Writing in the on-line edition of the New Yorker, former Jimmy Carter speechwriter Hedrick Hertzberg spots an odd parallel between 2013 and 1979 which I've also been wondering about.  President Carter's famous "malaise" speech (in which the word never appeared) was given on July 15, 1979. Three years in Jimmy Carter's Washington had proved chastening. It was the era of "The Limits to Growth" and "The Population Bomb," just as today we hear of "the New Normal" and global warming.  Carter's speech was much mocked at the time -- as the "malaise" moniker soon showed. In fact, the speech proved to be a counter-factual: it presaged not an American future, but the nation's wholesale repudiation of Carter's failed Presidency in 1980. In December of 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. That same month began the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Radical Islam had just captured its first country. And an American president, in a nationally-televised speech, told the...(Read Full Post)