YOUR VIEW: Conservatives bemoan deficit, yet praise Reagan
By ARTHUR BETHEA
April 28, 2010 12:00 AM
...When (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) took office, the official unemployment rate was 25 percent. While his policies were far from a complete success, voters approved of his administration, and FDR won landslide re-elections in 1936 and 1940. Obviously, voters felt the economy had improved significantly, and it did, the unemployment rate dropping to 9.9 percent before our entrance into World War II.
When conservative Congresswoman Michele Bachmann suggested that FDR turned a recession into the Great Depression, she was crazy, ignorant or deceitful; President Roosevelt could not have been re-elected by huge margins if he had caused the Great Depression.
(CONTINUED)
...that's from an opinion piece in a Massachusetts newspaper. And there's more; a very concise citizen-journalist piece that exposes conservative teachings of twentieth century American history-- and explains why those teachings amount to mere propaganda, lies, garbage.
A brief tour of the historical facts is always valuable reminder to liberals and progressives about why they believe, what they believe. The scary part is the relative success that conservatives have had with their national base: teaching a past that never existed.
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/...
Next:
From the Wall Street Journal...
...Earlier this month, (Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine)told an audience of black ministers that Republicans were waging an "intentional strategy" to undermine Mr. Obama...
...In that speech, the Democratic chairman cited legislation by Rep. Bill Posey (R., Fla.) as "perpetrating the lie that President Obama is not a citizen of the United States." He mentioned South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson's cry of "You lie!" during a 2009 speech by Mr. Obama to Congress, as well as Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann's charge this month that Mr. Obama's party was running a "gangster government."
"This is not just about differences of opinion.It's an intentional strategy...to try to take back in '10 what this nation historically did in '08," Mr. Kaine said.
Ms. Bachmann's office said Mr. Kaine misused her words, and that the phrase "gangster government" referred to federal intervention in the private sector. Ms. Bachmann, in a statement, criticized Democrats for a strategy that would "inject racially charged statements into today's political discourse."
Yes, that would be awful if someone tried to inject racially charged statements into today's political discourse. For example, in the wake of the meltdown of home mortgage loan sector, Congresswoman Bachmann attempted to blame the disaster on people of color.
That was a very strange explanation for a Bush regulatory policy fiasco; economic experts addressing the actual causes of the disaster didn't argue that "it was the colored people who caused it." But in 2008 Bachmann did try to float a "race-based explanation" as the explanation:
Heard on the Hill: Finger-Pointing
September 26, 2008
By Emily Heil and Elizabeth Brotherton
Roll Call Staff
...Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) kicked up a controversy on Thursday when she pinned the mess on former President Bill Clinton (yawn) and minorities (now Democrats are listening).
During an otherwise mundane hearing on the federal takeover of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, Republicans, specifically Bachmann, focused on Clinton's administration and its push to provide loans to low-income minorities as a key reason for the downfall of the housing market.
...Specifically, that administration decided to make loans through the Community Reinvestment Act "on the basis of race and often on little else." Backpedaling on the controversial comments, Bachmann later added that the law was "well-intentioned" because ensuring that minorities have access to housing is important.
What about Bachmann's explanation of her regular use of the phrase "gangster government" to describe the Obama White House and current Democratic majority in Congress? Her defense is that the term "gangster government" is merely her shorthand way of referring to "federal intervention in the private sector."
The problem there is that the federal government of the United States of America has always intervened in the private sector. There is nothing inherently "gangster" or criminal in doing so. And Bachmann's explanations do not cite any criminal acts by elected colleagues she blithely identifies "gangsters."
This would all be ridiculous if there weren't so many Americans holding a firm if irrational belief that Obama and the Democrats in government are outlaws, acting outside the legal authority allowed to them by their offices and the US Constitution. It would be merely ridiculous if people weren't showing up at tea party rallies with signs comparing Obama to Hitler and Pelosi to Stalin. It would be ridiculous and easily dismissed, if people who track hate groups weren't citing Bachmann by name as a source of the kind of conspiratorial thinking that leads to death threats against public officials.
But Bachmann's accusations of criminal control of the US government can't be dismissed as ridiculous, in light of the death threats and the violent "acting out" on conspiracy rhetoric. Bachmann is aware of the current climate of hatred on the right, she knows that there are deluded extremists about who dream of assassinating Obama and Democratic members of Congress.
And she knows that the people elected to run Washington, D.C. are not "gangsters." Yet she continues to regularly assure her supporters that they are.
And Bachmann and her political mentors and allies know their anti-government target audience and the violent lunatic fringe that forms a part of that audience. They know exactly what effect her lies are likely to have.
Wall Street Journal article:
http://online.wsj.com/...