Posted on 09/30/2005 1:11:33 PM PDT by paltz
"PEARL HARBOR," the movie, is an engagingly ramshackle mess of comical improbabilities, '40s cliches and dialogue so corny it must have been (was it?) deliberate. It is entertaining enough but would hardly merit serious attention were it not for one scene too egregious to go unremarked.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Ivan,
FDR's economic policies were mostly empty feel-good guestures that did not address the true causes of the depression.
However, as I stated on another thread today, on the one big issue of his time, the war agaist Nazi Germany and an expansionist Japan, he was dead on. He did everything he could to get the country ready for war while far too many people had blinders on about the coming threat. He also did everything he could to keep the British Empire in the war (and yes the Soviets too....).
These actions (lend-lease, the draft and the rebuilding of a shell of a military) were critical to saving the world and overshadow the major domestic mistakes of 1933-1939 and the foreign policy mistakes of late 1944-early 1945.
In this he is like Tony Blair, who is wrong on so many things, (don't get me started), but who has kept Britian in the current war. (Though Blair is more wrong and not as right as FDR was, FDR did not weaken the armed forces in the middle of a war the way Labour has.)
When looking at FDR you have to keep the big picture in mind.
although they persecuted JOSEPH McCARTHY as a hate monger time and facts proved him right.
although they persecuted JOSEPH McCARTHY as a hate monger time and facts proved him right.
My son and his band wrote a song about FDR called "Dead Legs Big Spender".
His condition was known at the time.
I have a copy of the World Book Encyclopedia from the time period that FDR was Governor of New York. He was not yet President. There is an article about him, with a picture (not in a wheelchair). The article says that he was disabled by polio and that he had leg braces and could not walk.
FDR did not make an ISSUE about being crippled, but before he was President, it was public knowledge, to the point of being published in a short article in an encyclopedia, that he was crippled.
Polio was a terrifying thing back then, with children dying and in iron lungs. People did not make GRAND, DRAMATIC emotional appeals from these tragedies then, as they do now, but everyone knew FDR had been partially paralyzed from polio, and everyone knew that he was still an indomitable figure, and this made them feel a little bit better, because polio seemed like such a death sentence, or a sentence to a life without hope, but there was FDR, governor of New York, crippled but powerful. And then there he was, President of the United States.
Nobody wanted to see him weak.
And he didn't want to be seen weak.
But everyone knew that he was crippled.
Even kids reading encyclpediae in the 1930s.
Krauthammer is too kind. The opening sequence, set in 1923, features a Stearman airplane not built until 1937 and sporting an instrument panel not available until 1964. The entire movie is a car wreck and can be viewed only for the CGI Hawaiian attack sequence.
Yes, you do.
FDR was the American leader who saved the world.
Had America actually listened to the Republican Isolationists of the time and implemented their policies against rearmament, and against the draft, etc., America would have lost the Second World War.
On the biggest of the big issues, the greatest and most dangerous war in human history, FDR was THE leader who saved the world. It was indirect, but nevertheless he saved Britain. Indirectly, he saved Russia. Directly, he had the atomic bomb built. Directly, he drove forward the military preparations that had the US ready for war.
And when the time came to decide where, and when, and how, and who, once again he was dead on.
FDR was a great President.
Had there been no war, he would have been simply a left-winger. And had there been no war, George Washington would have been simply a tobacco farmer.
But there was a war, and he saved the world.
Let's not lose the forest for the trees here.
Dislike his economics if you must, but look at how he handled the war, and remember, he is the LAST PRESIDENT to get it right. When the time came, he stood before Congress and demanded a formal Declaration of War, meaning that the country could not go back, meaning that opposing the war after that was sedition, meaning that the press could be muzzled to prevent defeating morale, meaning that the political opposition could not use opposition to the war as a platform, meaning that those who deserted the military and ran away were put to death, meaning that potential enemies inside the US were rounded up and put in camps, and captured spies were put to death.
