Wall Street Journal Don’t Know History and Some Other Rightie Revisionism

Original Link: http://thelonggoodbye.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/wall-street-journal-dont-know-history-and-some-other-rightie-revisionism/

The right-wing New Deal conniption fit

How else to explain the paper’s increasingly shrill declarations that the New Deal absolutely, positively did not work?

The latest salvo came Monday morning in a piece by two economists, Harold L. Cole and Lee. E. Ohanian: “How Government Prolonged the Depression.”

Defenders of the New Deal will find much to argue with in Cole and Ohanion’s account, but for simplicity’s sake, I am going to zero in on just one point — the impact of the New Deal on unemployment.

[ ]…The government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York’s Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown.

It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country’s entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

In other words, millions of men and women earned a living wage and self-respect and contributed mightily to the national infrastructure. But, according to the statistics as interpreted on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, they were unemployed.

Not a new right-wing tactic. They cannot win the argument based on facts so they spin the facts to have an entirely new meaning. You’re employed when they feel that what you do to earn a pay check counts as employment according to the right-wing playbook. What you accomplished counts as directly or indirectly leading to an economic recovery when the mood strikes them to give you credit. They can’t when the game so they change the rules.

Karen Greenberg at Foriegn Policy mag adds another article that tackles all the paranoia and misinformation Cons are floating about closing Guantánamo, Think Again: Guantánamo

“The Detainees at Guantánamo Are Hardened Terrorists”

Not the majority. Since the prison opened seven years ago, confusion has reigned about exactly who is detained at Guantánamo. Officials at the prison initially knew almost nothing about their first 300 detainees beyond the hearsay reports that they were the “worst of the worst.” The detainees’ names, countries of origin, and even the languages they spoke were not immediately apparent. The circumstances of their capture and their association with al Qaeda or the Taliban were equally opaque. Only after investigators from various U.S. agencies began interviewing and interrogating the detainees, and combing through information from foreign police departments and intelligence agencies, did they find that many of their quarry had nothing to do with terrorism at all.

Even today, evidence to back up criminal charges against most of the prisoners — now numbering 243 — is scant. By all reports, about four dozen or so of the detainees will eventually be brought to trial, including the 14 high-value detainees that were transferred to Guantánamo in 2006, among them Khalid Sheikh Mohammed…

Remember also that those that have been released so far - some, no absolute number is known - some may have returned to terroist related activity. Those were released directly by the Bush administration without the slightest bit of judicial review.

If you enjoy rubber necking at the occassional wreck the Old is New Again Republican Party may give you endless hours of entertainment, For this I went to Georgetown?

When GOP congressional aides gather Tuesday morning for a meeting of the Conservative Working Group, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – more commonly known as Joe the Plumber — will be their featured guest. This group is an organization of conservative Capitol Hill staffers who meet regularly to chart GOP strategy for the week.

The GOP, the new absurdists comic irony show.

The “defense cut” falsehood from The Washington Post and Robert Kagan

So Obama proposes that the U.S. spend $40 billion more this year than it spent last year.

Despite this, the right-wing noise machine, led by Fox News, is gearing up to accuse Obama of “cutting defense spending” (Fox headline: “Defense Official: Obama Calling for Defense Budget Cuts”). And today, The Washington Post publishes an Op-Ed from Robert Kagan — who, it must be acknowledged, is a decorated member of the toughest and most noble warrior-family in America — which is headlined: “No Time To Cut Defense,” and which repeatedly accuses Obama of plotting to slice military spending

I thought the Conservative media was supposed to be about getting out the ultimate truth. When is that going to start exactly.