WELCOME BACK, CARTER! Biden’s physician uttered the dreaded M-word in his covid diagnosis last night:
Dr. Kevin O’Connor, the president’s physician, said in a note that Biden, 81, “presented this afternoon with upper respiratory symptoms, to include rhinorhea (runny nose) and non-productive cough, with general malaise.”
At Commentary, John Podhoretz responded:
In the most pregnant turn of phrase in 45 years, his own press office presented us with a letter from Biden’s doctor explaining that the president had taken the test because of his symptoms, which included a feeling of “malaise.”
That word was, of course, the takeaway from the speech that unofficially announced the futility of the Jimmy Carter reelection effort 14 months before Carter faced Ronald Reagan—and Carter never even said “malaise”! It was just what emanated from his discussion of what was ailing the country, which was not his bad leadership but a “crisis of confidence.” Carter’s effort to shift blame to the American people’s own spiritual condition was the marker of his doom. Its use again in 2024 suggests an unseen Straussian hand at work in the levers of the universe, planting esoteric messages about the end of Joe Biden’s career in his own press statements.
Since an economic malaise tends to go hand-in-hand with a leftist in the White House, as I wrote in 2011: Welcome Back My Friends, to the Malaise that Never Ends.
1979 was also the year of Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech. As [Steve] Hayward wrote in volume one of The Age of Reagan:
The New Republic [called] the speech “pop sociology stew” filled with “servile flatteries.” “Carter seems to think that teaching us to sing ‘Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella’ can be a substitute for leading us in out of the rain. Fortunately, he utterly lacks the rhetorical skill for such a con job.”This represented a striking turnabout for The New Republic. When Carter first declared the energy crisis to be the “moral equivalent of war” in the spring of 1977, The New Republic editorialized in a vein that anticipated the Carter of July 1979: “To us, whatever contraction of affluence this country may suffer over the next few years appears no more than a byproduct of the contraction of the spirit we are already suffering.” A labor leader who had supported Carter in 1976 complained that “The fault is his, not ours, and asking us to say something nice about America is like Gerald Ford telling us to pin on little lapel buttons and ‘Whip Inflation Now.’” And naturally Carter’s message rubbed Reagan the wrong way: “People who talk about an age of limits,” Reagan said, “are really talking about their own limitations, not America’s.”
To his credit though, last year, an Insta-commenter noted, “Carter didn’t give a speech soon after his (honest) election in front of a national monument back-lit blood red with two Marines flanking either side describing his political opponents as traitors.”
Last night, Biden’s doctor inadvertently channeled Jimmy Carter. Today, one of Biden’s supporters is channeling his opponent:
When you order the Trump campaign on Temu https://t.co/1tCupK4JKf
— Siraj Hashmi (@SirajAHashmi) July 18, 2024
Exit question: Was this the moment when everything went pear-shaped?
