Over the weekend, John Podhoretz, Rob Long and yours truly recorded a new podcast. In it we talk about many things, including the Newtown shooting. But, we also covered some other topics including classic Christmas cartoons and specials. More on that in a moment.
In the meantime, a couple commenters are unfairly (I think) criticizing me for my remarks about FDR and the “forgotten man.” They seem to think I don’t know Amity Shlaes’ book, The Forgotten Man. I do, and have praised it many times (even though I have a couple disagreements with some of it). What they don’t seem to realize is that FDR appropriated the phrase “the forgotten man” for his own purposes. Here is FDR’s famous (or, rather, once famous) “forgotten man” speech. I probably should have clarified the point given how Amity has successfully revived the William Graham Sumner formulation of the forgotten man as the taxpayer. But I wasn’t wrong (never mind somehow unconservative) for saying what I said.
Now on to more compelling topics. In our discussion of shlocky Christmas specials, I somehow failed to bring up the Star Wars Christmas Special which was just too horrible to describe. The good news is…we have video: