a liar, or just plain stupider than a lavatory plunger?

[realthog]

I report, you decide. Well, in fact, it's Harper's Weekly that reports:

The House and Senate reached agreement on a $789 billion economic-stimulus plan, which President Barack Obama is expected to sign into law despite a lack of support from Republicans. "When Roosevelt did this," said Representative Steve Austria (R., Ohio), "he put our country into a Great Depression. That's just history."

Um, no, Rep. Austria. It's not.

Comments

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"One of the current Republican talking points is that Roosevelt started the Great Depression."

The tactic's like something out of Goebbels, isn't it?

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

You got it. There's something extremely disturbing about how the totality of discussion of the War of 1812 in most public schools is bringing up that British troops set Washington DC afire, and the resultant whitewash job is why we call the President's residence "The White House". The fact that we kinda instigated it by invading Canada is just left out of the official narrative. (I won't get into how no matter what happens, American history studies always stopped either at the War Between the States or World War II, so I never heard a straight answer about why we went to Vietnam until I was in my twenties.)

[realthog.livejournal.com]

There's a useful book in this context called Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen.

But I think all nations colour thewir history atrociously to make themselves look good -- or at least they used to: most of the European ones have learned to face up to reality a bit better, with the Brits acknowledging the many vilenesses of the colonial period, etc. And even when I was a kid it was admitted openly in history classes that, yes, the Brits had been in the wrong in the events leading up to the American Revolution/War of Independence. The US is being a bit slower to catch up in this respect, is all.

But then, to the European eye, the US is pretty goddam odd and atavistic about patriotism, and that's probably a part of it too.