-By Warner Todd Huston
PBS and documentary maker Ken Burns have done it again with a wonderful look at the political lives of Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. But if the series did anything it revealed to a discerning viewer how Franklin rebuilt the presidency on a pillar of hate and lies and remade the Democrat Party into a party driven by purposeful misdirection and deceit.
Certainly the series approaches these two consequential presidents as good for the country. Neither were as salubrious for the country as popular opinion holds and both did a lot of damage. To Burns’ credit he does allow conservative commentator George Will to slip in a few digs at how both Teddy and Franklin tore down the presidency and turned our country from a constitutional republic built on a pretty straightforward explication of the political raison d’être of any particular party, candidate or era and into a nation run by sneaky politicians who lie straight-faced to the people and don’t care about the Constitution at all.
Teddy Roosevelt did his bit to end our Constitutional republic, granted, and was followed by Woodrow Wilson who pounded a few more nails into that coffin. But it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who really destroyed the country.
The truth is, Franklin was an utterly failed president in everything but his leadership in WWII. It has to be acknowledged that his stewardship of the war was great and maybe a lesser president would have left the US more vulnerable. But there is no doubt that he materially hurt this country in every other arena.
His domestic policy was a disaster, his economic policies utterly failed, and his disregard of the rule of law and the US Constitution was a disgusting display of arrogance and hubris. By forcing the world into war, Hitler ended the Great depression, not Franklin Roosevelt.
Franklin Roosevelt re-built this country into a country of haters, liars, cheats, and welfare slobs, destroying a country of rugged individualists who only wanted the freedom to get ahead by the labor of their own two hands.
Our latter Roosevelt lied incessantly to the voters, too. Sadly, they loved him for it setting the precedent for a Democrat Party that doesn’t care how crooked, how mean, and how filled with lies their party is. As long as they win, that is all that matters. It’s no wonder the Republican Party has been worthless since Franklin Roosevelt. They’ve never understood that they are facing liars and have never been able to make voters realize it.
Roosevelt lied about the business sector, lied about Social Security, lied about the war, lied about his health, in fact there was little that he didn’t lie about except for his desire to remake the federal government into a massive charity governed at the point of a gun.
The Hyde Park Roosevelt came to office with hate on his perpetually smiling lips. He riled the American voter to hate their place of employment, encouraged them to despise banks and financiers, and created an air of entitlement to others’ money by laying the foundation for the modern welfare state.
One quote in the series is telling. Roosevelt, an unnamed worker is quoted as saying, “is the only man who knows that my boss is a son of a bitch.”
This is the hate Roosevelt carefully and gleefully engendered in the people of the United States of America.
Previous to Franklin most presidents, most politicians, and the political culture was pretty straightforward about what their goals, policies, and ideals were. Hate them or love them, you generally knew where politicians stood in most ways. Sure there were lies in politics, but they were essentially small lies.
Roosevelt, though, was an inveterate liar and he re-created the presidency into a purveyor of “the great lie.” Just like the communists, Roosevelt believed that he should tell the people what they wanted to hear knowing full well that he was telling them lies and that he intended to do something different than what he said.
Many of the hateful things he said about the business sector were outright lies. In fact, he knew them to be outright lies because he came from that class of people.
He lied for his entire presidency about not getting into WWII, as well. He intended to jump into the war at his earliest possible convenience. For years, Roosevelt held secret meetings with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and planned a series of maneuvers to get the US into the war.
For instance, over the years many have said that Franklin knew that the Japanese were about to attack Pearl Harbor and that this was his best “in” into the war. But whether he knew about it or not is really immaterial. Roosevelt created Pearl Harbor with a concerted policy of starving Japan of the raw materials it wanted for its expansionist efforts in the Pacific.
Whether he specifically knew that the Japanese were going to hit Pearl or not, Roosevelt purposefully created the attack with policies geared toward pushing Japan to the breaking point. Far from desiring to stay out of a war with Japan as he said daily through his lying, smiling teeth, Roosevelt essentially caused the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. What should really “live in infamy” is the fact that Roosevelt lied us into that war.
But he also lied about everything else in his life.
He lied repeatedly about his health, for one. Somehow he was able to cowl the press and create the lie-fueled, lapdog media with which we are so familiar. He invented a press corps that would allow itself to be led by the nose by any Democrat president when he got them to refuse to report on just how ill he always was.
Then, when he was dying of heart disease as WWII was coming to a close, he lied barefaced to the country telling us in his own voice that he was perfectly healthy. He died only a short time after one such speech to the nation.
He also lied about Social security calling the redistributionist program an “insurance policy” for the elderly. It never was anything like “insurance” and once he even admitted the Soc. Sec. was “politics all the way through.”
Even the Supreme Court at one point demanded that the President stop telling Americans that Soc. Sec. was an insurance policy. But he thumbed his nose at the courts and the truth and lied with abandon.
Roosevelt also created the Democrat Party as a re-imagined plantation for African Americans lying repeatedly to their faces that he intended to “help” them achieve equality but rarely lifting a finger to enact any such policies all the while reaping the benefit of their slavish support of the Democrat Party.
His conduct of the war effort aside, Franklin Roosevelt ranks as one of the worst, most dangerous presidents in American history. He joins Wilson and Lyndon Baines Johnson as the chief murderers of the United States of America and for the most part he should not be venerated as he is.
Worst of all, Franklin Roosevelt created the office of the president not as a leader but as the liar-in-chief who will lie to the people as he carries out his arrogant, hidden agenda.
After Roosevelt, every single Democrat president understood that if he said one thing and did another he’d likely maintain his power. Lies have ruled the day and they have never stopped.
A nation of lies is Franklin Roosevelt’s disgusting legacy. Obama has inculcated that rule by lies to become the biggest liar this country has ever seen in the White House. But he and his ilk learned their craft at FDR’s knee.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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