Bush must have loved this guy
George W. and Ashcroft, Cheney, et al must have loved this president with his secret trials and secret executions.
Still holds truth for 2004 even though it was made in 1933.
I just saw this movie on TCM.
Get a grip, lefties. This film was "The West Wing" of the early 1930s with Democrats fantasizing about how great things would be if they won the White House.
President Hammond in the film fires his entire cabinet, declares marshal law, suspends Congress and creates a national police force from the Army. That national police then goes on to hold court marshals and execute people who had escaped punishment in the past on "legal technicalities". The Democrats's fantasy president then goes on to abolish prohibition by executive order (establishing federal government liquor stores) and threaten foreigners with war if they don't pay their WW I debts. Hammond needs the money to pay for a massive make work program to employ the millions of unemployed men who have marched on Washington DC.
As it turned out, FDR must have been a disappointment to people like the writer of this move (who went on to produce such gems as "This is Russia"). Although Roosvelt did create the WPA and did round up American citizens without trial, he did not declare marshal law and make himself dictator.
Oh, well. If Hillary is elected in 2008 maybe she can fulfill the Democrats' fondest dream for a left wing dictator.
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Are you kidding me? Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt rounded up thousands of people to silence dissent, tossed the constitution aside to implement the New Deal and tried to pack the Supreme Court when two thirds of the branches weren't enough to satisfy him. Ever hear of the internment camps for American citizens of Japanse -- and yes -- German and Italian ancestory? Ever hear of the Sedition Trial of 1944? Even before that, Woodrow Wilson's War Socialism policies of World War I rivaled anything Joe McCarthy or even Joe Stalin even dreamed of. Panting fantasies of the far right my arse!
The use of the word "liberal" isn't so baffling when you realize that liberal democrats looked admiringly to Fascist Italy as well as Soviet Russia for their inspiration. This is well documented, even if lefties prefer to drop it down the memory hole. The irony is that by the time "It Can't Happen Here" was published, it was already happening and from the side Sinclair Lewis was on! To understand the fascist aspects of the New Deal you have to understand fascist corporativism.
George Bush may not be a good president, but calling him a fascist is left-wing typical hyperbole. But what do you expect from people who can't tell an agrarian reformer from a vicious communist murderer and who would defend Soviet spies as "good Americans?"
You want fascism? Check your liberal heros.
Sounds to me like you could use an enema even if what you say is partially correct. Polarization in our country will sink it as fast as any Ruskie (0r Chinee) rocket. We are going to end as all great societies end, but some will say glory be God's in his heaven and all's right with the world!!
Nothing is more beautiful than nothing.
Good work taggerez. You made all the correct points. I would only add that as Bilwik1 indicated in an earlier post, Franklin Roosevelt was a great fan of this film. Now there is concern among many economists that Obama is waging a program to impose direct government control over US corporations. Oh, BTW in the 1930s that was called Fascism and was quite popular until Hitler and Mussolini started waging aggressive wars. I am reminded of a conversation I had with an avowed liberal in which he maintains that what is needed in American is a benevolent dictator. IMO, the "Left" is much more predisposed to Fascism than the "Right". Not just economic Fascism but also social Fascism which today is called PC.
I cannot see how one would conclude that G. W. Bush had any such inclination. But I am sure someone will help me see the true way of Bush. In a nasty insulting name calling way, of course.
I'm not going to say anything nasty, but I flashed on Bush when Hammond told Congress to stand down. He lost me right then and there. Concentrating all power in the executive and removing the legislative branch (the film seems to have ignored the judicial branch entirely) is what Bush tried to do. I liked the portrayal of Coxey's Army and getting everybody a good job like the WPA, but the rest of it was a turn-off.
I'm all right, I'm alllll right!
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It's interesting reading rightists declaring that leftists want to "control every single minute aspect of society."
Because in my experience, it's the right that wants to dictate who can marry and who can't. And it's the right that wants to dictate what sexual acts are illegal and what are not. And it's the religious right who has declared their intention to outlaw many sexual practices, even among consenting married heterosexuals. It's the right that wants us all to live by the teachings of one religion's sacred text, voicing their desire that all its commandments be obeyed, even though they don't obey them themselves and don't seem to be aware of most of them. (Amusing: right-winger has tattooed on his arm the Biblical verse from Leviticus that condemns homosexuality, but that tattoo violates another Levitical law against tattooing.)
