Oh, I just love using words like “Hullabaloo.”
There is a Hullabaloo in Partisan Democrat Blog Land about some comments made by Brit Hume on Fox News. Hume’s comments are as follows:
Senate Democrats gathered at the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial today to invoke the image of FDR in calling on President Bush to remove private accounts from his Social Security proposal. But it turns out that FDR himself planned to include private investment accounts in the Social Security program when he proposed it. In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plans should include, “Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age,” adding that government funding, “ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.”
For this, they’re saying Brit Hume should resign. They say Hume is lying.
Where’s the lie? Media Matters’ expose lays out the shocking resignation-worthy offense thusly:
Roosevelt was not advocating that the present system of guaranteed Social Security benefits “ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.” Rather, he was proposing that both mandatory contributions and voluntary annuities would eventually eliminate the need for a different fund which was established to provide pension benefits to Americans who were already too old in 1935 to contribute payroll taxes to the Social Security system.
Problem is, Hume didn’t say that Roosevelt was advocating that the present system of guaranteed Social Security benefits “ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.” Hume didn’t say that.
Political Animal says the resignable offense can be described thusly:
Now here’s what Hume said: In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plans should include, “Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age,” adding that government funding, “ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.”
By clever truncation of the quotation, he’s trying to make it look like FDR thought #2 (Social Security) should eventually be replaced by #3 (private annuities). FDR neither said nor meant any such thing, and Hume knows it.
Blah, blah, blah.
The thing is, Kevin Drum of Political Animal is himself engaging in the “clever truncation” of Hume, who provided context with the paragraph before the one Drum quoted. In that first paragraph, Hume says “it turns out that FDR himself planned to include private investment accounts in the Social Security program when he proposed it.”
Not “turn into.” Not “make wholly.” Include.
Pardon me for not toeing the party line here, but given Hume’s “include” statement, it seems to me that Hume’s next paragraph can be read to mean that FDR intended for the Social Security plan to be made up of both “compulsory contributory annuities” and “voluntary contributory annuities.”
Which is, by my reading of the entire original quote of FDR’s speech (see under “Congressional Consideration”), precisely what he proposed.
If you read Brit Hume’s words ungenerously, you’ll see a distortion.
If you read Brit Hume’s words sympathetically, you won’t see an inaccuracy, but rather a historical truth uncomfortable to some Democratic partisans.
And for this, the partisan Democratic (not liberal, partisan Democratic) blogosphere is embarrassingly overheating.
Partisan Democrats maneuver for advantage, even when it’s silly.
Liberals stand on principle.
Although the two groups often overlap and cooperate, let’s not confuse the two.
Props for your analysis of Hume’s comments. I disagree with you guys ideologically on practically everything, but I really appreciate the intellectual honesty relative to this matter. We can disagree on every issue and be ideological enemies, but I would hope that everyone (including those on my side) would follow this example. Thanks for doing the right thing.
Good post J.Matthew. I hadn’t heard of this incident; thanks for bringing it up.
The more I read about party bickering (on both sides, mind you), the more I want to throw my hands up and yell, “Time out, children!”
Gosh, it’s getting ridiculous. Republicans point the finger at Democrats, and Democrats return the gesture, and vice versa.
I’m sick of the petty arguments and the he-said-she-said crap. It’s a cliche, but I think it’s time both sides sat down and hashed it out for awhile, let the smoke clear, and then start some real discussions about what is and isn’t important to our country.
Maybe I’ve changed the subject of the original post; for that I apologize. But sometimes I just have to get stuff off my chest. Hmmm, my blog comes to mind…
Incidentally, the term “Hullaballoo is a very popular term at my alma mater, Texas A&M. A conservative school, yes, J.Matthew, but you might get a kick out of singing our War Hymn (it ain’t a ‘fight song’ in our neighborhood!), as it starts: Hullaballo! Caneck! Caneck! Hullaballoo! Caneck! Caneck!
I don’t know, J. Matthew. I read the quote you provided and what I get is that Roosevelt didn’t think that the Federal program ought to be limited to the mandated contribution, but ought to be open to voluntary larger contributions that are in no way a reference to any kind of ‘self-supporting’ annuity plan. And there’s still the problem that Hume parsed Roosevelt quotes to make it sound like Roosevelt’s idea was to get the program started and then get government out of the Social Security business, and that’s just not the case.
I can’t say that I don’t have some misgivings about this. I didn’t like the attacks on Rather, I was appalled at the pillorying of Eason Jordan, and I wouldn’t like to see a Blogowar to collect Big Media scalps erupt. Honestly, I don’t think that there’s a chance in hell that FOX is going to drop Hume (unless, of course, it turns out he’s secretly gay), and it’s also possible that retaliation and the possibility of ongoing reprisals with a view towards Mutually Assured Destruction of Big Media will be seen by the Right as more of an incentive than a deterrent to continue these attacks on media figures.
All the same, FOX is a Pravda-esque organization, and drawing attention to the inaccuracies – and the ‘FDR wanted govmint out of Social Security’ one is a whopper – isn’t a bad thing.
Oh, I agree: FOX News is a nasty place. The “newspeople” openly editorialize, and they don’t trust the truth.
But Hume’s statement isn’t technically false. What Hume said can be read in a way that is technically true. So I just don’t see the sense in calling on Hume to resign or be fired.
What really irks me is that while sites like dailykos have been going whole hog on media tempests, much less attention has been paid by such sites to, oh, ACTUAL POLICIES that the people in political power are shoving through.
Let’s pay attention to those policies, like HR 418. You don’t have to stretch anything to take offense at them.