I thought Brit Hume was done littering our airwaves with conservative talking points since he gave up his show to Mr. Baier, but no, he's still going to be a lead talking head for FOX. And boy is he ever wanking. With a straight face and not in clown make up, Brit Hume said this:
HUME: That's right. Well, then, the New Deal -- everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed. The debate is over why it failed. People on the left believe it failed because Roosevelt, at the end of the day, really didn't do enough spending, that it simply wasn't spending -- he was not spending, whether deficit spending or not, on a scale grand enough to lift the damaged U.S. economy out of that depression.
There are people on the other side of the spectrum who would say, maybe, but look at this as well. President Roosevelt waged what could only be called a jihad against private enterprise. He prosecuted leading figures in it, Andrew Mellon being a conspicuous example. He prosecuted little companies, butcher shops in New York, as has been laid out in Amity Shlaes' book about the new -- book about the history of the Great Depression.
The problem FDR had was that he got caught up in being more conservative with the budget in '38, which slowed it down---still---the NEW Deal rescued America out of the depression and was so successful that conservatives have been trying to destroy every part of it ever since. Bush's lame attempt at dismantling Social Security was a humiliating defeat for him right after he won reelection in '04. He thought he had all that political capital to spend and he turned his attention on Social Security. There's one thing you can't fool with. That is Social Security benefits. Americans will never take that risk. .
Can you imagine if the people had actually been hoodwinked into believing Bush and went along with the mantra that they should invest their Social Security into the stock market? There may have been an armed march into DC, not by Blackwater type militia's, but by the AARP crowd that would have been screwed by the market meltdown. But it will not stop clowns like Brit Hume from trying to rewrite history about FDR.
I agree with Digby when she says:
...Brit Hume's mendacity is approaching Holocaust denial territory. Talk about intellectual violence.
The conservative elite appear to have decided on a strategy of making Obama's recovery plan fail so that they can blame the Democrats, seize power and start a world war.
I keep thinking I can't be any more shocked by their audacity. But they always exceed my expectations.