Elmer's Brother

I thought it would be interesting to see what the media said about another president during wartime. This all sounds so eerily familiar. You will probably guess who it is before you get to the end. All comers are welcome to take a swag in the comments section and when all guesses are in I will provide the answer.

The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. --JFK, June 11, 1962

You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does. I'm perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths...FDR, May 1941 (Morgan p 550)

1. Carried on an affair with his wife’s social secretary. (1)

2. This president was a mediocre and unpopular student at Groton and Harvard.

 

3. Failed as a lawyer without a degree.

 

4. Was accused of playing the most sordid sort of ward politics with Navy contracts.

 

5. Personally led US Marines into Haiti to overturn the only independent black republic besides Abyssinia. By some accounts administered Haiti brutally and cruelly with no regard for lives. Gross atrocities were reported in the media, he denied responsibility.

 

6. Another former president had this to say, “ Haitians are being killed by American Marines, and that many of our own gallant men have sacrificed their lives at the behest of an Executive department in order to establish laws drafted by the Assistant Secretary of the Navy...I will not empower an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets borne by US Marines."

 

7. This president said, "Two months after the war was declared, I saw that the Navy was still unprepared and I spent $40,000 for guns before Congress gave me or anyone permission to spend the money." This action had been opposed by the President. He further stated that he had "committed enough illegal acts" to be impeached and jailed for "999 years."

 

8. A Senate subcommittee concluded that this president had committed perjury before a Naval Court of Inquiry about his investigation of a homosexual corruption ring at the Newport, RI, Naval Station.

Kept his disability from the public. It damaged the country. He was utterly unfit for his high office long before the election. The lives of millions depended on the judgment of a man whose mind was warped by arteriosclerosis and the strong medication digitalis. It was a sordid deception. This president also had cancer.

 

9. This president always struggled financially. He flopped in the stock market. His only business was his Warm Springs, GA, resort, bought with his mother's money, which he ran as a quack health spa. As a condition of running for governor kingmaker named Raskob pay off his $250,000 debt.

 

10. He became Governor of New York by means of massive vote fraud in Buffalo. They say the seeds of a depression were first sown when this man was governor.

 

Some of the things said of his economic plan:

 

11. "The present pseudo-planned economy leads relentlessly into the complete autocracy and tyranny of the Collectivist State."

 

12. He broke every campaign promise he had made and the economic plan was exactly the opposite of what he had promised.

 

13. "I propose to you that the government, big and little, be made solvent and that the example be set by the President of the United States and his cabinet...Stop the deficits! Stop the deficits!" He made a flat promise to "reduce the cost of government operations 25 percent" and called for a sound gold currency. Instead he engaged in an orgy of spending and implemented the first twelve planks of the Socialist Party platform, which in substance was economic plan.

 

14. In his first year he proposed spending 10 billion on 3 billion of revenues. Government expenditures went up more than 83 percent. He closed all banks with no intention or thought of ever re-opening them (banks are not needed in Marxist economics). After two years the his economic plan was such a failure through waste, mismanagement and outright graft that he had to introduce a "New” economic plan.  The plan has been called 'a study in economic confusion.'

 

15. He undermined the Constitution with blank-check appropriations which allowed him to control spending and blank-check legislation which allowed him to set up agencies to pass laws and regulations.

 

16. “Every choice made in his economic plan, whether it was one that moved recovery or not, was a choice unerringly true to the essential design of totalitarian government -

1. To extend the power of executive government, to rule by decrees and rules and regulations of its own making; during two of his administrations he  issued 3,556 Executive orders
2. To strengthen its hold on the economic life of the nation;
3. To extend power over the individual - the domestication of individuality;
4. To degrade the parliamentary principle;
5. To impair the independent Constitutional judicial power;
6. To weaken all other powers - private enterprise and finance, state and local government.

 

17. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled his National Recovery Administration, the centerpiece of his economic plan, unconstitutional (Schechter v US). The NRA was a total assault on free enterprise. Industry was to be straight jacketed into government-mandated cartels given the authority to set prices, determine production levels, and regulate the workplace.

 

18. The Supreme Court ruled his Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) unconstitutional (US v Butler). This was the program that plowed crops under and senselessly slaughtered millions of animals at a cost of $700,000,000 over two years. By cutting corn production the US had to import 30 million bushels from abroad. The Supreme Court ruled the AAA was "a central government exercising uncontrolled police power in every state of the union."

 

19. The British Leninist theoretician R. Palme Dutt published a scathing analysis of the economic plan  "social fascism" - as the reality of fascism cloaked with a thin veneer of populist demagogy. The  policy, wrote Dutt, was to impose a State monopoly capitalism through the NRA, to subsidize business, banking, and agriculture through inflation and the partial expropriation of the mass of the people through lower real-wage rates and to the regulation and exploitation of labor by means of government-fixed wages and compulsory arbitration. Dutt wrote this economic plan is stripped of its "social-reformist progressive camouflage," the reality is a new Fascist type of system of concentrated State capitalism and industrial servitude.

 

20. This president sent observers to Italy to learn how to implement Fascism in America is that the left at the time believed that Fascism was a midpoint between capitalism and Soviet-style Communism, that it was a large and useful step. They believed by converting capitalism to Fascism and then Fascism to Communism, violent revolution was unnecessary.