Stop trying to tell me Franklin Roosevelt was a great man...

[SaveElmer]

Look at the miserable record...

At the height of the depression he pushed for a 40% cut in veterans benefits...coalescing support around Huey Long and having to endure passage of a bonus bill over his objection.

He refused to push for anti-lynching legislation for God sakes...crassly playing to southern racist sympathies in a pathetic attempt at gaining their political support.

Pearl Harbor...c'mon, he clearly knew the Japanese were going to attack, any moron could see that was coming. Showing no scruples whatsoever he allowed thousands of deaths in Hawaii to occur to drag the country into another war.

Roosevelt knew for many years that the concentration camps were in operation in Europe, yet he refused to do anything about it, and refused to allow large numbers of Jews to emigrate to the U.S.

And finally, he interred an entire class of citizen simply because of their heritage...120,000 of our fellow citizens herded into internment camps. How many families were split up, how many folks lost their jobs...?


He was a neocon enabler before we knew their were neocons!!!!!





















In case no one is paying attention this is a satiric response to the anti Ford posts floating around here...

[Deja Q]

1. Don't you dare piss off Maude!

[WI_DEM]

25. God will get you for that, Walter.

[WI_DEM]

2. Yeah...well he didn't pardon Dick Nixon! :)

[Paulie]

6. He does have the record for total pardons though (3687)

So it's likely he would have, just because he couldn't stop writing his name... :)

[TankLV]

3. You forgot the "sarcasm" thingy...

[SaveElmer]

4. Well I put a note at the bottom...

Wanted people to think about it for a minute before realizing it was satire.

[jpgray]

7. Sadly, you forgot to read it.

[mckara]

5. Wait a Minute!

You can't read history with Zeitgeist! Chances are you would have agreed with him if you understood the times in which he lived.

[valerief]

8. Well, there were all those sanctions against Japan that really

pissed them off right before Pearl Harbor.

[Warren Stupidity]

9. uh, ah, hmmm...

Ok. So is this the Democratic Underground? Was there something about the Ford presidency that we should admire and praise that I missed? There was certainly a LOT about the FDR presidency that we all on DU can agree was great, was progressive, advanced our side of the political spectrum. What was it about the Ford presidency again?

[SaveElmer]

13. The point is...

There is more than one explanation for certain events...the motivation of the individual matters. And that any man, no matter how great, will have taken actions that can be roundly criticized, and yet still be admirable in many ways.

I have heard no one here say that Ford was a great President...simply that many think he was a fundamentally good person and that his intentions were good...that is all I have seen.

[Warren Stupidity]

16. And we disagree about that.

His presidency was flawed from the start, tainted by the dark cloud of a back room deal and the end run around any attempt to bring the Nixon administration to justice. Many of us here take exception to the characterization of his presidency as a good one, and the mainstream media is positively gushing about his supposed greatness.

So let's cut to the chase: pardon good or bad, Elmer?

[SaveElmer]

18. Pardon was the correct thing to do...

And if you have any credible evidence of a "backroom" deal why don't you post it...

[Warren Stupidity]

21. Sure Al Haig lying his ass off this morning that there was no deal.

'nuff said. Talk to Dan Shore. Get a clue. Oh never mind.

[SaveElmer]

23. So as usual...

You have no credible evidence...

[Warren Stupidity]

26. No as usual I am one step away from the ignore key.

There is of course no hard evidence one way or the other about the Ford deal. There is tons of circumstantial evidence that the lying war criminal al haig brokered the deal with Ford. There are lots of very credible folks who know a very lot about this particular bit of history who support that position. I'd ask you for the evidence that there was no deal, but that wouldn't be fair. I suggest instead that you google the situation and make an honest decision about what really happened.

[SaveElmer]

27. Believe me I have...

In fact have read quite a bit about the situation and read several biographies on Gerald Ford...so yes in my opinion Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon was a sincere attempt at healing the nation...

Feel free to press that ignore button...that's what its for!!!

[stansnark]

28. do you think nixon, with all the dirt he had on people,

would have resigned without the assurance of a pardon ?

[Solon]

30. So Presidents should never be accountable for what they do in office?

Seriously, I'll mail you a dollar, buy a clue.

[porphyrian]

10. Yeah, but Roosevelt Franklin was a great muppet.

http://www.muppetcentral.com/news/2002/080602.shtml

[renie408]

11. Thanks. This was very elegantly done. n/t

[TwentyFive]

12. And don't forget his cowardly wife, Eleanor, who refused to come out of the closet as bisexual.

</sarcasm>

Thanks for putting things back into perspective. I hate these people who judge great leaders of the past by contemporary standards. That said, something is not right about comparing FDR in any way to Gerald Ford.

edit: add last 2 sentences.

[Deja Q]

14. But there is no such thing as bisexual!

:sarcasm:

[TwentyFive]

20. Exactly! The Radical Homosexual Agenda had not been invented yet.

Everybody had good wholesome family values back in those days. (I'm assuming its unecessary to put the sarcasm tag on this?)

[EFerrari]

15. What crap.

See ya.

[theoldman]

17. Roosevelt made a lot of mistakes.

The difference between him and Bush is that Roosevelt corrected most of his mistakes. The many good things that Roosevelt accomplished outweigh the bad things. That is why he is remembered as one of our greatest presidents.

[SaveElmer]

19. Well this was a satiric post...

And I was not comparing Roosevelt to Bush but to comment on the Ford bashing...

[Solon]

31. Still an insult to FDR...

even in satire you demonstrate the lowest of the low.

[jpgray]

24. Like the court packing scheme, for example

[Book Lover]

22. Your rhetoric is overblown

Rather than belittle the real and lasting damage done by Executive Order 9066, perhaps you should direct your rhetoric differently. Were I in your place, I might simply point out that there are no clear-cut heroes or villains in the grey-shaded complexity that is the modern Presidency, rather than fan the flames by illuminating these true and tragic flaws FDR showed.

[stansnark]

29. Pearl Harbor...

he not only knew it was coming, he instigated it in order to get us in the war against germany.a very courageous act that may have saved the world imho.