Republican Revisionists

When I was a kid and was told lurid tales about how the bad commies re-wrote history to suit their ideological viewpoint, I learned to hiss and boo at appropriate times. It was evil to re-write history for political ends!

But now I guess I've got to learn to embrace revisionists as creative truth-sayers who are "blessed" with a special knowledge of history.

Here's a news bit from Dispatch Politics.com (self-described as "the reporting staffs of The Columbus Dispatch, ThisWeek Community Newspapers, WBNS-10TV and ONN, Ohio News Network") catching the Congressional Representative doing revisionist history:

U.S. Rep. Steve Austria said he supports a scaled-down federal economic-stimulus proposal, but the Beavercreek Republican told The Dispatch editorial board that the huge influx of money into the economy could have a negative effect.

"When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression," Austria said. "He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That's just history."

Most historians date the beginning of the Great Depression at or shortly after the stock-market crash of 1929; Roosevelt took office in 1933.

Yep... it takes a special kind of Republican ideologue to ignore the 3+ years that Herbert Hoover presided over the economic collapse -- the start of Great Depression -- and instead focus on the efforts of FDR to pull the economy out of the ditch. It takes real strength of character to re-interpret FDR's efforts trying various approaches to pull the country out of the mess as causing the country to 'end up in a Great Depression'. And it is fascinating to have FDR applying Keynes before Keynes even wrote his famous book (published in 1936)!

I guess Steve Austria believes that he can treat you like Winston Smith i.e., if he tells you enough times that 2+2=5, you will finally learn to parrot back the "truth". So now you know. When asked what caused the Great Depression, the "correct" answer is that FDR borrowed and spent and drove the country into the Great Depression just like Barack Obama is now trying to do!