FDR's "Fala" Speech

[David Morris]

Sounds so very similar to what the Republicans are doing today:

Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gztvtSyTdY

Text
http://www.hpol.org/fdr/fala/

Snippets from a pretty long speech:

"The whole purpose of Republican oratory these days seems to be to
switch labels. The object is to persuade the American people that the
Democratic Party was responsible for the 1929 crash and the
depression, and that the Republican Party was responsible for all
social progress under the New Deal."

"Well, let us take some simple illustrations that come to mind. For
example, although I rubbed my eyes when I read it, we have been told
that it was not a Republican depression, but a Democratic depression
from which this Nation was saved in 1933 - that this Administration
this one today - is responsible for all the suffering and misery that
the history books and the American people have always thought had been
brought about during the twelve ill-fated years when the Republican
party was in power."

"These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or
my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my
little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my
family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know,
Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the
Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story
that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a
destroyer back to find him - at a cost to the taxpayers of two or
three, or eight or twenty million dollars- his Scotch soul was
furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to
hearing malicious falsehoods about myself - such as that old,
worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable.
But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements
about my dog."