Posted on 10/15/2011 6:16:32 AM PDT by milwguy
One of the best FDR critiques ever written was Raymond Moley’s 1939 memoir After Seven Years. Moley had been a top aide and speechwriter for FDR from 1932 on, and it records Moley’s growing disillusionment with both FDR and the New Deal that culminated in Moley leaving the White House in 1938
There are numerous passages that will remind the contemporary reader of Obama’s narcissistic presidency. One passage in particular recounts how FDR bristled at the suggestion that his policies impaired business confidence and were therefore a drag on economic recovery:
It was Roosevelt’s insistence upon the essential unity of his policies that inevitably brought into question his understanding of economics. . . The first centered in a failure to understand what is called, for lack of a better term, business confidence. Confidence consists, on the one side, of belief in the prospect of profits and, on the other, in the willingness to take risks, to venture money. . . This Roosevelt refused to recognize. In fact, the term “confidence” became, as time went on, the most irritating of all symbols to him. He had the habit of repelling the suggestion that he was impairing business confidence by answering that he was restoring the confidence the public had lost in business leadership. . .
But, what had been done? For one thing, the confusion of the administration’s utility, shipping, railroad, and housing policies had discouraged the small individual investor. For another, the administration’s taxes on corporate surpluses and capital gains, suggesting, as they did, the belief in a recovery based upon capital investment is unsound, discouraged the expansion of producers’ capital equipment. For another, the calling of names in political speeches and the vague, veiled threats of punitive action all tore the fragile texture of credit and confidence upon which the very existence of business depends.
All sounds rather familiar. Especially the “irritating” part. Moley thought FDR’s fatal flaw was he became “overwhelmed by the illusion of his own rectitude.” Too bad Moley didn’t live long enough to witness Obama. Putting Moley’s critique of FDR next to Obama recalls one of Harry Truman’s personal axioms: “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”
Obama, the genius Harvard Law Review President, U of C Law 'Professor', and consumate politician is really just a narcissistic dolt who has an Ivy League education and never learned one useful thing his entire time there. I am not sure if that is more an indictment of Obama or Harvard and Columbia, but it is obvious what they taught him had no practical value in the real world.
FDR was re-elected twice with unemployment figures that he could only wish were as low as 9%. 2012 will NOT be a “gimme” for Republicans. The Tea Party will need to press harder than they ever have before. Midterms do not bring out the numbers of electorate that Presidential elections do.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ― George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense: The Life of Reason Volume 1
Did Burke write under a pseudonym?
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Actually Santayana is erroneously given credit for that quote.........Santayana is known for his (often-misquoted) comments: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfill it”,[1] and “[O]nly the dead have seen the end of war.”[2] The latter sentence has often been falsely attributed to Plato; the former is itself a misquote of a statement by Edmund Burke.
Obama already knew how to get unearned opportunities by using his half-blackness to milk the Affirmative Action system and avoid responsibility and accountability.
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