Levin: Trump "Hit It Out Of The Park" With "Very Good Speech"

Breitbart.com ^ | June 23, 2016 | Ian Hanchett

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

FDR turned a routine recession into a depression with his boneheaded socialist crap.

. . . which is not to say that Hoover did not start, and would not have continued and worsened, the recession with his socialist (anticommunism notwithstanding) claptrap. When the country needed Coolidge, it had Hoover and then FDR. FDR privately favored Hoover at one point, back when he was under secretary of the Navy, IIRC.

the fifties

then you and I are of similar age, and you probably take interest in WWII and the prewar era. Interesting reading:

1941: Fighting the Shadow War: A Divided America in a World at War Hardcover – April 19, 2016

This book makes it painfully clear that FDR wanted to enter WWII, and the country at large did not. I had known that Lindberg was critical of FDR on foreign policy; in this telling Lindberg is the opponent of FDR on foreign policy. Under SecState Averil Harriman exceeded his instructions in dealing with Japan, and was the precipitating factor in Pearl Harbor. When Hitler invaded the USSR he was far from the only person to think he would conquer the country quickly. FDR right-hand-man Harry Hopkins went to Moscow, talked to Stalin, and concluded that with help, the USSR would avoid that fate. Planes already packaged for shipment to British forces in Egypt were unwrapped, assembled, and flown to Vladavastok.

The New Dealers' War:

FDR and the War Within World War II
by Thomas Fleming

Gives a slightly different slant on the era, very interesting.

Freedom's Forge:

How American Business Produced Victory in World War II
Arthur Herman

reveals that FDR, as under SecNav during WWI, had seen that it took so long for US war production to start up that the war was actually over before it had any effect. FDR realized that would not do at all in WWII, so upon the Fall of France (May, 1940) he fang dangled and finagled to get military production geared up in advance. The reason the US had very little in the way of armament inventory in December 1941 was not that production was not under way, it was because the inventory of such was continually stripped bare to keep Britain and the USSR in the war.

So it was not a miracle that military production promptly skyrocketed after Pearl Harbor; that was just a continuation and followthrough of a ramp-up of military production that started a year and a half earlier. The necessary factories and machine tools were already in place.

[dsc]

Great info.

I still blame FDR for the depression, though.