"Like a bat to a belfry"

I actually read something positive yesterday about Jimmy Carter! Holman Jenkins Jr. writes in the June 3 WSJ that if Obama had Carter's courage, our auto industry would not be in such a mess. He writes about how Carter persuaded Congress to "junk the regulatory apparatus that destroyed the railroads." Obama could have recognized that the CAFE standards have done the same thing to the auto industry. Instead, he "took to the CAFE fraud like a bat to a belfry," and "appropriated the fraud for his own careerist purposes."

Jenkins writes that it is "impossible to reconcile stiff fuel mileage mandates with gasoline prices set by the market, with a domestic labor monopoly, with a high degree of openness to international trade." Jenkins says, "you can have three, but not four of the above."

By the way, how smart were the Japanese to locate their auto plants in the solidly anti-union southern and border states in America?