March 17, 2013 --

LPR is convinced that there but for the ghost of President Roosevelt, the RINO hold on the Republican Party would be ineffective.

The media served FDR in discrediting his predecessor, President Herbert C. Hoover. Consider the term -- "Hoovervilles" that became part of the language ever before FDR was elected to the White House.

For LPR, 80 years is time enough to go beyond anti-Hoover propaganda, and consider examples of Hoover's insight.

Addressing the Republican National Convention, June 1940, Hoover offered the term "'totalitarian liberals'" to describe officials, in Europe, after World War I, who "'thought they could have economic dictatorship by bureaucracy and at the same time preserve free speech, orderly justice and free government.'" Hoover then pointed out: "'These men shifted the relation of government to free enterprise from that of umpire to controller.'" Thereafter, Hoover noted, "'...came chronic unemployment and frantic government spending in an effort to support the unemployed Government debts mounted and finally government credit was undermined." Hoover regarded these officials as "'the spiritual father of the New Deal.'" (Hoover quotes appear on pp. 205-6 of The Roosevelt Myth, by John T. Flynn (Garden City, 1948).

The New Deal, clearly, was not effective in bringing the U.S. out of the Great Depression There were more people out of work in the U.S. in 1938 than in FDR's first term. The generally- accepted view that it was World War II that got the U.S. out of the Depression is not exactly a vote of confidence in President Roosevelt's approach, now followed by President Obama, to use governmen as controller, not umpire.

House Speaker John Boehner would do well to act on this Calvin Coolidge quote, first posted on LPR, last week:

"There is no salvation in a narrow and bigoted partisanship. But if there is to be responsible party government, the party label must be something more than a mere device for securing office. Unless those who are elected under the same party designation are willing to assume sufficient responsibility and exhibit sufficient loyalty and coherence, so that they can cooperate with each other in the support of the broad general principle of the party platform, the election is merely a mockery, no decision is made at the polls, and there is no representation of the popular will. Common honesty and good faith with the people who support a party at the polls require that party, when it enters office, to assume the control of that portion of the government to which it has been elected. Any other course is bad faith and a violation of the party pledges."

LPR would remind Speaker Boehner of this quote on news that Mr. Boehner might support President Obama's controlling policies with a House majority that does not include a majority of Republican representatives.

If the speaker should so disregard Republican conservatives (perhaps fearing an attack from Robert Reich) he should acknowledge that he has left the Repbulican party -- or, that the Republican party has become an arm of leftist government.

Leftists, LPR submits, tend to believe that wisdom arrives on our planet the moment a leftist reaches puberty. A conservative tends to acknowledge that he stands on the shoulders of political giants.

One of those giants, certainly, is James Madison. LPR was interested to hear Sen. Rand Paul, interviewed on radio after his filibuster in the Senate, refer to the comment in Federalist No. 51:
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

LPR would also call attention to this observation in No. 51: "Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit."

"Moderate" Republicans would do well to appreciate that did not assert: "Control of the people is the end of government." LPR is confident Madison would agree: Where government controls the people, liberty has been lost.