Remember when Lincoln flew in his jetpack around the battlefield at Gettysburg before leaving to help fight the Nazis in the Philippines?

In re: history as useful myth, Biden tried to conjure the ghost of FDR as a lesson on leadership during the current financial meltdown. Unfortunately, nearly every single historical fact he cited in his talk was incorrect:

Joe Biden’s denunciation of his own campaign’s ad to Katie Couric got so much attention last night that another odd note in the interview slipped by.

He was speaking about the role of the White House in a financial crisis.

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed,” Biden told Couric. “He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”

How ignorant is this statement? Let me count the ways:

1. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t become president in 1929 during the crash. He won the 1932 election and took office in 1933, largely because of the 1929 crash and the incompetent protectionist policies that transformed it into a Great Depression.
2. If FDR and President Herbert Hoover didn’t talk about the “princes of greed” in 1929, by the time FDR took over, that kind of populist rhetoric had certainly taken root. FDR greatly escalated the scope of federal government to institute the kind of redistributionism that Obama and Biden now champion.
3. If Hoover or FDR appeared on television in 1929 or even 1933, only a few hundred people would have seen it. Television was still an experimental medium and wouldn’t be introduced to the public for at least another decade.

Certainly there's a point to be made here by ringing in FDR; just get it right, buddy, will you?