Herbert Hoover

Bob Schieffer slammed Mitt Romney on Tuesday's CBS This Morning for his recent "I like to fire people" line, stating that he was "looking for every way he can try to lose and drive down his percentage of victory." He added, "I guess the only thing worse you could say...when people are out of work is that Herbert Hoover is my hero or something like that. It just boggles the mind."

Right after he harped about Romney's apparent incompetence, Schieffer slipped up himself when he confused Ron Paul, one of Romney's competitors, with Les Paul, an early pioneer of the electric guitar [audio available here; video below the jump].

It really is amazing that anybody takes New York Times columnist Paul Krugman seriously.

Consider the following factual misrepresentations in what he wrote Friday:

CNN's new host Eliot Spitzer slammed the Tea Party movement on Tuesday's Parker-Spitzer: "I think that that piece of the Republican Party is vapid. It has no ideas....They're going to destroy our country." Spitzer also accused Tea Party members of forwarding a "Herbert Hoover vision of government...saying, we want to take away the very pieces of government that created the middle class."

The former New York governor of "Client Number Nine" infamy launched his attack on the nascent political movement minutes into the 8 pm Eastern, as he and his co-host, Kathleen Parker, discussed Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell's new ad. After listing what he thought was positive about O'Donnell and her ad, Spitzer gave his "vapid" remark about the Tea Party and made his first mention of former President Hoover:

George Will on Sunday gave Robert Reich a much-needed history lesson about deficit spending and liberal myths concerning Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.

As the Roundtable segment on ABC's "This Week" moved to the current state of the economy, Reich predictably called for another stimulus package. 

"You can't even talk about stimulus because people say, 'Oh, that would create a deficit and that would generate inflation,'" declared one of the Left's favorite economists.

Fortunately for those actually interested in facts, Will was there to offer viewers the truth (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):  

Is it "the economy, stupid" or is it just that the economy makes people stupid? Either way Matt Yglesias, ThinkProgress.org blogger extraordinaire, believes the economy is what's driving conservative furor over the "Ground Zero Mosque."

On MSNBC's August 9 broadcast of "Countdown," Yglesias did his best to psychoanalyze people that are upset a mosque is being built in the shadow of Ground Zero, where over 2,600 people died in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. According to Yglesias, whose blog, ThinkProgress.org, is a function the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress, opposition to the plan had nothing to do with sensitivities but instead economics. The anti-mosque sentiment, he believed, couldn't exist without masterminds like former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich whipping conservatives against the mosque into a frenzy.

"Well, it seems to me that there is or at least there - it's much more visible than it used to be because we're seeing it stoked by sort of the leads in the conservative movement, by Sarah Palin, by Newt Gingrich, by others, in a way that we never had before 9/11," Yglesias said. "And I think what's happening is that when the economy goes down, people become anxious, you see, historically, a lot of increase in xenophobia, in fear and in sort of intolerance. And we've got the conservative movement leaders, very opportunistically trying to take advantage of that, try to play on people's anxieties, and build this kind of anti-Muslim hysteria in a way that President Bush never did in 2001 and 2002."

How can you tell when MSNBC cable-show host Rachel Maddow utters falsehoods about Herbert Hoover? If she talks about him.

This is becoming enough of a pattern for Maddow, as I've described previously at NewsBusters, to border on the pathological.

Here she goes again, this time during her show Friday night while condemning Republicans calling for a "freeze" on federal spending for the rest of the fiscal year --

You know who else had the excellent idea to freeze government spending during a recession? This guy! (holds up photo of Hoover) H.H., President Herbert Hoover. His fundamental misunderstanding of how to shore up a failing economy was so celebrated that the great armies of homeless and jobless Americans gave him naming rights for the shanty towns where they all lived in cardboard boxes and burned-out cars during the Great Depression -- Hoovervilles. Hoovervilles.

And now, (House Minority Leader) John Boehner and congressional Republicans are advocating the same policy.

Enboldened by smarm, Maddow went on to say --

In this context (referring to the recession), the Republicans are proposing a spending freeze. They're saying the government should stop spending. And also, rather than put your house fire out with water, they're going to switch the liquid in the firehose over to gasoline.

Much like that alleged tightwad Hoover during the Depression. Maddow at the same fire resolutely douses the blaze with water, regardless of whether it was electrical in origin. 

Certain left-wing myths are so impervious to reality -- McCarthy chasing phantom communists, Reagan as amiable dunce, the doomed surge in Iraq -- that arguing with liberals about these sacrosanct beliefs is like trying to convert house plants. The best you can do is open them to sunlight.

