A splendid opportunity to get the Depression right

[phantom power]

It has often been noted that to the Right, 9/11 provided an opportunity to "get Vietnam right," by invading Iraq and "winning" rather than ignominiously withdrawing. Despite the fact that by any rational metric, the Bush/Iraq war was an unmitigated disaster and the situation today is only slightly less anarchic than a Hobbesian State of Nature, it is a given among movement conservatives - and their enablers in the press - that the "surge" worked and "we" are winning in Iraq.

What if, I woke up thinking, the current economic crisis is perceived by the Right as nothing less than a splendid opportunity to get the Depression right? In fact, around the time Roosevelt took office, there were nationwide calls for a dictator to take over the government, a call Roosevelt wisely, and fortunately for the world, ignored. But according to the Right, both then and now, Roosevelt was a socialist, barely distinguishable from Stalin (!) and a class traitor who prolonged the economic hardship and established a godless, feminized, communistic America.

Perhaps the Right, in its typically delusional state, finds the current worldwide financial collapse a perfect opportunity to do today what Roosevelt derailed, ie, implement a dictatorship. They would then reason that for the political climate to be ripe for such a takeover, it would require that Obama fail and that the rightwing be held in no way responsible for that failure.

Suddenly Limbaugh's publicly uttered wish that the president fail, the lockstep Republican opposition to Obama's economic proposals, and the "disappearing" of the true cause of our woes - the spectacular incompetence of the administration of George W. Bush - from polite public discourse takes on a deeply ominous cast.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/eliminationists-by-tristero-last-night.html