But newspaper reporters like E.J. Perkins keep writing that he didn't: "One only has to recall that two of the nation's greatest "war presidents," Abe Lincoln and FDR, never served a day in the armed forces."
Oh and did I mention that before he became President FDR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
It's worth remembering. Reporters are hired because they can write passable sentences for the general public. And they aren't hired because they have any special knowledge or because they have any particular insight. They are there because they can tell a presentable story in sound English under deadline. That's it.
Here's a rundown of American Presidents and their military service records.
For the record, I've served in the U.S. military, and -- according to our not so reliable E.J. Perkins -- bloggers Joshua Marshall, Glenn Reynolds and Ana Marie Cox have not. Well, so what? Does that make me more qualified to be on your blog roll? I report, you decide.
Fundamentalism Triumphant. Three out of five Americans believe that God flooded the earth and Noah built an ark to save all the animals -- and a host of other fundamentalist touch stones of the literal truth according to the Bible. So says a new ABC News poll of Americans. Ninty-one percent evangelical Protestants believe that Moses parted the Red Sea and led the jews out of Egypt ..
George Will gives three cheers for an ever expanding federal government. Is it just me, or does George Will sound here about as well connected in reality as a high flying Michael Jackson? And aren't we all tired of this bait and switch "liberal" and "conservative" wordplay? As Lincoln liked to say, "How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." Calling Bush's massive expansion of federal power amd spending "conservative" no more makes it conservative than does calling a dogs tail a 'leg' make the thing a leg. Reagan Republicans continue to get their rear section handed to them by former Democrats in "neoconservative" bow ties. What's a libertarian? A Reagan Republican mugged by a gang of "neoconservatives" -- i.e. one-time Stevenson Democrats, Rockefeller Republicans, and Stom Thurmond Dixiecrats.
Finally, it's an "elephant in the livingroom" lie to interpret the inevitable outcome of a screw-your-neighbor political system as "public opinion" or "the will of the people". What people want and what the logic of the system produces are two very different things. And George Will (and Glenn Reynolds) don't have to be any smarter than the paperboy to know it. It's been obvious for a long time that Madison's Constitution has failed the test of the purposes found in Federalist #10. Can you say logrolling? Can you say, "what have you done for the district?" This has nothing to do with any "common good" which people want for the country. It has everything to do with picking your neighbors pocket because he's damn well already picking your own pocket. In the military we called this a "cluster f**k". Teenagers would call it a "circle j**k". It doesn't take fancy rational choice theory to understand. So, I'm sick of the lie that "American's are getting the government they want". Indeed, Americans are rationally ignorant of just how much government they are getting -- or how much government they might want. Al Sharpton thinks that the super rich are being taxed at a 5% tax rate -- and their taxes should be "raised" to, say 15%. For Sharpton's purposes, he's perfectly rational to be completely uninformed about the facts of the matter, for what difference it will possibly make to the successful pursuit of his own personal aims.
(Semi-technical aside. It's rather clear that for all the difference it could ever make in the causal nexus of the universe, a single individual is never acting rationally by voting, or even following political events. There is just no chance that a single vote from a single point of view can make any difference in the whole scheme of things. In a national election, it's never happened, and the experience of Florida should show you that it really can't ever happen. There are a dozen other factors which intervene before that single vote could be the deciding factor -- and this is just another thousand lottery rolls of probability on top of the effectively zero odds that a national election will come down to a single cast vote.)
So are Americans choosing the government they want? Are they even thinking clearly and well about the problem? Rational choice theory tells us that we shouldn't expect them to think any clearer or well than Peter Pan political commentator George Will. And if they do happen to think clearly about it, choice theory tells us plainly that the logic of the situation will still drive them to make expedient and collectively destructive choices they would never have made if choosing directly for the common good as a whole. Ask a Congressman and he'll tell you. He's voting for the good of his district, and he's not worrying about the good of the country. And if he doesn't tell you that, he's lying. Trust me.
As they say, it ain't rocket science folks.
Stossel's Top Ten Lies, Myths and Downright Stupidities. And here is:
Myth No. 6 � Republicans Shrink the Government
Republicans always trot out the slogan that they oppose big government and want to shrink the federal payroll. President Bush tells us that "big government is not the answer." President Reagan told us, "Our government is too big and it spends too much."But for more than 75 years, no Republican administration has cut the size of government. Since George W. Bush became president, government spending has risen nearly 25 percent.
