FDR now target of r/w wrath

[babylonsister]

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_01/016353.php

THE RIGHT TARGETS FDR.... In keeping with the recent trend, Fox News personality Brit Hume became the latest in a series of conservatives to demonstrate bizarre confusion about the Great Depression. Hume insisted this morning that "the New Deal -- everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed." He added, "President {Franklin} Roosevelt waged what could only be called a jihad against private enterprise."

The right has been repeating similar nonsense for a couple of months now. It's demonstrably ridiculous, but that's not stopping them.

David Sirota has written a couple of excellent items lately, responding to the absurd Republican talking points related to FDR and the Great Depression, but yesterday, to his credit, MSNBC's David Shuster did an entire segment on the patently false conservative argument.

We don't often see this kind of fact-checking segment on national television, so kudos to Shuster and MSNBC.

(For more background on this, also note this Paul Krugman column from November, which notes the "intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse.")

Why does the right bother? It's hard to say for sure, but there are probably a few aspects to this. First, FDR was a Democrat, addressing a devastating economic crisis handed to him by a failed Republican president. This, of course, sets up Obama as Roosevelt, which the GOP would like to avoid.

Second, the conservative ideology demands that FDR's approach to the Great Depression was fundamentally flawed, but it was premised on ideas like increased spending, public works, Social Security, and stronger unions.

It's easy to mock Fox News and the rest of the Republicans for pushing obvious nonsense, but I'm afraid the economic conditions are so dire, the right's ridiculous sense of history is actually kind of dangerous. Americans, I hope, know better, but I'd feel a whole lot better if there wasn't an organized campaign from conservatives trying to convince Americans to reject the lifesaver while the nation drowns.

—Steve Benen

[baldguy]

1. FDR really *caused* the Depression and Hoover was a hero.

[Donnachaidh]

6. the sad part is, there are ignorant bastards out there that will BELIEVE the lies.

And the RW propaganda machine will start churning out the lies faster and faster, just to keep the sheep in line.

[gratuitous]

2. Shame on us for eavesdropping

Hume, Fox News and the right wing "think" tanks aren't talking to us or anyone else who is historically literate. Their target audience is the robber barons who got us into this mess, and who need someone to pat their wrist and say, “There, there.” This disinformation is also aimed at their knuckle-dragging audience who all think that someday very soon they’re going to be rich (Rich, I tell you!) thanks to Laffer economics, and that any proposed recovery program where the government takes an active role is doomed to failure. Or that will result in the “wrong” kind of recovery.

For the rest of us, we have the wearisome task of setting the record straight, and we have to do it over and over again. We’re fighting against the ignorant, which is bad enough, but their crooked overlords who are heavily invested in and who profit handsomely from, a system that they can cheat. Any changes to the system make it tougher for the crooks, so this becomes an existential battle for them.

[NYC Liberal]

3. Now? The right-wingers have always hated FDR.

They even tried to stage a coup and install a fascist corporate puppet government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

[mod mom]

4. RWers (including Bush's grandfather Prescott) behind the Coup against FDR:

1934: The Plot Against America
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED July 28, 2007
I’m back from the land of heather and thistles, not to mention wee drams and lukewarm ale, but on my way out a friend at the BBC alerted me to this, a not-to-miss program on the BBC this morning, accessible over the next several days by internet. It’s the story of the Plot Against America. I don’t mean the Philip Roth novel, nor even the Sinclair Lewis book, It Can’t Happen Here, but rather the historical events upon which these two works of fiction were based.

In November 1934, federal investigators uncovered an amazing plot involving some two dozen senior businessmen, a good many of them Wall Street financiers, to topple the government of the United States and install a fascist dictatorship. Roth’s novel is developed from several strands of this factual account; he assumed the plot is actually carried out, whereas in fact an alert FDR shut it down but stopped short of retaliatory measures against the plotters. A key element of the plot involved a retired prominent general who was to have raised a private army of 500,000 men from unemployed veterans and who blew the whistle when he learned more of what the plot entailed. The plot was heavily funded and well developed and had strong links with fascist forces abroad. A story in the New York Times and several other newspapers reported on it, and a special Congressional committee was created to conduct an investigation. The records of this committee were scrubbed and sealed away in the National Archives, where they have only recently been made available.

The Congressional committee kept the names of many of the participants under wraps and no criminal action was ever brought against them. But a few names have leaked out. And one is Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the incumbent president. Prescott Bush was of course deep into the business of the Hamburg-America Lines, and had tight relations throughout this period with the new Government that had come to power in Germany a year earlier under Chancellor Aldoph Hitler. It appears that Bush was to have formed a key liaison for the group with the new German government.

Prescott Bush, of course, went on to service as a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, and his son, George H.W. Bush emerged from World War II as a hero.

-snip

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000651



The Whitehouse Coup
Monday 23 July 2007



The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.

Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.




http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml

[MADem]

5. I think this is the last twitch, the final shudder, of the GOP as we have known it.

Their only hope is to retool completely and come back as a completely different entity with a completely different agenda. They'll have to develop populist themes, embrace underserved interest groups, and completely flip their attitude on its head. Less, Frist and Thurmond, more Snowe and Brooke.

Be interesting to see if they can swing it. They'll have to jettison the Hatin' Crowd to do it. Perhaps resurrect the era of the "Liberal Republicans" once more.

It could happen. We should not be complacent.

I can't see what else they can do, really. They're rather crushed, of late.