A Second Look: Media Matters: Conservative media peddle a raw deal

Media Matters for America wrote:

Media Matters: Conservative media peddle a raw deal

From: Media Matters for America [action@mediamatters.org]
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 5:44 PM
To: tomc2322
Subject: Media Matters: Conservative media peddle a raw deal

The conservative punditocracy that has spent the past eight years propping up a president who gave us an illegitimate war and leaves us with an almost unimaginably bad economic crisis apparently grows weary of defending this spectacular failure of a president. And so they have begun to shift their efforts to an easier task: trying to turn Americans against the president who ended the Great Depression, initiated the minimum wage, created Social Security, and helped defeat the Nazis.

Here we go again, more misdirection. The corprate media is still drinking the Bush Milkshake, one that has turned to sour curds long ago.

Brit Hume

On Fox News, for example, Brit Hume insisted this week that “everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed.”

Economist Paul Krugman, for example, disagrees.

Paul Krugman

Krugman may not have the gravitas that comes with being Washington managing editor of Fox News, but he does hold the most recent Nobel Prize in economics. Krugman says the New Deal included “long-run achievements” that “remain the bedrock of our nation’s economic stability” and “brought real relief to most Americans” and notes that “[b]y 1937, things were a lot better than they were in 1933.” According to Krugman, the New Deal would have been even more successful had Roosevelt not been “eager to return to conservative budget principles.”

Let’s see, Democrats have gained an even larger majority in the House, increased their majority in the Senate to almost cloture-proof (59), and now there is a Democratic President. It looks like the nation has fully embraced these conservative budget principles. NOT!

There is instead a wholesale rejection of “conservative budget principles”. We need to expand the New Deal because of it’s success.