Herbert Hoover

I wonder sometimes if we are not really fighting the old arguments present during WWII and even prior to that war!

I recently viewed a CSPAN presentation by some old man named George Nash who wrote Freedom Betrayed

The book is a biography of Herbert Hoover.

To me, Herbert Hoover was responsible for the Great Depression along with his predecessor Calvin Coolidge and all the other capitalistic bastards who owned this country then just as they do now.

Hoover had at least been a part of the Coolidge Administration and the propaganda of each of these administrations had underlined the crap we must listen to every single time a repub runs for office in this new century.

We should remember that the Depression began with a stock market crash (much like the crash of 2007-2008) only 6 months following the election of Hoover. So it really matters not if one blames Coolidge or Hoover since the same policies were in force during the lead up to that debacle.

Much like we should remember that 9/11/01 occurred only 8 months following the installation of George W. Bush into the White House by the Supreme Court of the United States. However, Bush succeeded a Democratic Administration. And Bush could use that to his advantage from a propaganda standpoint.

I am also reading a book discussing Intellectuals by one Professor Paul Johnson who includes a chapter on Marx.

You cannot understand Hoover without seeing him in a Marxist context. Herbert had a great fear of communism.

Now to the war.

Franklin Roosevelt is constantly, even to this day, chastised for not 'getting into the war' sooner.

But back in the 1930's there was a plurality if not majority of Americans who were still pissed off about WWI and did not wish the USA to weigh in upon the new battles in Europe. And this was certainly a reasonable position to take.

Remember Hoover sent in MacArthur and his troops (including a younger Ike) to disrupt the first Million Man March (WWI Vets) that 'threatened' our capitol. The bloodshed that followed was not necessarily President Hoover's fault.

MacArthur acted on his own in almost total disregard of the orders of his Commander in Chief (an omen for some of his behavior decades later in Korea) seeing the peaceful protest as spearheading a commie revolution.

Hoover was pissed but never publicly denounced the actions of MacArthur for political reasons.

Hoover could be a wuss at times.

A lot of irony in all of this history; especially when one finds Ike as a leading officer in the assault.

I bring this all up because there was a continuous Red Scare in this country from 1917 through 1941.

Hoover might have been an isolationist because of conclusions he had come to following the First World War; but his real consideration had to do with his hatred of the Soviet Union and his hope that the Nazis should be left alone to destroy the communists. This had been Hitler's argument all along.

And this, in fact, is Buchanan's take on all of this.

http://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2009/08/31/did-hitler-want-war/

Further irony lies in the fact that Germany allied itself with Japan.

And once Japan attacked us and declared formal war on the US; Germany was forced to declare war upon the US.

We did not declare war upon Japan or Germany first!

That fact, whether or not Franklin Roosevelt nudged events along, pulled this nation together fastly.

Joe Stalin became our ally. And there was not one frickin thing that right wingers could do about all of this!

And we became a socialist nation immediately.

The U.S. Government took over all the substantial means of production in this country.

We as a nation in total disregard to our Constitution (although martial law is mentioned in the Document) rounded up not only Japanese Americans but also German Americans (just as we had done in WWI).

We did not round up Russian Americans.

Now Franklin Roosevelt was constantly denounced as a commie, as a commie sympathizer and as a socialist until the war began.

And following the war, the policies of the dems from 1933 through 1953 were denounced as socialistic and sympathetic to commie causes by the right wing in this country.

Just as is the case right now!

And there is no real communist menace in the world today. China? Come on, China has way too many billionaires and too large a middle class to be derided as being a true communist menace!

Besides even Bachmann wishes us to follow China's lead with regard to its treatment of its workers and its poor.

Gingrich and Romney and Santorum and Paul all claim that Obama is a socialist and so did all but one of the other repub candidates; every single day we hear this claim.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I came upon the recent New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza

I actually saw Lizza on MSNBC recently which tells me that his article is causing a stir.

His point is that Obama was attempting to drag us out of this century old debate; although Lizza and Obama think that our current polarities result from some sui sponte generational battle erupting in the 1960's between the hippies and Spiro Agnew!

Scarborough interrupted Lizza several times during the New Yorker's presentation in order to point out that the repubs are always right and the dems are always wrong and really missed the point of the entire essay which really did nothing but prove Lizza's points.

What follows are some segments from this well written essay.

What I got out of all of this was that Obama has always been out of the loop. He really thought that these political polarities began in the 1960's; that leaders like Clinton and Newt were fighting some old and unnecessary fight that was becoming irrelevant.

Which is the main reason he knew not how to deal with repubs; especially in the current House. Repubs do not wish to negotiate anything!

My point after reviewing the chapter on Marx in Johnson's book; and following the CSPAN discussion on Hoover all in the context of Lizza's essay is that our current political polemic relates back to 1917 and I do not see any way of getting out of this intellectual mess.

I think my conclusions are underlined by talking points issued by right wing 'think tanks' showing up in the rhetoric of Beck, Bachmann, Palin, Limbaugh, and all of the anti-Obamites.

This is why we hear calls for putting the likes of Coolidge and Hoover on Mt Rushmore/

A few years later, Obama ran for the U.S. Senate and criticized “the pundits and the prognosticators” who like to divide the country into red states and blue states. He made a speech against the invasion of Iraq but alarmed some in the distinctly left-wing audience by pointing out that he was not a pacifist, and that he opposed only “dumb wars.” At the 2004 Democratic Convention, in Boston, Obama delivered a retooled version of the stump speech about ideological comity—“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America!”—and became a national political star.

In 2006, Obama published a mild polemic, “The Audacity of Hope,” which became a blueprint for his 2008 Presidential campaign. He described politics as a system seized by two extremes. “Depending on your tastes, our condition is the natural result of radical conservatism or perverse liberalism,” he wrote. “Tom DeLay or Nancy Pelosi, big oil or greedy trial lawyers, religious zealots or gay activists, Fox News or the New York Times.” He repeated the theme later, while describing the fights between Bill Clinton and the Newt Gingrich-led House, in the nineteen-nineties: “In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation—a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago—played out on the national stage.” Washington, as he saw it, was self-defeatingly partisan. He believed that “any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we’re in.”...

If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign, it was the idea of post-partisanship. He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, reflected on Obama’s heady appeal: “Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us...

Obama’s rhetoric about a nation of common purpose and values no longer fits this country: there really is a red America and a blue America...

Obama didn’t remake Washington. But his first two years stand as one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history. Among other achievements, he has saved the economy from depression, passed universal health care, and reformed Wall Street. Along the way, Obama may have changed his mind about his 2008 critique of Hillary Clinton. “Working the system, not changing it” and being “consumed with beating” Republicans “rather than unifying the country and building consensus to get things done” do not seem like such bad strategies for success after all

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1kHUJJXJ9