2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumNo Democratic President was perfect, not even FDR
Is it realistic to put our politicians to very high standards?
As transformational as FDR was, he had several big blemishes:
1. He started the relationship with Ibn Saud, leader of Saudi Arabia, hooking the United States to middle eastern oil and oil dependency and ultimately leading to the mess in the middle east, due to Saudi Arabia being protected by America as it funds Sunni Islamic extremists, including Al Qaeda and ISIS, and promotes the extremely conservative Wahabbi form of Islam around the sunni muslim world.
2. The Military Industrial Complex originated with FDR:
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Roosevelt's use of public-private "partnerships" to build up the munitions industry, and thereby finally overcome the Great Depression, did not go entirely unchallenged. Although he was himself an implacable enemy of fascism, a few people thought that the president nonetheless was coming close to copying some of its key institutions. The leading Italian philosopher of fascism, the neo-Hegelian Giovanni Gentile, once argued that it should more appropriately be called "corporatism" because it was a merger of state and corporate power. (See Eugene Jarecki's The American Way of War, p. 69.)
Some critics were alarmed early on by the growing symbiotic relationship between government and corporate officials because each simultaneously sheltered and empowered the other, while greatly confusing the separation of powers. Since the activities of a corporation are less amenable to public or congressional scrutiny than those of a public institution, public-private collaborative relationships afford the private sector an added measure of security from such scrutiny. These concerns were ultimately swamped by enthusiasm for the war effort and the postwar era of prosperity that the war produced.
- http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174959/chalmers_johnson_warning_mercenaries_at_work
3. The Japanese Internment of course.
4. FDR appointed a member of the KKK, Hugo Black, to be a supreme court justice, and when a scandal broke out when that fact was found, FDR tried to cover it up, using the age old tactic of media manipulation, with his "quarantine" speech:
Kalidurga
(14,177 posts)Look at how Donald Trump is skewered here and for good reason for saying we should bring them back for Muslims. Most people here wouldn't vote for Trump is he was promising us all lollipops, rainbows, kittens, puppies, and a pony, based on that stance alone.
Vattel
(9,289 posts)zalinda
(5,621 posts)Hindsight is 20/20 for every one, no matter what their status.
Z
uponit7771
(90,347 posts)... Jewish people not be inslaved and murdered on an industrial scale.
To expect perfection from any human is unreasonable.