FDR and Dubya.
I read an article in Newsweek comparing FDR and Dubya. (The article is actually about a book about FDR, but the article author, Jonathan Alter, goes further to toss that book into today's pot of socio-political stew, stir it up and describe the taste. HOLY CRAP... what a metaphor).
Anyways, this set my mind a-wanderin'. Their backgrounds are not too different. FDR went to Harvard; Bush went to Yale. Both went to uppity private high schools. Both overcame serious ailments, polio and alcoholism, respectively. But both presidents turned out so different.
The biggest difference, in my opinion, is how each president chose to treat the American people. FDR told us, "There is nothing to fear but fear itself." This is at the time of great depression, and Nazis, fascists, and communists (Oh My!) threatening the power balance of the entire globe with our own country not yet at absolute superpower status. Today, embroiled in war of ideology, we are not told to not fear fear. We are told to make choices based on that fear. That fear of something, be it WMD, China, immigration, health care. Condi Rice said it best, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." WTF! Fear monger and manipulate much?
Anyways, the article is interesting. Admittedly, it is left-leaning. But I'll try to drum up something right-leaning for my next great political soapbox stand.
posted by Anthony @ 3:09 PM
9 comments
9 Comments:
I really like your connection between how they used fear. Such a heady post for a Sunday!
"Meet the Press" and "This Week" always get me going on Sundays. I'm definitely more tirade prone on those mornings.
I concur with your observation about fear: one calming, one alarmist and fear-mongering. But while I agree that's a significant difference, it might not make the top of my list. I'd like to start a running list, but I honestly believe that my emotions would overrun any impression of sanity that I might present shortly into the process.
I'm impressed you can watch those shows without having a stroke, man. I end up yelling at the TV.
On a contrary note, to be fair regarding fear and context: FDR's quote referred to the Great Depression bank runs and lack of faith in the American Economy, while Secretary Rice's comments were made while the President of Iran is enriching Uranium while making statements of "wiping Israel off the map." Given context, her comment might actually be justified.
But I do believe that the current administration regularly uses fear to emotionally manipulate in a despicable way.
I do see your point, Mike. However, I'm not convinced considering context favors this administration. Was the Great Depression more or less scary than this "War" on Terror?
Plus, how not American (not in the "unpatriotic" assinine way)! You think potential nuclear capability is worse than a poor economy? Sheesh.
I appreciate your observations.
I would like to mention that both Prez's have another thing in common....they married strong, intelligent, and principled women. Why is it that in the 1930's and 40's the political climate allowed Eleanor to change the world, but presently only allows Laura to be a "hausfrau"?
Aunt Mb
I think that Frau Bush would have been eine Hausfrau in the 30's and 40's in any case.
And I would vote for Elanor to be the actual President, were she alive today. And not 140 years old. (You know what I mean).
In response to Mike--yes--But I still like Laura as person. The fact that she has contributed nada to the country, is not totally her fault. I do think, behind the scenes, she has scolded her dolt of a husband about many things, and we just don't know about it.
But I agree with you. I can't see her ever running for anything except the bread and milk....if millionaires do that!
Eleanor is one of my heroes. Talk about someone who faced the hard stuff and endured.....I think she would have made a great Prez.
Anthony's Aunt Mb
OMG!!! Bob Herbert reads your blog-- and plagarizes it!!! Please note his column (which follows) in today's NYTIMES!!
May 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
America the Fearful
By BOB HERBERT
In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public's fear is this president's most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset.
Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear — so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.
If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the nation has ever known.
Four marines drowned Thursday when their 60-ton tank rolled off a bridge and sank in a canal about 50 miles west of Baghdad. Three American soldiers in Iraq were killed by roadside bombs the same day. But those tragic and wholly unnecessary deaths were not the big news. The big news was the latest leak of yet another presidential power grab: the administration's collection of the telephone records of tens of millions of American citizens.
The Bush crowd, which gets together each morning to participate in a highly secret ritual of formalized ineptitude, is trying to get its creepy hands on all the telephone records of everybody in the entire country. It supposedly wants these records, which contain crucial documentation of calls for Chinese takeout in Terre Haute, Ind., and birthday greetings to Grandma in Talladega, Ala., to help in the search for Osama bin Laden.
Hey, the president has made it clear that when Al Qaeda is calling, he wants to be listening, and you never know where that lead may turn up.
The problem (besides the fact that the president has been as effective hunting bin Laden as Dick Cheney was in hunting quail) is that in its fearmongering and power-grabbing the Bush administration has trampled all over the Constitution, the democratic process and the hallowed American tradition of government checks and balances.
Short of having them taken away from us, there is probably no way to fully appreciate the wonder and the glory of our rights and liberties here in the United States, including the right to privacy.
The Constitution and the elaborate system of checks and balances were meant to protect us against the possibility of a clownish gang of small men and women amassing excessive power and behaving like tyrants or kings. But the normal safeguards have not been working since the Bush crowd came to power, starting with the hijacked presidential election in 2000.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, all bets were off. John Kennedy once said, "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war." But George W. Bush, employing an outrageous propaganda campaign ("Shock and awe," "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"), started an utterly pointless war in Iraq that he still doesn't know how to win or how to end.
If you listen to the Bush version of reality, the president is all powerful. In that version, we are fighting a war against terrorism, which is a war that will never end. And as long as we are at war (forever), there is no limit to the war-fighting powers the president can claim as commander in chief.
So we've kidnapped people and sent them off to be tortured in the extraordinary rendition program; and we've incarcerated people at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere without trial or even the right to know the charges against them; and we're allowing the C.I.A. to operate super-secret prisons where God-knows-what-all is going on; and we're listening in on the phone calls and reading the e-mail of innocent Americans without warrants; and on and on and on.
The Bushies will tell you that it is dangerous and even against the law to inquire into these nefarious activities. We just have to trust the king.
Well, I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion of blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.
There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage that George W. Bush has done to his country. If the United States could look at itself in a mirror, it would be both alarmed and ashamed at what it saw.
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