Snapshot #1

I'm still feeling pretty lousy so I'm just going to run down a couple of quick things that struck me today. Consider them snapshots, mostly gut reactions.

Here's the first:

On February 3, Faux News anchor Brit Hume claimed to have uncovered evidence that FDR actually wanted the government to eventually get out of Social Security. Here is Hume's quote, via Al Franken's Air America Radio website:

In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plans should include, quote, "Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age," adding that government funding, quote, "ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans."

If you like, Media Matters for America (MMFA) has a video clip of the quote; this is the link.

There were three parts to what Roosevelt proposed in that statement.

1) A system of "compulsory contributory annuities" to "establish a self-supporting system."

2) The option of additional voluntary annuities "by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age."

3) A non-contributory old-age pension for those too old to have time to build up enough of an annuity to benefit from it. He proposed the federal government would pay half the cost of this; apparently the states were to pay the rest.

It was that third part and only that third part that was to be "supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans."

There is in this case no way around the fact that Hume was lying. Period. The speech that he quoted absolutely did not say what Hume claimed it did. This is not a case of shading the truth or being clever, it's an outright whopper.

A whopper, not surprisingly, that has already been picked up by other right-wingers, who love nothing more (other than the random exercise of arbitrary power in a way that fattens their bank accounts) than finding some statement by some Democrat that can be twisted into supposedly supporting their goals. (Unless, of course, the subject is race or affirmative action; then they use Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Franken called on Hume to resign. Sounds right to me.

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By the way, the winger defense of Hume so far seems to be - surprise! - an attempt to change the subject by dwelling on the fact that Roosevelt apparently wanted an annuity system, where what you got at retirement depends on what you put in yourself, as opposed to the "pay as you go" system that was adopted and has served retirees well ever since. That, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that Hume lied about what Roosevelt said. But it's apparently the best they can do.