Franklin Roosevelt

Book Reviewer: America ‘More Polarized’ Because ‘Reagan Brought Right-Wing Politics Into the Mainstream’
By Tom Johnson | June 21, 2015 | 2:02 PM EDT

Michael O’Donnell is eager to push back against the belief that Reagan ranks with Franklin Roosevelt as a great 20th-century president. In his review of H.W. Brands’ Reagan: The Life in the Washington Monthly’s June/July/August issue, O’Donnell wrote that “Roosevelt saved the nation from an existential threat (the Great Depression), while Reagan merely steered it out of a funk (the 1970s). Roosevelt enacted structural reforms to protect the most vulnerable members of society, [whereas] Reagan systematically set about dismantling those reforms.”

Moreover, argued O’Donnell, Reagan influenced today’s politics for the worse. O’Donnell calls him “the author of many of our current predicaments as a nation and a society…The government-is-the-enemy mind-set that pervades the right today comes to us from Barry Goldwater via Ronald Reagan. As our roads, bridges, and schools fall apart around us, we have them to thank.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Hillary Should Challenge the Right’s ‘Constrained’ Idea of Freedom
By Tom Johnson | June 10, 2015 | 5:55 PM EDT

When it comes to the word “freedom,” liberals and conservatives long have told each other, in effect, “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Take Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, who in a Tuesday Washington Post column urged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to endorse a “far more expansive” concept of freedom than the right’s “constrained notion” that’s held sway in America since the Reagan era.

Market-oriented, anti-government ideas about freedom, vanden Heuvel claimed, have brought about “an economy serving the few, and a politics corrupted by money,” whereas Hillary can become an ideological heir to FDR if she “take[s] on the economic royalists of this day” by calling for measures such as “fair taxes on the rich and corporations,” “vital public investments…in new energy, in infrastructure, in education and training,” and expanded Social Security.

Does Ed Schultz Believe New Deal Emerged From US Experience in WWII?
By Jack Coleman | September 21, 2012 | 2:21 PM EDT

Sure sounds like it, but you be the judge.

Here's Schultz on his radio show Wednesday, doing his part in the liberal media pile-on after Mitt Romney dared suggest considerable overlap between President Obama's supporters and those Americans most dependent on government (audio) --

Ed Schultz Tells Radio Listeners 'You Better Be Packing Iron' to Defend Yourselves
By Jack Coleman | February 3, 2012 | 3:01 PM EST

And no, he wasn't talking about golf clubs.

A liberal says what Ed Schultz said on his radio show Wednesday, other liberals shrug it off as just an opinion, albeit one oozing the odor of the Second Amendment. (audio after page break)

Socialist Thom Hartmann Lectures Caller: Capitalism a Cancer, Libertarianism Corrupts
By Tim Graham | January 4, 2012 | 7:58 PM EST

On Tuesday, liberal radio host Thom Hartmann engaged a conservative caller who was tired of the anti-capitalist rhetoric from President Obama and the left. “From the president’s own mouth, the anti-capitalist rhetoric is so poisoned,” said the caller.

Hartmann interrupted: “It is rhetoric in opposition to the excesses of unregulated capitalism. Unregulated capitalism can become a cancer just like unregulated growth in a cell is the definition of cancer.” Hartmann went on to say that libertarian notions are corrupting government, and that the Founding Fathers were for “general welfare” exactly like Franklin Roosevelt.

New Deal Apologist Mike Papantonio Praises FDR Scheme to Pack Supreme Court
By Jack Coleman | December 30, 2011 | 2:17 PM EST

Leave it to a fringe leftist to tout a rarely-defended plan proposed by Franklin Roosevelt.

Angered by Supreme Court rulings that blocked many New Deal initiatives, Roosevelt in 1937 came up with what he considered an ingenious scheme to get around the court -- increasing it from 9 to 15 justices, the additional six most assuredly sharing Roosevelt's politics. (audio clip after page break)

News Networks to Acknowledge Ronald Reagan, but Pulled Out All the Stops for FDR’s 100th
By Rich Noyes | February 5, 2011 | 6:43 PM EST

On Saturday morning, TVNewser summarized the news networks’ plans for covering former President Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday tomorrow — Fox News plans a documentary for Sunday night, CNN will have live programming Sunday afternoon and NBC’s Meet the Press will originate from the Reagan library with guests including James Baker, Reagan’s first White House chief of staff.

