This article is a rebuttal to Fred Barne's Weekly Standard piece entitled Not Your Father's FDR available at the link provided. Forgive me for being a bit snarky in tone, but it had been a long day when I penned this.

It's true, Obama is no FDR. Sadly, in 2010 corporate interests are so much in control of both parties - though certainly more so for the Republicans - that sweeping reforms that favor the average working class person are much more difficult to enact than they were in FDR's time. So, on this point Fred Barnes is correct: Obama is no FDR. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and Fred's accuracy ends there: almost everything else he says in his article is simply factually wrong.

First, I must tip my hat to Fred for the subtleties of his propaganda. Some of it is almost stated in passing, such as this one: (... obama enacted a) "government takeover of the college loan program". Really, Fred? As Mr. Barnes is no doubt aware, the student loan program is a government program. So, how exactly does the government have a "takeover" of one of its own programs (which clearly upsets Mr. Barnes)?

I'll tell you how: by removing the corporate middlemen (banks) which profit from the program by getting cheap money, which is guaranteed against default(!), from the US government, and then loaning it out at a higher interest rate to students. So, Obama says - let's remove the middle men (banks) from this equation and let the government loan directly to students. Since the government already takes on all the risk in these loans, the banks provide no value (other than skimming off some easy profits). This is a win-win (students get cheaper loans, the government gets more oversight), yet Fred doesn't like it because it hurts corporate interests such as the banks' bottom line. C'mon now, that's a government takeover? Seriously, Fred, dig a little deeper.

But that was just a subtle fib in passing. There are bigger fibs to fry in this article. FDR's reforms were not tried because the public lacked experience with public goods and services, as asserted by Fred. The reforms were passed because we were in the Great Depression - 25 percent unemployment - as a result of unfettered / unregulated capitalism: which we had tried and which had failed (miserably! much as it is failing us today with oil spills, too large to fails, bailouts, mining accidents, etc.). Fred takes the facts and spins them on their head 180 degrees. The whole point of those reforms was to put some checks on capitalism, as capitalism with no checks and balances had failed us.

Now Fred seems to say that all these FDR reforms were bad ideas. Does Fred want to repeal Social Security? FDIC insurance? I'm sure Fred's money is all invested in non-FDIC-insured accounts, what do you bet? These "big government" programs are so awful, but what do you bet Fred uses FDIC insurance for his investments, despite the fact that he purports to trust the 'free market' to keep his money safe. I'll bet you non-insured dollars to FDIC-insured doughnuts that Fred doesn't practice what he preaches on this one.

Finally, to avoid rambling for too long (I could go on and on rebutting fibs but will spare you), the movement to "repeal" the health care bill is astroturf-turned-grassroots, not grassroots from the ground up, as Fred asserts. That is, it was manufactured and whipped up by the right-wing echo chambers. I will grant you that there are people on the street that have been whipped into a frenzy, but they did not exist prior to the echo chamber instigation. FDR had no such issues because there were no right-wing echo chambers such as talk radio, cable television, and internet (and Weekly Standard propaganda) in his day.

To compare things, we must understand the historical context as well as the facts. Fred does neither.