Free Republic

My seventh-grade son recently wrote a U.S. History paper extolling the virtues of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “It ended the Great Depression,” he wrote with great certainty. He’s only 12 and parroting what the history texts and his teachers told him. That’s his excuse. What’s Ken Burns’? Mr. Burns’ docudrama on the Roosevelts — for those who weren’t bored to tears — repeats nearly all the worn-out fairy tales of the FDR presidency, including what I call the most enduring myth of the 20th century, which is that FDR’s avalanche of alphabet-soup government programs ended the Great Depression. Shouldn’t...

Tomorrow evening begins the first of Ken Burns' 14 hour documentary on PBS, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. The good news about this documentary is that we can be sure it will be free of any political advocacy since Burns has no bias and..... Huh? Am I kidding? Of course I am. The fact is despite Burns' laughable denials, he is a bitterly partisan Democrat to the extent that he gave a speech  in 1998 in which he declared himself to be a "Yellow Dog Democrat." The speech was also chock full of scathing attacks upon Republicans which makes his...