To watch self-styled "conservatives" vie with one another in
bending the knee at the
shrine of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is to appreciate the rot at the
core of a
once-great movement. Have we no heroes that we must beg for folding
chairs at the
dedication of a monument to the amoral man who destroyed the Old
Republic?
Undeniably, FDR was a political genius. His golden voice was
perfectly tempered to
the Great Depression. He gave a nation hope.
Though his New Deal schemes miscarried, no one can fault the man
for trying to
alleviate the suffering of his people or failing to reignite a
stalled economy that no one
else understood any better. But for all his courage in fighting
polio, FDR was a fake.
The "I hate war" quote on a tablet in his memorial, for example, is
from a 1936
speech at Chautauqua: "We are not isolationist, except insofar as
we seek to isolate
ourselves from war. ... I have seen war. ... I have seen blood
running from the
wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have
seen the dead in
the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. ... I hate war." FDR was
posturing as an
isolationist, while his own Congress was passing the very
neutrality laws that, he
would whine four years later, tied his hands in dealing with Adolf
Hitler.
As for all that mud, blood and gas, it is manure. A Navy
bureaucrat, FDR spent
World War I sneaking off into the Virginia countryside with Lucy
Mercer, cheating on
the mother of his five children, breaking Eleanor's heart. The man
did not have the
truth in him. A year before Pearl Harbor, in the most dishonest
campaign ever
conducted, FDR declared: "Mothers and fathers ... I have said this
before, but I shall
say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be
sent into any foreign
wars." At that very moment, he was plotting war. When Hitler turned
on his ally
Joseph Stalin in mid-1941, Americans, more than ever, wanted to
stay out. But FDR
was wild for war.
When the destroyers Greer and the Kearny were fired on by
submarines, FDR
decried this unprovoked "piracy" and declared a "shoot-on-sight"
policy for German
ships. Again, he was lying. The U.S. war ships had been
collaborating with British
planes, attacking the German submarines for hours before the subs
fired back. Failing
to whip up war hysteria, FDR claimed he had "a secret map" of
Hitler's plans to carve
up all Latin America into "five vassal states," plus a copy of
Hitler's plan "to abolish all
existing religions," liquidate all clergy and create an
"International Nazi Church." "(I)n
the place of the Bible, the words of Mein Kampf will be imposed and
enforced as
Holy Writ. And in the place of the cross of Christ will be put two
symbols -- the
swastika and the naked sword. ... The god of blood and iron will
take the place of
the God of love and mercy."
These "grim truths," said FDR, will be "hotly denied in the
controlled press and radio
of the Axis powers." The documents did not exist. Again, he was
lying. As Clare
Luce said, he "lied us into a war because he did not have the
political courage to lead
us into it." Though he unleashed the FBI and the Internal Revenue
Service on the
America First Committee, smearing these patriots as neo-Nazis, FDR
lacked the
courage to confront them. In October 1941, America First called for
an up-or-down
vote in Congress on a declaration of war against the Third Reich.
FDR ducked the
challenge, preferring duplicity, stealth and provocation to get the
war he desperately
wanted.
Once at war, FDR became a base appeaser of Stalin. Among his first
acts in 1933,
he recognized Stalin's barbaric regime even as the Forgotten
Holocaust of Ukraine
was going on. In 1943, FDR declared Germany's "unconditional
surrender" to be the
Allied war aim, ensuring that Germany would fight to the death,
more Americans
would die, and Stalin would inherit Hitler's empire. At Tehran and
Yalta, FDR and
Winston Churchill drunkenly signed away the independence of Poland,
for which
Britain, presumably, had gone to war. Stalin was permitted to keep
the fruits of his
evil pact with Hitler, and U.S. armies were deliberately held back
to let the raping
hordes of the Red Army take Vienna, Prague and Berlin. "Yalta,"
apex of FDR's
diplomacy, is today a bitter curse in all of Eastern Europe.
His regime shot through with Communist spies and traitors, FDR even
betrayed
China. As a young congressman said in 1949, as Mao's Communist
armies
massacred our old allies: "Whatever share of the responsibility was
Roosevelt's, and
whatever was Marshall's, the vital interest of the United States in
the independent
integrity of China was sacrificed, and the foundation was laid for
the present tragic
situation in the Far East." The words are those of JFK. Have
conservatives no heroes
that we must slaver over this unprincipled politician and icon of
the American left?
