Republicans: 'Nobody Expected' the Coronavirus Pandemic. So Joe Biden Is Nobody?

[BidenBacker]

14. A blast from the past

None of this Republican revisionist history bullshit is new...Goppers have been pulling this shit since long before most of us were even born. From a campaign speech FDR made way back in late September of 1944...see if anything has changed much since then...

America Has Not Been Disappointed

http://www.speeches-usa.com/Transcripts/franklin_roosevelt-america.html

The fact is that, since Pearl Harbor, only one-tenth of one per cent of man-hours have been lost by strikes. But even those candidates who burst out in election-year affection for social legislation and for labor in general still think you ought to be good boys and stay out of politics. And, above all, they hate to see any working man or woman contribute a dollar bill to any wicked political party. Of course, it is all right for large financiers and industrialists and monopolists to contribute tens of thousands of dollars -- but their solicitude for that dollar which the men and women in the ranks of labor contribute is always very touching.

They are, of course, perfectly willing to let you vote -- unless you happen to be a soldier or sailor overseas, or a merchant seaman carrying munitions of war. In that case they have made it pretty hard for you to vote -- for there are some political candidates who think they may have a chance if only the total vote is small enough.

And while I am on the subject of voting let me urge every American citizen -- man and woman -- to use your sacred privilege of voting, no matter which candidate you expect to support. Our millions of soldiers and sailors and merchant seamen have been handicapped or prevented from voting by those politicians and candidates who think they stand to lose by such votes. You here at home have the freedom of the ballot. Irrespective of party, you should register and vote this November. That is a matter of good citizenship.

Words come easily, but they do not change the record. You are old enough to remember what things were like for labor in 1932. You remember the closed banks and the breadlines and the starvation wages; the foreclosures of homes and farms, and the bankruptcies of business; the "Hoovervilles," and the young men and women of the nation facing a hopeless, jobless future; the closed factories and mines and mills; the ruined and abandoned farms; the stalled railroads and the empty docks; the blank despair of a whole nation -- and the utter impotence of our Federal Government. You remember the long, hard road, with its gains and its setbacks, which we have traveled together since those days.

Now there are some politicians, of course, who do not remember that far back, and some who remember but find it convenient to forget. But the record is not to be washed away that easily. The opposition has already imported into this campaign the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad. The technique was all set out in Hitler's book -- and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan. According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature will make it more credible -- if only you keep repeating it over and over again.

For example, although I rubbed my eyes when I read it, we have been told that it was not a Republican depression, but a Democratic depression from which this nation has been saved -- that this Administration is responsible for all the suffering and misery that the history books and the American people always thought had been brought about during the twelve ill-fated years when the Republican party was in power. Now, there is an old and somewhat lugubrious adage which says:

"Never speak of rope in the house of one who has been hanged."

In the same way, if I were a Republican leader speaking to a mixed audience, the last word in the whole dictionary that I think I would use is that word "depression."

I've listened to audios of this speech and FDR had Dems laughing their asses off at times. Later on in the speech you'll see that not only have Goppers been revising history for ages they've also been lying their asses off for as long as people can remember. It involved among other things an infamous FOX News-like fabrication about FDR's little dog Fala...

Perhaps the most ridiculous of these campaign falsifications is the one that this Administration failed to prepare for the war which was coming. I doubt whether even Goebbels would have tried that one. For even he would never have dared hope that the voters of America had already forgotten that many of the Republican leaders in the Congress and outside the Congress tried to thwart and block nearly every attempt which this Administration made to warn our people and to arm this nation. Some of them called our 50,000-airplane program fantastic.

Many of those very same leaders who fought every defense measure we proposed are still in control of the Republican party, were in control of its national convention in Chicago, and would be in control of the machinery of the Congress and the Republican party in the event of a Republican victory this fall.

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala.

Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks — but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers, in Congress and out, had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him — at a cost to the taxpayers of 2 or 3 or 8 or $20 million — his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.

I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself — such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent [and] object to libelous statements about my dog.

Different century...same Republican bullshit. It's just what they do...the nature of the beast.