From Uncle Bob

(Uncle Bob responds to questions raised by Arthur in earlier posts. For those of you who are new here, Uncle Bob is a retired Marine Sgt. Major, a Wake Island Defender, former Japanese POW, Vietnam Veteran, and a pretty interesting guy to listen to after a couple of brandies. We digress....)

I was twelve when Franklin Roosevelt began his first term in office and twenty-four when the only president I had ever known as a teenager and young adult finally succumbed to the wear and tear of the presidency and was laid to rest in Arlington.

He was revered by families like mine who had lost all due to the depression. My father went to work for FDR’s WPA to put food on the table for his family and probably would have voted for his sainthood if asked to do so.

An interesting footnote to all this is the fact that in the early months of his presidency, FDR pushed through Congress the so-called "Economy Act" which reduced the pensions of government retirees and the salaries of all servicemen by twenty percent, thus ensuring that when I enlisted in the Corps in 1939 my monthly stipend as a private was $21 instead of the $30 it should have been. But that was before FDR surrounded himself with advisers who embraced the John Maynard Keynes notion that "deficit financing" may become necessary to salvage a national economy tottering on the brink of bankruptcy and out the window went "pay as you go" government, eliciting frenzied editorial shrieks and caterwauls from the fiscally conservative Republican establishment, which seven decades later, in a supremely ironic turnaround, embraces the deficit financing of the Iraq war, which even if it ends this year, will have cost US taxpayers trillions of dollars they have not yet earned.

The record of Roosevelt’s early days in office prove that noone becomes president knowing how to be a president, and some never learn, as the current incumbent has proven in spades. After seven dreadful years (why did we attack Iraq, and why are we torturing dissidents?), impeachment is the only answer, Nancy Pelosi!

My reading of the political tea leaves indicates that an intellectually agile Barack Obama may inherit the Rooseveltian mantle, and if he does, I hope that he follows the Rooseveltian tradition of surrounding himself with experts in all the fields that he knows nothing about, which notwithstanding his supreme title as the new President of the United States of America, I hope he understands will be essentially everything.

Yes, I know. There are experts and then there are experts. Let us hope, for the survival of the nation as we know it and want it to be, that he chooses the right ones.

.........

Has John McCain been so emotionally tainted by his imprisonment as a POW that he is unfit to serve as President of the United States?

McCain, according to press reports, when things do not go his way, occasionally erupts in what I can only describe as "hissy fits." I do not think that this has anything, or very little, to do with his imprisonment as a POW. It’s just McCain letting off steam.

My friend, whose POW experiences were almost identical to mine, blames the Japanese for his subsequent emotional problems and distress. In my view, he would have had these problems no matter where he had been, but the Japanese were a handy excuse.

Sure, John McCain's view of the world have been changed by his experiences. So have mine. So have yours.

Uncle Bob