Late Senator figures in 2008 Presidential furor

[last_texas_dem]

by John Miller/ Associated Press

>>>>>BOISE, Idaho - Being dead since 1940 hasn't kept Idaho U.S. Sen. William Borah from being inserted squarely into 2008 presidential politics after Democratic candidate Barack Obama took issue with President Bush's borrowing of a quote from Borah.>>>>>

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>>>>>Bush then recalled a comment attributed to Borah in 1939 following Germany's invasion of Poland.

"As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939," Bush told Israeli lawmakers, "an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.">>>>>

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>>>>Bush isn't the first to use the comments by Borah, who was himself a contender for president in 1936. In a Time magazine article in August 2006, writer Brendan Nyhan noted the very same reference had also been used by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer.>>>>

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080517/ap_on_el_pr/appeasement_idaho_senator

I found the fact that referencing Church's quote has become a new neocon pastime to be interesting. It's funny how all these guys seem to get their talking points from the same place. Bush probably has about as much of an idea about who Frank Church was as that Kevin James jerk had about what Neville Chamberlain did...

[whistle]

1. Senator William Borah although a republican supported FDR and many of the New Deal

...programs during FDR's first two administrations. So it is not surprising that the neocons would demonize any republican they thought would oppose the fascist neoconservative ideals.

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A Lion Among the Liberals:

Senator William Edgar Borah and The Rise of New Deal Liberalism

Kevin C. Murphy, Harvard University
(Copyright 1997-2008, All Rights Reserved)

I. Introduction

II. The Lion of Idaho: Borah's Intellectual Anatomy

III. The Lion Roars: Borah and the Early New Deal

IV. The Lion in Winter: Borah and the Later New Deal

V. Epilogue: A Critique of Borah's Public Philosophy





Introduction

William Edgar Borah (1865-1940) of Idaho, considered by his contemporaries a first-class statesman and orator in the tradition of Daniel Webster and William Jennings Bryan, spent thirty-three tumultuous years as one of the most powerful and persuasive members of the United States Senate. From the time of his arrival in Washington in 1907 until his death of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1940, Borah was well known and highly regarded both in the capital and across the nation for the force and quantity of his rhetoric. In 1936, Time Magazine declared him “the most famed Senator of this century” and “the great Moral force of the Senate, the one member who could arise and deal with Right and Wrong in an electric way.”1 Esteemed around the world as “the Lion of Idaho” and “the Great Opposer,” he played a pivotal role through five Presidential administrations in shaping the domestic and foreign agendas of early twentieth-century American public policy.

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http://www.kevincmurphy.com/williamborah.htm