THAT is how you fight a war. THAT is what the Constitution demands. FDR was the last President to obey the US Constitution when he took America to war. And THAT is why he was a greater war leader than Truman, or Eisenhower, or Kennedy or LBJ or Nixon or Reagan or either Bush. If you go to war without a Declaration of War, you set the country up for defeat. You'd think we would have learnt that by now.
FDR was the last President to obey the Constitution when it came to the war power.
We won decisively.
Since then, no President has gone to Congress and asked for a DoW before committing forces. And we've fought to draws or defeat, able to win battles, but never achieving our strategic objectives...because the naysayers at home can still bloviate. With a DoW, they are legally silenced. Sedition is illegal in time of war.
Too bad we don't just emulate FDR when it comes to war.
Declare it.
Forcibly silence domestic opposition.
Imprison enemy nationals and don't let them go.
Demand unconditional surrender.
Firebomb resisting cities and rip the guts out of enemy populations that support your enemies.
He got it right.
We have it wrong.
I concur. I borrowed the book from a friend of my son's they are both Economics major's in college. Both are also staunchly conservative.
My bad. I should have said "widely known" or "common knowledge". But even those may have been inadequate qualifiers, based on your comments.
I have always been under the impression that FDR went to great lengths to hide his polio from the general public. Of course those close to him knew and those in the media knew. I did not mean to imply that those who knew was a very select group.
He got it right.
We have it wrong.
Guess again. While he was arming Uncle Joe in Russia
he left Americans high and dry in the Pacific, one
result, the Batan Death March.
It's funny what the warp of time does.
Here, I think, is what happened.
America, circa 1930, was a tough place. There were mobsters in Chicago, and there was lots of crime everywhere else too. There was a dust bowl and a Depression. People were not shrinking violets on any side in 1930. Right wingers were folks like Lindbergh, brave, but mentally inclined to side with the Nazis when the time came and the Nazis showed guts. Left wingers were folks like the Union guys, not modern blow-dried metrosexuals, but bare-fisted Communists. It was a tough world of men, and men of the left were not shrinking weasels wetting their pants the way they do today. Neither were men of the right. Women didn't like pantywaist men either. Men were men. Women were women. Life was tough as hell. And crying, mewling, puking weakness was no recommendation for anything.
FDR was crippled by polio. People knew it. Polio was scary stuff. People's kids got it and ended up in iron lungs for the rest of their lives. That someone got polio, was crippled and made good anyway, that was inspiring. People knew it, but nobody was in awe. Blind people, mutilated men from the First World War, all of the miseries of the world were there. You didn't bitch and moan. You loaded your 16 tons and worked till you dropped. Never complain, never explain.
FDR had polio.
Had he whined about it, it would have made him weak and nobody would have voted for weakness.
Had he trumpeted it, it would have made him weak, and nobody would have applauded bringing attention to himself in that way.
People knew it, it didn't affect his job, they admired that it didn't stop him, and that was that.
Now let the time pass.
Along come the 1960s, when everything is a conspiracy, and everything done by every past generation was hypocrisy and evil. Such was the mantra. The politics of victimhood became locked into power in the 1970s. There was nothing wrong with the concept of the Americans With Disabilities Act, but the whole professionalization of whining about one's weaknesses, as though they were recommendations: this was (and is) the way of the world since then.
So, therefore, looking back and "discovering" that FDR was crippled. Well, SURELY, since everyone who was adult back then was a hypocrite and evil and oppressive, FDR had to HIDE the truth, because he would have been rejected by an unfeeling, uncaring society. That's the legend. It's ridiculous. FDR had his cross to bear, and so did everyone else in 1930. FDR was elected because he offered enough people what they wanted. If he hadn't, he wouldn't have been elected. That he was crippled was not a recommendation for anything, and it wasn't a disqualification. It wasn't like he was CATHOLIC or something egregious. Unlucky in health, perhaps, but so what?
