In short, it was a calculated, crafted lie, perpetrated by Brit Hume, the closest thing Fox News has to a Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw.
Yet, where's the outcry? Where's the calls for resignation? Where's the accusations of partisan shilling?
Dan Rather reported on a forged document written by someone else, collected by someone else, verified by someone else. For this his head was demanded on a platter. Even though the secretary who would have written such a memo said that though the memo was a forgery, it was textually similar to a memo she remembered writing. These same voices have given Brit Hume a complete miss, even though the deliberate misquote of Roosevelt was an outright lie, and the lie, apparently, was his own.
I guess to the right-wing the lie only matters if a liberal makes it.
Brit Hume has, as of this writing, remained dead silent on the matter, failing to issue so much as a retraction. So much for accountability.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146409,00.html is the lie. Note it's a "report", not an editorial, allegedly.
Here's the real quote:Brit Hume wrote:But it turns out that FDR himself planned to include private investment accounts in the Social Security program when he proposed it.
In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plans should include, "Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age," adding that government funding, "ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans."
The quote shows the "self-supporting annuities" were referring to the Social Security tax revenues, that would replace government contributions into the program since people who were already 65 would be drawing from it. Brit Hume's 'quote' was a complete, calculated distortion.Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote:In the important field of security for our old people, it seems necessary to adopt three principles: First, noncontributory old-age pensions for those who are now to old build up their own insurance. It is, of course, clear that for perhaps 30 years to come fund will have to be provided by the states and the federal government to meet these pensions.
Second, compulsory contributory annuities which in time will establish a self-supporting system for those now young and for future generations.
Third, voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age. It is proposed that the federal government assume one-half of the cost of the old pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.