I've seen rightists yelling at liberals to "shut up" whenever they dare to speak out against the Bush administration or the war we're mired in, and openly declare that since there was a war going on, Bush was to be regarded as above reproach and never publicly criticized. I had a Clinton/Gore sticker on my car and a number of times was flipped off and yelled at by rightists (and I would never dream of doing that to anyone..that's just rude and crass). I've seen rightists howl about how they wished the Oscars would be bombed and all those "liberal Hollywood elites" be killed; one even went so far as to offer a bounty for any liberal star killed. (I'm not making that up; it was on a now-defunct message board elsewhere that was likely reported to the authorities.) I've seen rightists twist facts and try to rewrite science.
I've seen rightists complain about "liberal elitists" and try to paint themselves as defenders of equality, freedom, and egalitarian values...and stupidly continue to do so after the revelations of the C Street Family's religo-conservative elitism and the conservative movement's embrace of nakedly elitist Objectivist viewpoints. I've seen rightists declare that they're against democracy, and openly voice their desires for a super-conservative religious oligarchy that would oversee every tiny detail of our lives.
And amusingly, these days I see the Right trying to foist off some mutant offspring of intrusive and oppressive Old Testament social values with atheistic anti-Biblical Ayn-Rand-derived economic values, something that will only collapse in on itself the more they try.
That halo the right tries to put over its own head is cheap foil. Be honest about the right's desire to dictate people's lives, please, and stop kidding yourselves.
Facts need to come before certainty.
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There were conservative religious groups openly talking about how they were pressing for sodomy laws to be reinstated specifically as a way of targeting gays, and then declaring that they wanted to then start tackling the sexual practices of heterosexuals. They may have gone silent since then, it was a few years ago.
Then again, conservatives were fine with sodomy laws being applied solely to gays and not to straights, which was one of the reasons the Supreme Court knocked them down in Texas, citing the "equal justice" clause, much to the distress of conservatives everywhere.
Granted, these are probably the actions of fringe groups and not indicative of the conservative movement as a whole. I'll admit there are those on the left who seek to control various aspects of the public's lives but they certainly don't speak for the left as a whole. The problem is that too many on the right latch on to the actions and words of a minority, and then proceed to lie to themselves and each other that ALL of the left are like this, in order to maintain the fantasy that it's only the left that seeks to control everyone's lives, and that they never ever do anything like that. But fantasy is all it is; when it comes to a desire to dictate people's actions, the right is just as bad, and maybe sometimes worse, then the left. But when push comes to shove, there's good and bad people on both sides of the political fence; someone being of a different political persuasion doesn't automatically make them my enemy, at least in my viewpoint. But I've seen too many on the right declare me Evil and The Enemy, not because of the person I am, but because my political views make me some sort of abstract, nebulous Other who must be hated on principle. Or sneered at and talked down to, as I was once by a man whose friends later gushed about how much of a "compassionate Christian" he was. Ha!
Even now, conservatives are dictating to science teachers that they have to teach "creationism" or "intelligent design" along with evolution. And what about that state where conservative special-interest groups have dictated that pediatricians are no longer allowed to ask if the parents of children own guns, or talk to them about gun safety? Who's dictating people's actions in those cases?
When someone on the right complains that the "Left" wants to "dictate every aspect of people's lives" I usually want to laugh, or feel pity for them; they obviously are too busy listening to the pundits and talking heads and not paying enough attention to what their own side is doing.
There are factions and splinter groups on BOTH sides who want to dictate every aspect of people's lives; to declare that to be strictly the agenda of one side and pretend one's own is guiltless is folly.
Facts need to come before certainty.
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But the left also wants to dictate its own agenda through Force. Who you have to hire or who you can fire, supporting labor racketeers, what you can market and to whom you have to appeal, using the justice department to decree business affairs, to control housing, to control education, to control behaviors through the debasement of real scientific inquiry to set invasive policies. The right appeals to their Book of Fairy Tales and the left appeals to its Science and Sociology (note capital "S's"). Both try and justify interference in the lives of peaceful and productive people by claiming to oracles to The True Word. They scare us with tales of boogie men that only they can defeat. It works, and way too many people sell liberty for "security".
Neither party are about individual liberty, and both parties are abrogating the existing institutions to set agendas. And 90+% of those agendas, despite rhetoric, are the same. The primary differences are simply to which rent seeking subset they are beholden, and the differences that people THINK are differences are merely red herrings.
The reality is there is really just a single party with two branches. They suppress every other voice, left or right, and make a grand show about their differences. And they go an apace with the Welfare/Warfare state. I have no doubts that either branch would feed me (or you) feet first into a wood chipper if it served their mighty purposes.
Some people are afraid of the unknown. I don't know why, and it scares me.
Dictators have this funny habit of not being benevolent.
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