Republicans pretend George Bush was never president while using Jimmy Carter to attack Barack Obama

Republicans would love it if they could convince everybody that Jimmy Carter was the worst president of the 20th century and that Barack Obama is even worse than Carter. To prove it, they've taken Carter's critical words from more than three decades ago in an attempt to describe current economic conditions. In another of his lie-filled speeches, as Bob Johnson points out, vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan contended that "President Obama makes the Jimmy Carter years look like good old days." And Team Romney's Ryan Williams was quick to blast Carter's four-minute video viewed by delegates at the Democratic Convention Tuesday night.

Carter, who left the White House 32 years ago, thus remains a perpetual Republican target.

Yet at the same time as Ryan and Romney and the rest of this year's desperate Republicans try anything to get the bounce in the polls their pathetic convention in Tampa failed to deliver, they act as if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, gone from office just three-and-a-half years, don't exist. Neither of them did videos for the assembled faithful in Florida.

Vanished with them from the Republican campaign playbook are two wars of choice at an ultimate cost of around $3 trillion, changes in the tax code for the ultra-wealthy that added trillions to the national debt, failure to pay attention to intelligence that might have prevented the terrorist attack on Manhattan and Washington, D.C. that killed 3,000, failure despite "dead or alive" bravado to get the guy who ordered that attack, economic policies that cost the nation in the pair's final 12 months in office 4.5 million jobs, an unemployment rate that was 87 percent higher than when they came into office and gasoline prices that were twice as much.

Is it any wonder that Team Romney seeks to frame the campaign with a convenient amnesia about what happened just a few years ago while boasting the sharpest memory of what happened before nearly half the population of the United States was born? Could it be because they don't have a candidate who on his best day is half as good as either Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama on his worst?