Sept. 15, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
03:19
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Who was president before Wilson? | |
| William Howard Taft. | |
| So when the country elected, when they went from the Republican Taft to the progressive Wilson, were they aware of what they were voting for? | |
| Almost certainly not. | |
| In the first place, the waters were a bit muddied because Taft himself... | |
| Was a progressive Republican. | |
| And Theodore Roosevelt then outflanked him and ran as an even greater progressive, which is one of the reasons why he's the only incumbent to finish third out of three, because he was not really a conservative, and yet there was no alternative for conservatives, and the Republicans were split. | |
| If they had not been split, Wilson would never have been elected. | |
| But he wasn't really chosen by the American people over those guys. | |
| It's just that there were two Republican candidates. | |
| And they were? | |
| Teddy Roosevelt and Howard Taft. | |
| Oh, Howard Taft ran for re-election. | |
| I see. | |
| So who, putting aside Coolidge, who was the, I'm talking now prior to Coolidge, who was the last conservative Republican to serve as president? | |
| Right before Coolidge, Harding. | |
| He's one of the ones who's rated as a failure by most historians who I rate as right up at the top. | |
| I would have given him a 10 out of 10 if it weren't for the Teapot Dome scandal, which is the only thing anybody remembers about him. | |
| But I gave him a 9 out of 10 because he's the one really who got the roaring 20s roaring with his cuts on taxes and regulations. | |
| And he turned things around, ended a lot of the restrictions on the freedom of speech that Wilson had put in. | |
| The socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was in prison solely for opposing World War I. And Harding freed him, restored a great deal of integrity to the American legal system in the process, and protected the First Amendment. | |
| I've never asked a guest this. | |
| And it's painful to ask. | |
| Would you have sent Americans over to fight in World War I? I don't think so. | |
| It's of course easy for me to say over a hundred years later. | |
| But I don't see any compelling reason to get us involved in that conflict. | |
| It's not like World War II. World War II, you have Hitler. | |
| He's obviously evil. | |
| People knew about what was going on to varying degrees in Europe, and that one absolutely we should have gotten involved in. | |
| But World War I, Germany was not evil like that. | |
| It was a matter of a war for hegemony over Europe, essentially, and even a lot of the people who were fighting it. | |
| Had no idea what it was all about. | |
| As a matter of fact, a German soldier is famous for having said, why are we being shot at in France because an Austrian was killed in Serbia? | |
| Oh, God. | |
| It's painful when you think about it. | |
| All right, we're going to be back in a moment. |
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