Worst. President. Ever.

No, not Obama, who has a ways to go to surpass the ineptitude of peanut-boy himself, Jimmy Carter.

The 39th president is near the bottom of most historian's presidential rankings, and with good reason. His mistakes are too long to list here, and I'm only bringing him up because he got himself in the news again, in a way that serves to make people even more cynical about politicians.

Carter - as president, and even more so once he left office - has been an enemy of Israel. Historian Douglas Brinkley has written about Carter's love for the terrorist Yasir Arafat, and the way Carter rushed to the Middle East in the 1990s in an effort to smooth things over between Arafat and Saudi Arabia. Again, I don't have time to go through all of Carter's shortcomings, but National Review's Jay Nordlinger once wrote an outstanding piece about Carter that you can read here.

So what got ol' Jimmy back in the news? Well, turns out he now feels bad about his shabby treatment of Israel (the only democracy in the Middle East) and wants to apologize.

"We must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel," Carter said in a message to Israel. "As I would have noted at Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, but which is appropriate at any time of the year, I offer an Al Het (a plea for forgiveness) for any words or deeds of mine that may have done so."

Now comes the cynical part. Why would Carter - after 30-plus years of opposing Israel's interests - feel the need to apologize? Feelings of guilt? A change of perspective? A desire to simply do the right thing?

No, no and no.

It turns out that Carter's grandson is now running for Congress, in a district with a large Jewish population. So in order to help the boy, Jimmy's decided it's now time to set aside his lifelong dislike of Israel and try to make nice.

Just when I thought my opinion of Carter couldn't get any lower, he manages to drain a little more water from the tub.