Former one-term President Jimmy Carter is harping to the press about what a lousy president George W Bush is.

Former President Carter says President Bush’s administration is “the worst in history” in international relations, taking aim at the White House’s policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy.

The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush’s environmental policies and the administration’s “quite disturbing” faith-based initiative funding.

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper’s Saturday editions. “The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.”

Carter spokeswoman Deanna Congileo confirmed his comments to The Associated Press on Saturday and declined to elaborate. He spoke while promoting his new audiobook series, “Sunday Mornings in Plains,” a collection of weekly Bible lessons from his hometown of Plains, Ga.

“Apparently, Sunday mornings in Plains for former President Carter includes hurling reckless accusations at your fellow man,” said Amber Wilkerson, Republican National Committee spokeswoman. She said it was hard to take Carter seriously because he also “challenged Ronald Reagan’s strategy for the Cold War.”

Douglas Brinkley, a Tulane University presidential historian and Carter biographer, described Carter’s comments as unprecedented.

“This is the most forceful denunciation President Carter has ever made about an American president,” Brinkley said. “When you call somebody the worst president, that’s volatile. Those are fighting words.”

This from the man who gave us the misery index of 21% interest rates, told us we were in a malaise as a country and would never get better, had 52 Americans held hostage for over 400 days in Iran and consulted his then twelve-year old daughter on the problems of nuclear proliferation.

In fact, in Carter’s term in office we first experienced Islamofascism and all he could manage to do was send 3 helicopters to rescue them with no chance of surviving.

I don’t wish ill on the man but I do wish he’d shut up and write or do whatever it is he does besides bash his own country and the sitting president.