OTHER THAN THAT, PRETTY MUCH THE SAME THING!

The current New Yorker cover, showing some prominent American presidents of years past agog at a Donald Trump speech, is gentle anachronistic satire, like the radio playing "Shoo Shoo Baby" in A Matter of Life and Death. Yet some media folks think they have to debunk it. At Mediaite, Joe Concha says:

In other words, if presidents like Franklin or Teddy Roosevelt or George Washington witnessed the kind of rhetoric offered up by Trump, the reaction would be horror, disgust, shame. To that end, wouldn’t it be interesting to see the cover reversed with Trump on the outside looking in at Washington, who was a slave owner since the age of 11? And just how well did our first president treat the 318 slaves he owned at his estate in Mount Vernon (Virginia)?

The Founders were hypocrites, see; at least Trump doesn't have slaves (and if he does they're probably in Qatar), so who are we to look down on him? I won't bore you good people by explaining what's wrong with this analysis -- instead, I'll mildly divert you with an even worse one by David Harsanyi at The Federalist. He begins:

It is not exactly surprising that The New Yorker offers us a pristine example of the smugness that permeates the Left these days...

I put a funny picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache on my Facebook page and nobody paid any attention, but let some elitists put their funny president pictures on fancy glossy paper in front of a bunch of boring "journalism" and suddenly it's a big deal!

As you might expect, Harsanyi isn't worried about Washington's slaves, and uses The Father of Our Country merely as a stick to beat his own enemies:

In a Politico podcast this week, Obama claimed that, “[The] Republican vision has moved not just to the right, but has moved to a place that is unrecognizable.” Funny, I felt the same way when I heard this State of the Union Address. But since we’re on the topic: What would George Washington have to say about a leading Democrat candidate who deploys calculated class war and diluted Marxist economic theories?

I imagine he would say, "What is class war and Marxism? Away with this strangely-dressed person, lest I forget my own Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior."

Harsanyi is particularly incensed by the Big Gummint sins of the Roosevelts  -- "[FDR] brandished executive power in ways that would almost certainly make a President Trump look like a piker," "[TR] embraced some of the ugliest pseudoscientific aspects of progressive racism and chauvinism," etc. But he is outdone, and at the same website, by one Julian Adorney. Adorney's essay is called "The Uncanny Parallels Between Donald Trump And FDR," but he's really frying bigger fish:

FDR may not have been Hitler or Mussolini. But the difference was one of degree, not of kind.

And it's hard to say which one's worse, as Adorney goes on to tell us about the Japanese-American internment camps and the S.S. St. Louis, but not about the Second World War, in which FDR unaccountably endeavored to destroy his fellow fascist Adolf Hitler. Maybe he was jealous!

I notice this FDR-as-Hitler shtick is getting popular with conservatives. Looks like Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has trained a generation of wingnuts to spread the story of Adolf Roosevelt, in hopes of attracting swing voters. Good thing for these guys there aren't that many WWII vets left to beat the shit out of them.

UPDATE. Many spectacular comments, e.g.: Jay B: "I'm sure that conservatives were against Japanese internment at the time, when it mattered." (Find Yastreblyansky's comment on how Robert Taft wanted to deal with them, too.) Megalovanian: "Antifascism is the fascism of liberal fascism." And Gromet, on Adorney's "difference of degree, not of kind" thing: "FDR gassed my grandparents with Zyklon-W. Same kind of thing as Zyklon-B, just 20-something letters less in degree, so instead of killing them it employed them, fed them, and freed the world of fascism for them."