From David Brooks, some appalling disingenuousness:
The Democrats, besotted by the myth that the New Deal ended the Great Depression, have consistently overestimated their ability to turn the economy around.
Brooks knows this is straw-manly hyperbole, bordering on the Big and deliberate Lie. I know of no Democrat or correspondingly partisan economist who believes the New Deal ended the Great Depression. Indeed, the Democratic (and liberal) knock on the economically excruciating 1930s is that empirical evidence inescapably suggests the New Deal could have ended the Great Depression, but FDR's budgetary caution and primal conservatism prevented the possible.
Brooks himself is too sober a thinker (or so I believed) to hustle what is in fact the pseudoconservative mythology of hallucinatory Dems on a wildly revisionist binge of New Deal revivalism. The right, characteristically, is selling a myth of a properly risible myth. It's what they do. David Brooks once refused to drink from their piss-bucket of venomous propaganda. But I guess they got to him.
And so goes the concentrically squeezed circle of thoughtful conservative commentators. What are we down to now? -- Sullivan, Frum, Bartlett, perhaps a few, but only a few, more? Or, maybe I'm making too much of this. Maybe Brooks was merely besotted when he wrote that.
Reading Mr. Brooks usually makes me want a stiff drink!
Posted by: SueMe | September 16, 2011 at 12:15 PM
You know who really did a good job solving their economic crisis with job-creating stimulatory spending? The Nazis. And Germany in the same time period was in worse shape than the US. Not that I am making any moral comparisons here. Just pointing out that the same fundamental laws of economics work for everybody.
Posted by: Peter G | September 16, 2011 at 12:51 PM
PM, I think about you everyday. I have been married for 35 years. I cannot imagine what it must be like for you at this time.
I have been a bit concerned about your negativity about PBO, but these personal issue are what our real lives are about. Take care of yourself.
Posted by: Dorothy Rissman | September 16, 2011 at 11:56 PM