Posted on 02/20/2007 8:16:56 AM PST by Al Simmons
Bingo!
I assume you strongly agree with the author's thesis, and that's why you've appointed yourself the defender of his literary acumen.
Have a muffin, and have a nice day.
this position is verified in a book
"fdr's folly"
just a perfect explnation of fdr's disasterous economic policies.
I do not think Roosevelt was a policial GOD like the Left makes him out to be, but I think he did a fine job of navigating us through the war, in some very touchy political environments.
He made mistakes, sure. But they ALL do, no matter what war. Washington made mistakes. Jefferson made them. Lincoln made them. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Bush Sr. and our current President ALL have made and continue to make them.
This whole thing starts to piss me off. Everybody is a damned retrospective armchair soldier/general/President.
As far as I am concerned, they are human, are going to make mistakes, and because THEY carry that enormous responsibility and weight, I am going to cut them some slack.
I think we should all do that. I disagree with Roosevelt's socialist policies,and I do agree that it is possible his policies might have exacerbated and deepened the depression, and I think his wife was indeed a communist sympathizer if not a full fledged closeted communist, but I think he did alright.
The Ilyushin IL-2 Shturmovik, which NATO later code named the Bark, would have pretty much been obsolete should an East-West war have broken out in the mid-1940's. The plane was hardly used at all in Korea.
By the end of World War II, the air forces of the Western Allies, which included jet fighters, would likely have been vastly superior to anything the Soviets had.
Interestingly, FDR continued Hoover's policy of opposing payment of the bonus that the Bonus Army protesters were demanding.
Tell the folks that lived behind the iron curtain it is a red herring. I work with a guy from Romania and he tells a very different story.
My Dad's brother was killed in WWII fighting the Germans, my father in law was a B17 pilot flying 16 missions over Germany, and another uncle was in the pacific. My father-in-law went down behind Russian lines and spent 6 months in a Russian POW camp and was released at the end of the war. He said the Ruskies would be the next bad guys and that FDR made an inexcusable blunder by signing the Yalta agreement. Label it what you wish, but that is my story. Joe Stalin was responsible for far more deaths than the Nazis ever dreamed of. Both the Nazis and the Russian Reds represented the face of similar evils.
In your own words you have simply set Democrat election strategy into past tense rather than present.
Fair enough because they've been using those points ever since FDR set them in place: that's how we got Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton. Every one capitalized on fears of "the Right" getting us into a war or a depression or just making things 'worse' and that's what you are hearing today from the whole lot of them.
FDR had several things going for him that hadn't existed before:
The press loved him and he used the office to control every bit of information the public saw. (How about that wheelchair that no one knew about until it was impossible to hid any longer?) The close ties are still there and we discuss daily their effects on elections and the WOT.
When you advise us to 'search out the archives & newspapers of the time' you are simply adhering to the propaganda set forth at that time. "Revisionism" in this case is fully justified although it is also liable to be distorted by those doing it. (Note also that there were books and reports written during and after the time that spoke against much of our WW2 policies but they were dismissed then as today by popular consensus (didn't "poll well" at the time.)
His socialist programs and government expansion were justified as emergency actions to 'save' us from depression, war, or defeat - and they are still with us!
Like most of that generation of elitists he didn't just accept the USSR as the lesser of two evils (I'd have armed them also) but embraced everything about their system. Same for China where we short changed an ally and lied about 'Agrarian Reform'.
Pre war disputes over Communism versus Fascism had grown along with the rise in academic interest in Marxism following the first WW and were made worse because at that time Germans were the second ranked minority in the USA. (Note: American Jewry also chose Stalin as the lesser of two evils at that time and they still vote as though FDR was going to save us all.)
Add to that the quite different democrat party that FDR built around the same group-think the dems still rely on: Black? Vote dem. Poor? Vote dem. Urban? Vote dem.
Finally, your "like Wilson in WW1" and "unlike Hoover" points are smoke and mirrors.
Much of what Roosevelt did early on was on the table before his ascension just as 'redeploy from Iraq' will remain on the table until Hillary is crowned using the time honored machine.
Any US president (neither Lindberg nor Joe Kennedy were running for office IIRC) would have done the same or similar regarding UK prior to 12/41 and we were on course to war with Japan in any and all events.
Questions for you:
What if a different president had NOT locked up thousands of American citizens for the entire duration because of their race?
What if a different president had NOT engendered a virtual cold war with France or had NOT stood back while an allied Chinese government was run over by a Communist movement we had allowed to prosper?
What if we'd supported the Greek and Yugoslav partisans who had been on our side during the war?
What if a different president had NOT firebombed Dresden?
Whatever you may say to rationalize your rating system, I hold FDR responsible for VERY much of what has come since his coronation. By the way, downplaying his cousin because he didn't have the benefit of a war is bogus as well, there is no doubt whatever as to how TR would have dealt with such events.
Wallace died in 1965, so if he endorsed Nixon, it would have probably been in 1960.
Professional historians must be very careful to choose only the approved korrect facts, any mention of inconvenient truths could severely impact ones' tenure and dry-up ones' governmental sugar-tit.
Confiscate the bulk of the lawful money of the US and replace it with fiat.
Stock the Administration with known and admitted Communists and any number of fellow-travellers, Hopkins, Dexter White, Hiss and hundreds of others.
Not a problem, any of it -- why, he kept morale up! That's all that matters. Let succeeding generations reap the whirlwind -- he kept morale up!
Paging Wesley Mouch...Mr. Mouch to the white courtesy telephone please.
Bah!
My mistake.
"I see that the 'traditional contingent' is out in force. Fine. At least you've been exposed to a different opinion and perhaps it will lead you to think after your knees stop jerking. Its a part of the process..."
I guess we need a "Third Way" of looking at things so we can throw out our outmoded and archaic way of thinking and be more "progressive"?
Perhaps you were referring to the T-34?
"The T-34 was a Soviet medium tank produced from 1941 to 1958. It is widely regarded to have been the world's best tank when the Soviet Union entered the Second World War, and although its armour and armament were surpassed by later tanks of the era, it is credited as the war's most effective, efficient and influential design."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34
We instead had a disguised one, headed by Harry Hopkins. We know that quite a few FDR appointees and their staffs were outed as Soviet spies by the Venona project many years after McCarthy was incorrectly reviled as a Red baiter.
Today, communists in government are called Democrats who have assumed the mantle of the old Progressive Party. If you look at the goals of the Progressive Caucus in Congress, they mimic the goals of the Communist Party USA.
So we didn't have bloody purges or pogroms like the Soviets, Mao or Pol Pot, but we are sliding into socialism just the same. FDR just gave the communists a huge start on the process.
Hoover was totally wrong on the economy because he believed in corporatism and had a total misunderstanding of monetary policy. Read Murray Rothard on it and you'll have a better understanding of Hoover's mistakes.
Diatribe ? I think you mean "dialectic".
You're forgetting the unions :)
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