Apropos the use and abuse of the memory of WWII, here's an article c/o of Sam Smith's Undernews:
URL: http://www.lancasteronline.com/pages/news/local/6749 May 23, 2004 Lancaster (PA) Sunday News Gil Smart Smart News <snip> Believe it or not, the writer states, the administration of FDR made many blunders during that war but everybody was too busy supporting the total effort to bash the president or his cabinet! Dont believe it. Because the fact is that President Roosevelt was pretty much roundly bashed by Republicans during the entirety of the war. And during the presidential campaign of 1944, things got as nasty as ever. Indeed, our local Lancaster New Era noted in an editorial on the eve of the election, Nov. 6, 1944, that The surprising thing about this war-time presidential campaign is that it was no different from all the others. Thomas Dewey, Roosevelts opponent that year, spent much of the campaign deriding FDR as a tired old man. The Roosevelt administration, Dewey said the week before the election, was the most wasteful, extravagant and incompetent administration in the history of the nation. Dewey, in fact, spent that fall all but calling Roosevelt a communist, insisting that FDR was intent on selling the nation down the river to the reds. But at least Dewey didnt criticize FDR on the war effort, right? To have done that in the wake of the failed Market Garden operation, just before the Battle of the Bulge, would have been grossly unpatriotic, right? Judge for yourself: American fighting men were paying in blood through a prolongation of the battle of Germany for the improvised meddling of the Democratic administration and the confused incompetence of President Roosevelt. Thats from an Associated Press article that ran in this very newspaper on Sunday, Nov. 5, 1944, the morning after a major Dewey address at Madison Square Garden in New York City. <end excerpt> Full at: URL: http://www.lancasteronline.com/pages/news/local/6749
