Why hasn’t the Brit Hume/John Fund/Charles Osgood distortion about FDR and Social Security enjoyed the same momentum that other blog-gates do? (Maybe ‘cuz it’s not true?) Al Franken called on Hume to resign last week, but you’d barely know it. On his blog, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann calls it “premeditated, historical fraud,” but adds: “you will not see Hume nor Fox News backpedal from it (as Jordan did for his misdemeanor), nor apologize for it (as Jordan did), nor save their masters from its shame (as Jordan did — of course there is no shame at Fox).” Update: After the jump, the full transcript of Hume’s remarks, which demonstrate that the Grapevine segment focused on Harry Reid…
“And now the most engaging two minutes in television, the latest from the “Political Grapevine.”
Senate Democrats gathered at the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial today to invoke the image of FDR in calling on President Bush to remove private accounts from his Social Security proposal. 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, quote, “Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age,” adding that government funding, quote, “ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.”
Last night, Senate minority leader Harry Reid likened the president’s proposal toll allow Americans to divert a portion of payroll taxes into personal security investment accounts to, quote, “gambling.” But in 1999, the Nevada Democrat proposed something very similar on our own “FOX News Sunday” saying, quote, “Most of us have no problem with taking a small amount of the Social Security proceeds and putting it into the private sector.” We’ll show you that later in the program.”