These may be dark times for Ukrainian democrats, but they can at least be grateful for one small mercy: they have not yet had a visitation from Jimmy Carter. In recent years, scarcely a trouble spot has been spared the ministrations of our ex-president. He has conferred the benefits of his wisdom on Cuba, Haiti, Liberia, Mozambique, and Venezuela. One of the hallmarks of his approach is moral equilateralism, whereby democrats in countries like Venezuela are treated as on a par with non-democrats such as the thuggish far-leftist “president,” Hugo Chavez, or vice versa. Like the frontierswoman in the Abe Lincoln log-cabin yarn, Mr. Carter seems to be yelling to the protagonists: “Go to it, husband! Go to it, bear!”

There is also a wonderfully euphemistic quality to many of Mr. Carter’s pronouncements. In Mozambique – run by the Marxist tyranny Frelimo – he frets about the “transparency of the tabulation process.” As for dear old Fidel, Mr. Carter assures us that “during our ride into the hotel, he and I had a friendly chat about growing peanuts, the total freedom we would have while in Cuba and my hope that I would attend the All Star baseball game and perhaps throw out the first ball.” Predictably, he lauds Cuba’s universal literacy and health care programs.

As Mr. Carter degenerates into a Ramsey Clark-like role, we are left with the question, why he has left Ukraine alone? Search for the dog that didn’t bark. It’s not the post-Soviet thugs who are seeking to rig the contest in favor of Moscow’s candidate, for they are noisily preserving their privileges. Nor is it the democrats who bravely and brazenly wish to align with the West. They aren’t Mr. Carter’s kind and can’t lay claim to any sort of leftist legitimacy. Why, it’s Karl Marx who’s missing from the field. Ukraine is thus rescued by virtue of the fact that the peanut farmer from Georgia hasn’t got a dog in this fight.