The effort seems a bit modest for the most successful conservative president of the 20th century, who re-invigorated the American economy and helped bring the Soviet Union’s communist empire to its knees. The best contrast is with late January 1982, when the towering liberal president of the 20th century, Franklin D. Roosevelt, reached his 100th milestone.

For that anniversary, NBC carved out an hour of primetime on Sunday, January 24, for a documentary narrated by newsman John Hart: “Nothing to Fear — The Legacy of FDR.” And ABC worked up a three-hour documentary, "FDR," which aired on Friday, January 29, 1982, the day before Roosevelt’s actual birthday.

Laughable Maddow Spin: Epic GOP House Blowout 'More Normal Than Not Normal'
By Jack Coleman | November 5, 2010 | 10:39 AM EDT

Allegedly not reeling from the previous night's midterms, Rachel Maddow quickly sought to reassure her shellshocked viewers -- debacle, what debacle?!

To bolster her argument, Maddow cited a bar graph created by Steve Benen at Washington Monthly showing midterm losses -- along with a few gains -- for the party in the White House since 1934.

Here's Maddow's valiant spin on her show Wednesday (video after page break) --

Blinders Securely Fastened, Rachel Maddow Proclaims 'There is No Milking' of Social Security - 'To Any Degree'
By Jack Coleman | September 6, 2010 | 8:18 AM EDT

Looking for someone to investigate theft and questionable spending in government programs? Think twice about hiring Rachel Maddow. The earnest MSNBC polemicist has deemed such a thing impossible, at least when it comes to Social Security.

Reacting with the reptilian defensiveness of liberals whenever conservatives suggest Social Security is unsustainable, Maddow made this whopper of a claim on her show Sept. 1 in response to former senator Alan Simpson's pithy criticism of the FDR-created sacred cow --

MADDOW: Here's the broader context, what he said, it was in an email, what he wrote in that email, in which that quote, from which that quote was taken. This is what he said -- 'yes, I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too. It's the same with any system in America. We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million [tits]', thing that starts with T that rhymes with bits.

Clownish Rachel Maddow Rewrites History of Great Depression, Reinforces Liberal Creation Myth
By Jack Coleman | December 15, 2008 | 2:13 PM EST

Must have been that full moon. Or "fool full moon" as Rachel Maddow stumbled in referring to it.

If the Newseum is accepting suggestions for exhibits, a possibility comes to mind -- the Pantheon of Unfortunate Punditry. First submission -- Maddow's hilarious revisionism of Herbert Hoover on her MSNBC show Friday. I've watched the segment several times, each time in awe at Maddow's supreme confidence, unrivalled since Ted Baxter in his heyday. I plan to preserve it for posterity, to share with my children as a cautionary tale -- This is what happens when a person makes an utter fool of herself in public.

Maddow told of Vice President Dick Cheney visiting Capitol Hill earlier in the week and warning congressional Republicans that if the GOP blocks the auto bailout, "... We will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever," according to the Los Angeles Times.

Maddow Perpetuates Hoary Great Depression Myth
By Jack Coleman | November 10, 2008 | 1:01 PM EST

"Rachel Maddow is the smartest person on TV," proclaims The Advocate magazine in a cover story on the newly christened MSNBC pundit and Air America Radio host.

That being the case, Maddow ought to know better than make some of the claims she does -- at least when it comes to politics, economics and American history.

Most recent example: Maddow's interview on Nov. 5 with former Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee and their discussion of the Republican Party's future --

NYTimes.com Video: 'Lesson' from 1930s is that Government is the Solution
By Paul Detrick | November 7, 2008 | 2:31 PM EST

"The government is doing what it can. They've learned the lessons of the 30s. And the lesson of the 30s was to put ideology aside and do whatever you can to bail it out," New York Times Chief Financial Correspondent Floyd Norris said in an Oct. 8 video on the publication's Web site entitled "Echoes from a Dismal Past."

"I agree with you," economics reporter Louis Uchitelle said, also pointing out that it took two years before the government really "stepped in and acted" during the Depression - referring to Franklin Roosevelt's action.

Norris said one of the first lessons of the 1930s was that bailing banks out would "limit the damage of the financial crisis."

"If you go back just two or three years ago, you had this powerful argument that government was the problem. So there is emerging from this an understanding that markets and government are married whether they like it or not," Uchitelle said.