NYT Joins In Debunking Wingnuttia's Anti-FDR Nonsense

The New York Times on Sunday [1] ran a big op-ed in which the author, Adam Cohen, leads off by citing my recent Fox News debate about FDR and the New Deal (you can watch that debate here [2]). The piece pushes back on Wingnuttia's claim that the New Deal "prolonged the Great Depression" - a claim being spun up in order to stop Congress from passing a new New Deal today.

Last week, I wrote my syndicated newspaper column [3] on this debate, and so it's good to see the pushback getting explicitly echoed by the Times. As I noted before [4], the pre-WWII New Deal era saw the single largest drop in the unemployment rate in American history, and the only way conservatives have been able to try to counter that basic verifiable fact is by dishonestly counting government workers as unemployed [5].

Unfortunately, as Media Matters reports this week [6], Wingnuttia shows no intention of stopping its historical revisionism. So get ready to continue hearing a lot about FDR as the debate over the economic recovery package intensifies.