If reality and ideology butt heads, by the reactionaries' own logic and rhetorical posturing, reality's the thing that's got to go, not their ideology. So, in the face of an ongoing economic crisis, expect them to continue carp on stuff like this. Just like when times are good, they advocate tax cuts for the wealthy, and when times are bad, they advocate tax cuts for the wealthy. I imagine their tonic for the current predicament would be tax cuts for the wealthy. We know this is what they're going to do; the question is whether the Democrats and/or Obama will listen to them.

Spreading lies about Democrats? Even the greatest Democratic President of the 20th century? The one whose portrait is on the ten cent piece?

Really?

No one could have predicted.

The conservative talking points on this issue are inspired by Amity Shlaes' 2007 book "The Forgotten Man - a new history of the great depression".

Shlaes does not even attempt to argue that big-spending new deal stimulus programs did not help ameliorate the depresssion; rather, she argues that their benefits were offset by excessive, soviet-style federal regulation of (non-finance-related) private industry through the NRA. Shlaes devotes a whole chapter the case of a small jewish poultry business who wound up in a lengthy court battle with the feds over the NRA's "Code of Fair Competition for the Live Poultry Industry of the Metropolitan Area in and About the City of New York", because of a provision in that code which sought to prohibit their customers being allowed to choose which individual chicken they wanted from the coop.

Any conservative trying to argue against massive government spending programs is clearly an idiot, but there is a lesson to be learned from Shlaes re the benefits of encouraging changes in behaviour through a carrot-and-stick use of the tax code, rather than through bureaucratic interference in private industry.

One of the latest bits of wisdom being passed around on the sly by one of the High Priests from the cult known as the Republican Party is that if Obama succeeds in getting Universal Health Care passed, the American people will see the Democrats as the party of the middle class - ruining the Republicans forever. And all this talk about FDR prolonging the Great Depression by pumping money into the economy is just one part of their strategy to kill Universal Health Care.

Finally, a small majority now realizes that the Republicans do not now and never have occupied any moral high ground whatsoever. And it appears the pestilence of greed and incompetence they've inflicted on America is at an end, at least temporarily.

To consolidate Democratic gains, Obama needs to educate the American people who must be made to realize that it's no coincidence that all the bigots, all the religious fanatics, all the ignorant and low information voters along with all the greed heads are Republicans.

Next time someone says this just tell them that the country was a lot worse off after four years under Hoover's policies than four years under Roosevelt's.

...are only interested in "prolonging" their own obstinance and infamy.

"To consolidate Democratic gains, Obama needs to educate the American people who must be made to realize that it's no coincidence that all the bigots, all the religious fanatics, all the ignorant and low information voters along with all the greed heads are Republicans."

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant--this is the most cogent assessment of the Repug bloc that I've ever seen. So true!

I wish I knew what happened since then. It is pretty scary when people don't just say these things, but assert them with all the indicia of confidence that the big primates who call themselves human beings look for when they are weighing the truth of the claim. When a TV pundit says that historians pretty much agree, there is a whole lot of people who just adopt that viewpoint. Popular wisdom is after all not really wisdom, but mythology.

If these pundits on fox are deluded that is sad. If they're lieing, they are despicable. It is also despicable if republicans would sabotage something good for the American people just to preserve their party and their bankrupt ideology. I though that Newt Gingrich had taught them that putting party first was bad for the party. Maybe they need to join the Whigs and Freesoilers and fade into history.

This is why we have to fix the education system in this country. Anyone who knows about the Great Depression knows that Hoover deepened it by doing nothing, and the New Deal was messy but effective. The only reason FOX and the conservatives get away with this nonsense is because so much of the country is so igorant.

.....and the other truism we must keep in mind in 2009, is that Conservatives are Always Wrong. (For further details, click on my name below.)

Over the past several years I've had frequent email conversations with old high school buddies who take this talking point (which is only now percolating into media awareness) as a given. What I find most striking is that these good ol' boys simultaneously hold several mutually exclusive sub-opinions:

1) The government in general (and the president in particular) has very little impact on the economy. The economy is moved by the invisible hand of the market; the only effect that a president can have is to slow down market growth by imposing taxes or regulations.

2) Republican presidents benefit the economy and Democratic presidents make it worse.

3) The fact that the economy has generally improved under Democratic presidents and declined or remained stagnant under Republican presidents since 1920 is irrelevant (see talking point 1).

4) The New Deal delayed our recovery from the Depression and prolonged our economic misery through burdensome regulation and public spending.

5) What finally ended the Depression, in spite of FDR's attempts to destroy the country and turn it into a Communist wasteland, was WWII.

What they can never explain to me is why the vast public spending on the military in WWII was beneficial, when vast public spending on the public infrastructure, welfare, and the arts in the New Deal was destructive. But, then, logic is not the point; the point is to invent a just-so story that will justify an absolutist opposition to government intervention of any type other than the military and police varieties.