So, by the 1980s and 1990s you've not got so many folks around anymore who were already voting, aware ADULTS back in 1930, and the breathless professional victims types can "discover" that FDR...whom they're inclined to lionize because they thing, wrongly, he was a socialist...was a cripple, and use this as part of a fantasy about how mean and cruel and hypocritical the world all was back then (as contrasted with our enlightened, gentle, and vegan world of today). There aren't a lot of folks around of an age and health to debate it to say, "Uh, actually everybody knew that FDR was a cripple. So what?" 75 year-olds don't sit in college classrooms to correct the instructors, or in college dorms to correct the students on what they think happened.
And so the past gets warped.
FDR should be primarily brought up in this day and age for two specific things that particularly show his character in a way that his lionizers and demonizers don't see.
The Firebombing of Europe.
And the Japanese Concentration Camps.
This was a man for whom winning was everything, and who was willing to kill to do it.
Men like him are hard to find these days.
We should remember that we have the personal endorsement of the greatness of FDR from one other man, FDR's greatest fan: Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan was an FDR Democrat. And when Nancy Reagan said that her husband would NEVER want his face to replace FDR's on the Dime, he meant it.
The reason FDR was put on the dime in 1946, after his death, was the March of Dimes, the fund for polio cripples and other diabled kids. It was not by ACCIDENT that this happened. People knew. It was no disqualifier. Of course, had FDR REVELLED in his weakness, it would have been a complete disqualifier to the tough people of that tough age.
FDR would abhor being remembered as a cripple.
But he would be proud of Dresden and Hiroshima (though he did not live to order the latter, and may well have ordered the bomb dropped on Tokyo instead).
It is difficult today to conceive of anybody being PROUD of a war strategy that reposed on firebombing cities. And that shows you just how wide the ocean of perception is between then and now.
They were different people, with different passions.
Today, FDR would be seen as a fascist mass-murdering fanatic.
Was Alec Baldwin already a F.A.G. when he did that role?
He did not.
The Americans were surprised in the Philippines and at Pearl Harbor because MacArthur blundered and didn't listen to reports (he made the IDENTICAL blunder years later in Korea, to the same result), and because Admiral Kimmel did not prepare the fleet for attack.
The military leadership were lax, and that is what made the initial Japanese attack on the Americans a rout of the US. FDR wasn't derelict in his duties, MacArthur and Kimmel were derelict in theirs.
Guess again, I had a relative in the Batan Death March
not something he read out of a book
My dad and uncle in the Korean war and have high regard for
McArthur. You are either a troll or are just have no
facts when it comes to war history.
MacArthur in Korea took the US North and disregarded the reports of the Chinese reinforcing all around. The US should not have been surprised, and should have halted the advance, but did not halt the advance, and was surprised, and US forces had to cut their way out of Chosin on account of McArthur's blunder.
That soldiers who served with McArthur were loyal to their commander is not to be doubted: he was a very charismatic man. But his errors in judgment caused the Americans in the Philippines to be surprised, and the same errors in judgment caused the Americans in Korea to be surprised. Those were commander's errors, not Presidential ones.
Men serving under a charismatic general in a war tend to lionize him. In the Civil War, General McClellan of the Union Army was very popular. He was, however, not very capable.
Also, men in the field during operations do not have the global perspective on the things that are happening that generals, or those who review the acts historically do. A soldier or sailor knows what's going on in HIS unit. He rarely has a big-picture strategic map view of the whole front and what is happening. Were your father and uncle high ranking officers serving on McArthur's staff? If they were not, there is no particular reason to believe that they would have had anything other than a very rudimentary picture of the operational theater situation other than what their unit was directly experiencing.
My dad was at the frozen Chosen and the Inchon landing.
Won a bronz star and purple heart, etc.
Where were you in the Korean war?
Ivan,
If you like that, I would also recommend "Wilson's War:How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II" by the same author. Another excellent book
Was your father on McArthur's staff, or was he serving in the fighting forces?
A soldier in the field sees the battlefield in front of him, and discovers the overall strategic situation afterwards by reading about it, unless he is on the staff.
McArthur was largely revered by his men.
This did not mean that he did not err.
Your father had to win his medals and potentially lose his life because his commander did not heed warnings and handled his army foolishly.
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