Former president and current loose cannon Jimmy Carter continues to rewrite history. He appeared on the Today show to give a strange rendition of the elections that produced Hamas as the winner of the Palestinian elections, somehow alleging that the US government’s identification of Hamas as a terrorist organization and the policy of non-engagement with terrorists came after the election. Carter rewrites history in this clip:

In fact, the policy of non-engagement with terrorists that so surprised Carter in 2005 dates back to before his own presidency in 1976. Perhaps Carter spent too much time kissing the cheek of Leonid Brezhnev to notice, but the US has always insisted that it would not negotiate with terrorist groups, which has included Hamas since the group’s inception. The election gave Hamas an opportunity to repudiate terrorism and to recognize the right of Israel to exist within borders later to be determined. It has done neither. Hamas conducted a coup d’etat in overthrowing the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and uses Gaza as a launching pad for rocket attacks on civilians in Ashkelon and Sderot, which they continued while Carter was in Israel and Syria.

Carter can play he-said, she-said with Condoleezza Rice all day long on whether he was “warned” not to meet with Hamas, but he knows perfectly well that negotiations with unrepentant terrorists is forbidden. The smug satisfaction he beams on Today comes from knowing that it wouldn’t have made any difference, anyway, as he himself admits. Nothing was going to keep Carter from hugging Khaled Mashaal.