Piers who? OK, that out of the way, Matt Hadro of NewsBusters catches CNN’s little-known successor to Larry King sucking up to Jimmy Carter by praising one of his worst, most self-destructive moments as president:
According to CNN’s Piers Morgan, former President Jimmy Carter was “right” for criticizing the “self-indulgence and consumption” of many Americans in his infamous 1979 “Malaise Speech.”
Morgan might find himself with a minority of Americans who actually favored Carter pointing the finger at the country, but that didn’t stop him from blaming the recent financial meltdown on a failure to listen to voices like Carter’s.
Click over to NewsBusters for the video; Hadro goes on to note that Morgan “even asked Carter if he would want Obama to give a similar ‘Malaise Speech’ for his upcoming State of the Union Address. Republicans could only hope that Obama would deliver such a speech.”
Obama actually has already given his own Malaise Speech this past fall; I even gave him one cheer at the time for having the sheer chutzpah to say it in dissipated, clapped out San Francisco. “We have lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge,” President Obama said at a Frisco fundraiser in October. Heck, we can’t even build new oil pipelines these days.
Actually we can — we’re simply not allowed to, and that’s where the crisis of confidence lies.
As I’ve written before, when Jimmy Carter crafted his original malaise speech, he referred to “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 the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.” What Carter actually meant was a crisis of confidence in American liberal elites. Their crisis first began ebbing away at their surprisingly fragile self-confidence in the mid-1960s. First there was the extreme cognitive dissonance caused by collectively suppressing the ideology of the communist who shot JFK. This was followed in short succession by witnessing a Johnson Administration that badly humiliated itself by trying to do everything simultaneously — Civil Rights, the Cold War, Vietnam, the Space Program, Medicare, Medicaid. Along the way, LBJ had his own Great Relearning moment: America, let alone the free world, was too complex to be run out of office buildings in the Beltway. But the rest of us knew that.
America is too great — and too diverse — a nation to be shackled by the spiritual limitations and punitive tone of today’s self-styled “liberal” elites. But if Morgan actually believes that Americans are wallowing in too much “self-indulgence and consumption” — and he’s not the first representative of CNN to make such a claim in recent years — he’ll immediately go on the air and demand that they cancel their cable and satellite television subscriptions. Or at least tell his viewers to boycott the products advertised on his network.
Of course, that will happen right around the same time that environmentally correct newspapers cease printing or turn off the power to their air-conditioned server rooms to save Gaia.
But this is a reminder that CNN prefers two types of leaders: foreign tinpots who make Patton look like an understated dresser, and domestically, morally confused American leaders who blame the American people for their presidential woes, rather than examining their own ideological weaknesses.
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