorists of Hamas, he is now seeking to stabilize his rickety reputation as Miss Nosey Parker's asshole-in-chief by scheduling a meeting with Hezbollah:

Lebanese press reports over the weekend indicate that former US President Jimmy Carter is expected to meet with leading officials from Hizbullah over the course of the summer. This visit would come on the heels of Carter’s visit to Damascus two months ago, in which he met with the head of the Hamas terrorist organization’s political wing, Khaled Mashaal. (Source)

While Carter, with his vapid, fixed smile and undentable sense of superior righteousness, often moves his lips to say the right things, such as condemning suicide bombings against Israelis or insisting that he is chiefly concerned with bringing peace to the Middle Eastern, in his heart he has compassion only for Palestinians.

When he explains why he wants to engage with Hamas, according to this interview

"Carter does not simply say that Hamas have an electoral mandate, that they represent part of the Palestinian people and therefore have to be engaged with. He goes further, praising them, speaking of their "glorious" election victory or suggesting their backgrounds in medicine makes them men of peace (thereby giving his enemies an easy shot, as they point out that, for example, Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy to Osama bin Laden, is himself an eye surgeon). When the former president praises Assad's "intelligence, competence and strength" or speaks of Hamas's "superb" record in municipal government, he walks into the same trap: he is no longer making the case for dialogue with Assad and Hamas. He is making the case for Assad and Hamas.

Carter is aware of this danger. I ask whether he detects an in-the-gut conversion to the path of peace in the Hamas leaders he met: "I do, but I may be naive and I may be mistaken."

What about Hamas's founding charter, replete with antisemitic imagery, some of it drawn from the notorious Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? "It's terrible," he says. "I despise antisemitism in anyone. I think anti-Jew is a violation of the basic principles on which my life is built. I grew up with it in the south with anti-black, so I saw the ravages of racial discrimination." But when the charter was raised in those talks with Hamas's top echelon: "They ridiculed it as being ancient, passé, an inconsequential document. But I don't speak for anyone else."

Norm on Normblog points out:

"Can it be that Carter failed to follow up here in the obvious way: if the document is no longer of any account, why not revoke it and replace it with something else? Can Hamas have missed this idea? Can Jimmy Carter?"

Is anyone holding their breath to see whether Carter will ask Hezbollah the same question?