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In this issue
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Feb. 18, 2009 / 24 Shevat 5769

Uncanny, Disturbing Historical Parallels

By David Limbaugh


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Recently, I reread the chapters on the New Deal in Larry Schweikart's superb "A Patriot's History of the United States" to review parallels with Barack Obama's radical economic agenda. Here is an eye-opening, side-by-side sampling, with Schweikart's observations on FDR and the New Deal, along with mine on President Obama and his policies.


Schweikart wrote, "During the campaign, FDR, a man whose presidency would feature by far the largest expansion of the federal government ever, called for a balanced budget and accused Hoover of heading the 'greatest spending Administration in ... all our history.'"


Obama's stimulus bill sets frightening new records for federal spending. But while campaigning, he said, "I'm running for president because I believe we can choose our own economic destiny ... to go another four years with the same reckless fiscal policies that have busted our budget, wreaked havoc in our economy, and mortgaged our children's future on a mountain of debt; or we can restore fiscal responsibility in Washington."


Schweikart wrote, "Roosevelt heaped dishonor on the defeated Hoover, denying him even a Secret Service guard out of town."


At Obama's inauguration, his supporters booed, heckled and chanted tauntingly at President George W. Bush. Obama went to dinner during President Bush's farewell speech and repudiated the Bush era in his inaugural address and on his new White House Web site.


Schweikart wrote, "Roosevelt hoped to capitalize on the terrifying collapse of the economy ... to bulldoze through a set of policies that fundamentally rearranged the business and welfare foundations of American life." He continued, "Above all emergency measures needed to be done quickly before opposition could mount to many of these breathtaking challenges to the Constitution."


When Obama peddled panic to rush his bill through Congress, he heeded this advice from Rahm Emanuel: "Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things." The Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector said Obama's stimulus bill "will overturn the fiscal foundation of welfare reform. ... For the first time since 1996, the federal government would begin paying states bonuses to increase their welfare caseloads." Obama regards this legislation as just the first step ("a down payment") in his mission to restructure the American economy.


Schweikart chronicled the liberal historians' view that FDR "saved capitalism from itself by entrenching a number of regulatory measures and social programs that kept the market economy from its own 'excesses.'" Rexford Tugwell, FDR's assistant secretary of agriculture, exposed the "myths" of laissez-faire, saying: "The jig is up. There is no invisible hand. There never was. ... Virtually all of the New Dealers shared, to one degree or another, a distrust of business and entrepreneurship that they thought had landed the nation in its current distressed condition. ... The administration's aims were crudely simple: 'One objective (of New Deal power policy) was to enlarge the publicly owned sector of the power industry ... as a means of diminishing private control over the necessities of life.'"


Today Obama trashes capitalism while pretending not to and without naming it specifically, but only as "an economic philosophy that has failed." Likewise, Obama's Democrats intend to curb capitalism's "excesses" and punish Wall Street "greed" through such measures as imposing caps on executive bonuses. It's also undeniable that they are wildly expanding the public sector at the expense of the private sector.


According to Schweikart, most of FDR's "Brain Trust" subscribed to the Keynesian premise that government spending would spur demand and thus pull a nation out of a depression. Few were troubled by the fact that this hadn't worked in Britain. A number of these "Keynes acolytes" sought "to ensure that federal spending was transformed 'from a temporary expedient to a permanent institution of government.'"


It's hardly a secret that Obama is a Keynesian and that he is staggeringly untroubled by the consistent failures of Keynesian policy before and since the New Deal. Moreover, Robert Rector notes that Obama has more ambitious plans than merely stimulating the economy. "The real goal is to get 'the camel's nose under the tent' for a massive permanent expansion of the welfare state."


Finally, Schweikart related that FDR adviser Raymond Moley "was 'impressed ... by the ... scantiness of (FDR's) precise knowledge of things that he was talking about (and) by the immense and growing egotism that came from his office."


Obama has sometimes revealed himself to be similarly uninformed on matters about which he has revealed an inflexible certainty, such as the complexities and consequences of closing Gitmo. Attorney Debra Burlingame attended Obama's meeting with families of terrorist victims, where he tried to justify his decision to drop charges against the USS Cole bomber. She said Obama said the right words in general, but when it came to specifics, he was "uncertain, uninformed and sometimes just plain mistaken." In addition, many have begun to comment on Obama's egotism, some even calling it narcissism.

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David Limbaugh, a columnist and attorney practicing in Cape Girardeau, Mo. Comment by clicking here.


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