When it comes to federal spending during Hoover's single term in office, 1929 to 1933, what actually happened? According to the Office of Budget and Management Web site, Table 1.1, just the opposite of what Maddow repeatedly claims.

Federal spending increased $166 million in 1929, or 5 percent. In 1930, it rose by $193 million over the preceding year, at 6 percent. The pattern continued in 1931, with an increase of $257 million, nearly 8 percent. And for 1932, it rose a whopping 30 percent, by $1.08 billion. All told, federal spending increased 57 percent in this four-year period, according to the OMB. 

It was a "freeze" on spending much the way bitter cold is evidence of global warming, another laughable claim from the left.

Not surprisingly, Maddow relies on anecdote to make her shabby claim -- shanty towns dubbed "Hoovervilles" during the Depression -- instead of the "empirical evidence" she touted but never produced, given its pie-in-face potential for besmirking her dogma.

Maddow also gets it wrong about what current-day Republicans in Congress are proposing -- they want to "freeze" spending, which beyond MSNBC is universally understood to mean maintaining spending at current levels. This is hardly suggesting we "stop" spending. 

An actual example of a politician determined to follow Hoover's lead by vastly increasing federal spending in an economic slump? Barack Obama. 

Must have been that full moon. Or "fool full moon" as Rachel Maddow stumbled in referring to it.

If the Newseum is accepting suggestions for exhibits, a possibility comes to mind -- the Pantheon of Unfortunate Punditry. First submission -- Maddow's hilarious revisionism of Herbert Hoover on her MSNBC show Friday. I've watched the segment several times, each time in awe at Maddow's supreme confidence, unrivalled since Ted Baxter in his heyday. I plan to preserve it for posterity, to share with my children as a cautionary tale -- This is what happens when a person makes an utter fool of herself in public.

Maddow told of Vice President Dick Cheney visiting Capitol Hill earlier in the week and warning congressional Republicans that if the GOP blocks the auto bailout, "... We will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever," according to the Los Angeles Times.

"Rachel Maddow is the smartest person on TV," proclaims The Advocate magazine in a cover story on the newly christened MSNBC pundit and Air America Radio host.

That being the case, Maddow ought to know better than make some of the claims she does -- at least when it comes to politics, economics and American history.

Most recent example: Maddow's interview on Nov. 5 with former Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee and their discussion of the Republican Party's future --

On Saturday’s Good Morning America, ABC ran an unusual report that placed some of the blame for the Great Depression’s length on government intervention by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as well as Herbert Hoover, and concluded by questioning whether the current plans could do harm. After an unidentified economist contended that "the government from Hoover to Roosevelt made it worse by intervening too much and too arbitrarily," correspondent Bill Blakemore concluded: "And now, is the Bush government intervening too much arbitrarily with its $700 billion bailout? That’s a million dollar question, so to speak, for those trying to guess when this crisis will end."

Blakemore’s attention to this often ignored take on government intervention came at the end of a report that looked back at the Great Depression. After giving Roosevelt credit for injecting America with a "can do" spirit, Blakemore noted that the Great Depression ended its 10-year run as a result of World War II. He then asked the question of why the Stock Market Crash of 1929 resulted in the Great Depression:

BLAKEMORE: So what made the crash of ‘29 lengthen into a depression?

WOMAN: Because the government from Hoover to Roosevelt made it worse by intervening too much and too arbitrarily.

With Eliot Spitzer gone, Chuck Schumer moves to the head of the list of smugly self-righteous New York pols. So it was particularly satisfying to see Sen. Jon Kyl [R-AZ] put Schumer is his place on This Week with George Stephanopoulos today.

A guest with Kyl for purposes of discussing the economy, Schumer clearly came in with a game plan: to analogize President Bush to the man who presided over the beginning of the Great Depression: Herbert Hoover. After Schumer tried it twice, Kyl had had enough and unleashed a riposte as devastating as it was reasoned.

It's questionable whether Herbert Hoover actually ever promised to put "a chicken in every pot." But even if Hoover did, he was a piker compared to Hillary Clinton. Check out her remarks in a campaign speech today, as aired on this afternoon's Hardball.

HILLARY CLINTON: Over the years, you've heard plenty of promises, from plenty of people in plenty of speeches. And some of those speeches were probably pretty good. But speeches don't put food on the table. Speeches don't fill up your tank. Speeches don't fill your prescriptions or do anything about that stack of bills that keeps you up at night. That's the difference between me and my Democratic opponent. My opponent makes speeches. I offer solutions.

View video here.