Malaise
The national unease will not disappear with the advent of the Democratic National Convention this week. It will only be acerbated as speaker after speaker this week trashes President Trump as he and his Republican party are responsible for the pandemic, the riots, and the homeless. The speakers will be burning incense before, during and after their speeches all the while chanting “Trump is the Devil”. After the first night we have already been treated to very dystopian view of the country.
This is the nature of the body politic in this election year. The Democrat nominee steadfastly, so far, has refused to take an hour interview with Sunday morning shows hosts but has found time to spend with that renowned “rapper-journalist” Cardi B. How can anyone seriously consider this man as the potential leader of the free world given that? Yet the visceral dislike of the President is such that Democrat partisans would vote for Justin Bieber instead of Trump.
His running mate, touted as a woman of color, someone who’s down with the struggle. She is the daughter of two accomplished, well-off immigrant educators, one Jamaican and the other Indian. There is a certain amount of inauthenticity in the selection of Senator Harris as fitting the African American demographic. There should be nothing wrong with referring to her as Jamaican-Indian American, if we’re going to get caught up in labeling candidates. It’s all about the content of character and not the color of skin as Martin Luther King stated. Why has it come to identity/fit in a certain box politics? Character matters on all sides.
The last time the term malaise was widely used was during President Carter’s administration. His famous speech was labeled that by Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Carter addressed a crisis of confidence in the nation’s future, stating “All the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America. The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” He went on to say there is “the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” The quintessential definition of the term “Malaise”.
This emptiness and crisis of confidence is directly attributable to the enforced isolation of the citizens to prevent them from catching a virus that 99.5% of the those who catch it, survive. It’s been reported repeatedly again that the average age of those who die is 78 with the vast majority suffering from serious underlying medical conditions. For months this fact has remained unchanged.
Do the words of President Carter sound like anything like we’re hearing from the current crop of Democrat politicians and their syncopates in the media? Don’t you just love their preaching about what’s wrong with the country. Uplifting to say the least.
Their ploy is that the country is in such a bad state that we need a fresh approach and ideas from the Democrats. So, what do they do? They nominate a guy whose been in Washington, D.C. for 47 years as the purveyor of “fresh ideas” and solutions to the national malaise. They pair him with a running mate whose accent to power has been marked by a callous disregard for due process as an Attorney General and Senator. One has to ask some obvious questions. Where were these fresh ideas when you had the reins of power, Joe? Kamala? Are you capable of leading the free world, Joe? Have a press conference without the softball questions from the powder puff local press and prove you’ve got all the dots on the dice.
Even Brit Hume, a well-respected national news media figure who has worked at ABC and Fox opined that Joe Biden is in the early stages for senility with good days and bad. In fact, he advised the Democrats to keep him away from the national press as long as possible. Brit has known Joe for over 40 years and said he’s a good guy but not up to the task.
Of the two men running for President, a lot of folks would vote for Biden before voting for Trump even if they thought he was going around the bend. We need a leader to instill a confidence, not a man who’s looks like he’s heading to the home and certainly not someone who’s a hostage to a radical leftist agenda, one hell-bent on remaking the Republic.