MEOW

Jimmy Carter is remembered as a failed president, and it seems unlikely historians will ever grant him a Trumanesque rehabilitation. But we correctly understood that America's oil dependence would one day take her down the road to ruin, as David Shribman reminds us in today's Post-Gazette:

Jimmy Carter was ridiculed three decades ago when he referred to the drive for energy conservation and independence as the moral equivalent of war, a phrase that came from a speech William James delivered at Stanford in 1906 but that, in a typical example of Carter's bad luck, had a pussy-cat acronym (MEOW). Now that we are literally at war in an oil-rich part of the world, and fighting a shadow war against terrorists whose ideology of violence was sown in part by the disruptions that oil money brought to the region, we regret that we didn't fight a moral war -- perhaps then we might have been able to avoid fighting a real one.