And the spending increase isn't just tied to the war on terrorism. The Office of Management and Budget says spending at the Environmental Protection Agency is up 12 percent, it's up 14 percent at the Agriculture Department, 30 percent at the Department of the Interior, 64 percent at the Department of Labor, and 70 percent at the Department of Education.
And the pork keeps pouring out. Even the Peanut Festival in Dothan, Ala., got $200,000. Republican congressman Terry Everett got them the money. He wouldn't talk to us about it. But the locals said they like getting your money. "I think it's a waste of money, but if they're going to waste money, I guess it's better to waste it here than anywhere else," one man told me.
Economist Stephen Moore, a Republican, says, "We fought a war against big government and you know what? Big government won."
He noted, "You look at what's happened to the government in the 10 years since the Republicans took control of Congress, the government is twice as big."
School kids don't know much about Lewis & Clark.
My neice was stunned to learn at age 12 that there were still "Native American" Indians still alive today. She was not at first easily convinced by her grandmother that this was in fact the truth. She was sure that she had learned in school that all of them had been killed by white people.
Ironically, my neice wouldn't be here today if her great great grandmother hadn't hid in a field to escape an Indian massacre of settlers in Oregon country.
My unfortunate neice for two years was taught by a hippy-dippy teacher of the 60s generation -- who used "whole language" and failed to teach my neice to read. It wasn't until 4th grade that my neice began to read her first sentences. A disgrace. (Postcript -- she's now doing fine in school, according to the lowered standards of the day).
Always a classic -- Orwell's "Politics and the English Language".
I've always felt there must be a special place in hell for the ostensibly genial spinner E. J. Dionne Jr. There is something so smoothly dishonest about his kind of spin that it gives me a chill -- the kind of chalkboard chill that slightly stiff velvet can give you. Indeed, you might call Dionne the master of the velvet covered lie. Here is an example:
Kerry's speech underscores that the core divide in American politics now is not between liberals and conservatives, or between capitalists and socialists. It is between libertarians and communitarians. Libertarians believe that tax cuts are always better than government programs, that private striving and self-improvement are the central acts of American citizenship, and that where the government and the market are concerned, the government should almost always get out of the way. Communitarians also see the market as useful and private striving as essential. But they insist that preserving the individual freedom that makes both possible is a cooperative endeavor. Self-rule in a democracy demands not just private creativity but also public commitment. Government needs to assert itself when private markets fail, and when markets fail to serve the common good.
In philosophy, we call this stacking the deck, a combining of strawmen within a poverty of alternatives. This is arsenic passed off in sticky berry sirup, the kind which is meant to entice children. Only someone with a deeply splenetic soul would perpetrate such a thing. I know there are folks who will vouch that Dionne is a good, religious man, etc. But there is something mean in the spirit of someone who would go to such trouble to slip through a deep lie about his opponents, all served up in halloween candy for the kiddies.
If you care what Francis Fukuyama has to say, read this. Virginia Postrel could tell you that this is far from the truth:
One of Bush's first speeches in 2001 was on stem-cell policy. Most politicians put forward a proposition and use arguments selectively to support it. Bush did the opposite. He presented both sides of the case in a balanced way, so carefully you didn't know which way he'd jump until the end. That's a sign of someone who's serious about getting it right, and about opening the debate.
And in the context of national strikes which have rocked France (and these sorts of things happen routinely in Europe), what to make of this?
The US is more individualist .. but also more disorderly. In the EU states have a higher degree of social solidarity ..
Well, it's nonsense, of course. Fukuyama has got to be the champion second-hand dealer in ideas of all time. He gets paid the big bucks for saying profound things like this:
The US is built on Lockean principles (derived from the British liberal philosopher John Locke). There�s a contract between state and people, and a belief in limited government. On the Continent their vision of the state owes more to (the French philosopher) Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They see the state as an expression of the �general will�.
While reading Fukuyama I always get the urge to scream, "Tell me something I don't know." It's like listening to the David Gergen of the college dorm philosophical bull session.
Google and the blogosphere help de-falsify another set of untrue memes spread by journalists and the college crowd (you know who you are).