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original political satire
original political satire
Posted on 06/08/2004 6:19:25 AM PDT by Theodore R.
Was Roosevelt a good president?
Posted: June 8, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
Condoleeza Rice said in a newspaper interview last week that President Bush will some day rank in leadership history alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
Which begs the question: Was Roosevelt a good president?
If Roosevelt is George W. Bush's model for leadership, his first term begins to make sense.
Roosevelt led the nation through World War II and certainly contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan – for which we should all be thankful.
However, Roosevelt also arguably presided over the creation of more unconstitutional domestic action by the federal government than any of his modern predecessors. As such, he remains the hero of modern-day socialists and an icon for today's Democratic Party extremists.
Is that what Bush wants to be remembered for?
If so, he must give himself extremely high marks. Yes, he has ably led the nation in the war on terrorism. But his administration has also given us unprecedented domestic spending increases.
Perhaps Rice and Bush should also be reminded that while Churchill provided great leadership of the United Kingdom in World War II, he was quickly turned out of office at the war's conclusion.
My guess is Bush will be turned out of office long before American achieves a victory in the war on terrorism. So, perhaps there is some validity to that comparison as well.
Notice that Rice did not compare Bush to a more recent popular Republican, two-term president – Ronald Reagan. Perhaps she understood that such a comparison would be laughable to too many Americans – especially those Bush still hopes to win over before Election Day.
"Statesmanship has to be judged first and foremost by whether you recognize historic opportunities and seize them," Rice said in an interview with Cox Newspapers.
I would agree. But I would not agree that Bush has met the challenge.
He came into office with Republicans controlling the House of Representatives and Senate. He saw that control strengthened in mid-term elections in 2002. Yet he governed like a Democrat – expanding spending for the Department of Education and other agencies the GOP once swore to eliminate.
"When you think of statesmen, you think of people who seized historic opportunities to change the world for the better, people like Roosevelt, people like Churchill, and people like Truman, who understood the challenges of communism. And this president has been an agent of change for the better – historic change for the better," said Rice.
Roosevelt and Truman understood the challenges of communism? Who does she think gave us Alger Hiss? And who does she think sold Chiang Kai-Shek down the Yangtze River?
Until I read this interview, I had an extraordinary amount of respect for Rice's intellectual achievements and her understanding of history. No longer. But it gets worse.
It was Bush, she said, who first recognized "that it was time to stop mumbling about the need for a Palestinian state" and spoke out in favor of a two-state solution to the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict.
Indeed he did – one of the foreign policy tragedies of his administration. In fact, he has retreated from that position recently, suggesting there was no longer any rush to create a Palestinian state. And why should we want to create a new Middle East state that was founded on terrorism? Why should we support a state whose official policy is "no Jews allowed"? Why should we want to continue to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results?
Does Rice really believe all she said in this interview? Or is she just being a good political soldier? It's hard to know for sure.
But now I know why the Bush administration has achieved so little in four years. Apparently, from the get-go, it never had the right goals.
The answer to the main question - NO!
FDR was the worst president we ever had.
It was his administration that set up all the socialist/communist programs that are sucking money from the tax payers to this day.
I believe the guy was a commie.
No..
Farah needs to get over his hatred of Bush. He brings up some legitimate points but greatly overstates his case and ignores many of relevant points.
No.
In a word: No.
Just my two cents. I don't want to slam FDR, as many here DO regard him highly. Every other issue aside, I would rank Reagan ahead simply because he ended the Cold War, which FDR did his best to help the Soviet Union begin.
A leader can only be judged in the context of time. FDR was right for the time but wrong for today. I believe that many of the programs he set up to address The Great Depression were intended to be temporary.
I judge FDR to be the best and worst on any given issue. Carter has the distinct "Worst Overall" title.
Hmm, a trick question. Ok I'll play.....
For the USA and world freedom - a resounding NO
For Marxism & Stalinist Despots - YES
I agree. Read "Treason" by Ann Coulter. If Roosevelt wasn't a supporter of Joe Stalin, I'll eat my hat.
He thought Uncle Joe was the best thing Russia ever had - the man who murdered more people than Hitler than did.
Also, I think Roosevelt deliberately engineered the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and was responsible for all those dead Americans because he wanted a reason to enter the war after having promised America to keep us out of it.
If I'm not mistaken, Roosevelt was Secretary of the Navy during WW1 and helped engineer the successful German attack on the Lusitania, with the connivance of Churchill, in order to accomplish the same thing he did at Pearl Harbor in WW2.
Roosevelt always envied his relative and great American Teddy Roosevelt. He was a poor excuse for Teddy Roosevelt in every way.
I don't think FDR was great in terms of policy, but he exuded some needed confidence for his first term. And he may have been a safety valve against the country going even further left out of despair. That said, his legacy of paternal government is a burden. I need to read more about him, hopefully from a concise, historical point of view.
You gotta give FDR credit for the one good decision he made: developing the atom bomb.
"Temporary government program," an oxymoron.
No. One of the things he is supposedly remembered for - getting us out of the Depression, he failed miserably at. It took a world war to get the economy going again, and he had been on the job 8 years by that point in time. In addition, in trying to pull us out of the Depression he abrogated and nullified many of the principal structures of our system of government and economy, unleashing a collectivist virus that, to this day, chronically infects us.
.............Besides, he couldn't keep that damned wife of his shut up.
he threw japanese in camps, tried to load the supreme court w/ extra leftists and gave away eastern europe to russia
he threw japanese in camps
But don't Japanese Americans still pay total fealty to the Democrat Party and hold FDR and HST in the highest rating?
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