If our current batch of pundits had been alive in 45

[George_Kaplin]

Fucking excellent post King Of Soup!

[DxZero]

@George Kaplin

Fucking excellent post King Of Soup!

Seconded.

[Marley23]

@The King of Soup

Those who disbelieve, get ye to the library and browse the editorials of R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, Patterson’s Washington Times-Herald, which was practically invented to attack the president, the New York Daily News and every newspaper owned by a small-timer named Hearst. There was not only plenty of criticism based on general foreign policy (should we be at war at all, and if so, are we on the right side?), but military strategy as well (why the hell are the bulk of our resources being spent in Europe?), not to mention gobs of personal slander that went out of fashion from the development of modern journalistic standards until the development of the internet.

I tried to find a cite for newspapers calling FDR a cripple during the war. I didn’t manage to do that, although I did find a blogger who quoted the Tribune calling him “that rotten cripple in the White House” during the '30s. I doubt they started playing nice in '41, but anyway - if Bush was in a wheelchair in August of 2001, I doubt you would have found Michael Moore or Molly Ivins calling him a “rotten cripple.” Times are different, and it’s possible you could argue that the invididual people who planned the Iraq war were treated with more decorum than their counterparts in WWII.

[Kimstu]

Here’s a beautiful example of what some people who actually understood American ideals said about suppression of dissent and ideological conformity back in WWII:

In the midst of World War II the U.S. government sought to revoke the American citizenship of a man born in Germany in 1895 and naturalized in the United States in 1932. Baumgartner had served in the German Army during World War I, graduated from a German university with an engineering degree and then emigrated to the United States in 1927. Five years later, he became a U.S. citizen.

The government sought to revoke his citizenship on the basis that he had extolled the virtues of Hitler, the superiority of the German people, German schools and German engineering. The government produced evidence that Baumgartner had justified the German invasions in the late 1930s and exposed his diaries, which showed a “violent anti-Semitism.” Most of the evidence postdated his 1932 naturalization.

On June 12, 1944, Felix Frankfurter, the sole Jewish judge on the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote the opinion for all nine judges. The court rejected the government’s attempt to deprive Baumgartner of his citizenship, stating that “American citizenship is the right to criticize public men and measures - and that means not only informed and responsible criticism but the freedom to speak foolishly and without moderation.”

Take that, “VDH”, and take your craven pleas for cringing journalistic sycophancy with you.