I have two observations about Joe Biden’s performance in last Thursday’s debate.
First – his campaign is all platitudes. He has a “plan” for everything. A government “plan” and three bucks will get you a cup of Caribou. It’s all there to gull the gullible.
Second – like all Democrats, he can pretty much say any billshut he wants, because his voters are all low-information drones who have the critical thought skills of herd animals, and the media like it that way.
There were many examples of this during the debate on Thursday – “I never said I’d ban fracking”, “nobody lost their plan to Obamacare”, and on and on.
The one that made me jump out of my seat with the most incredulity? “We had a great relationship with Hitler before he invaded Europe”.
He was half right. The US had a lousy relationship [1] with the Nazi regime – to FDR’s rare credit
The U.S. didn’t have a good relationship with Hitler before he “invaded Europe. The German dictator was, however, beloved in certain quarters, including the editorial offices of the New York Times.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t attack Hitler directly before the war began, but relations between the U.S. and Nazi Germany were by no means good. In September 1938, Roosevelt sent a telegram to Hitler lecturing him about the importance of keeping the peace and stating: “The conscience and the impelling desire of the people of my country demand that the voice of their government be raised again and yet again to avert and to avoid war.” Implying that Hitler was a warmonger was hardly a hallmark of cordial relations between the two countries.
Failing to get a satisfactory response from Hitler, on October 11, 1938, Roosevelt announced that he was increasing national defense spending by $300 million (over $5 billion in today’s dollars). No one thought that money was going to build up our defenses against Britain and France.
But the New York Times? They loved them some Hitler:
The historian Rafael Medoff recently noted that on July 9, 1933, just over five months after he became Chancellor of Germany and years after his virulent anti-Semitism and propensity for violence had become notorious worldwide, the New York Times published a fawning puff piece on Hitler that rivals even today’s media adulation of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi in its one-sidedness, myopia, and disdain for essential facts.
Pulitzer Prize-winning “journalist” Anne O’Hare McCormick traveled to Berlin to become the first reporter from an American news outlet to interview the new chancellor, and she was an intriguing choice for the Times editors to make to conduct this interview, as in the presence of this man whose name has become justly synonymous with evil, she was decidedly starry-eyed: “At first sight,” McCormick gushed, “the dictator of Germany seems a rather shy and simple man, younger than one expects, more robust, taller. His sun-browned face is full and is the mobile face of an orator.”
As if that weren’t enough, she continues with a description of the Führer as outlandish and adulatory as likening the supremely zaftig Stacy Abrams to a supermodel: “His eyes are almost the color of the blue larkspur in a vase behind him, curiously childlike and candid. He appears untired and unworried. His voice is as quiet as his black tie and his double-breasted black suit.”
This, of course, as Walter Duranty was all but french-kissing Joseph Stalin. The NYTimes were equal-opportunity up-suckers.
It wasn’t just the NYTimes, of course – Time named Hitler their “Man of the Year” in 1938:
Although as Time laboriously clarifies:
That choice abided by the dictum of TIME founder Henry Luce, who decreed that the Man of the Year — now Person of the Year — was not an honor but instead should be a distinction applied to the newsmaker who most influenced world events for better or worse. In case that second criterion was lost on readers, the issue that named Hitler dispensed with the portrait treatment that cover subjects typically got. Instead he was depicted as a tiny figure with his back to the viewer, playing a massive organ with his murdered victims spinning on a St. Catherine’s wheel.
Which, in context, makes sense.
Moreso than the NYTimes’ excuse, anyway.
[1] Speaking generally in re the government, of course. Some in the government – Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, Ambassador to the UK, Democrat eminimento and father of progressive icons John F. and Robert F. Kennedy – spent the early years of the war pulling for the Nazis to conquer the Brits, whom he hated.
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