Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedoms

Fox News regular and former New Jersey judge Napolitano (Constitutional Chaos) seeks to prove that presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were not heroes but A-list bad guys.. Napolitano claims that Roosevelt and Wilson “pushed aside the traditionally accepted and constitutionally mandated restrictions on the federal government and used it as an instrument to redistribute wealth, regulate personal behavior, enrich the government, and enhance the government’s health with wars.” With the draft, instituted by Wilson in WWI, the U.S. instituted “a form of slavery and therefore tyranny.” Napolitano repeatedly links what he views as Roosevelt’s and Wilson’s Progressive era folly and perfidy to the present, claiming that Wilson instituted the federal income tax we know today, which the authors calls “theft” and that, thanks to Roosevelt’s foreign meddling, the U.S. is the “most imperialistic country in the history of the world.” This hit job takes on the Federal Reserve, compulsory education, industrial regulation, and race with equal lack of subtlety. Roosevelt and Wilson, according to Napolitano, were agents of central economic planning. Whatever political points Napolitano is trying to score, he doesn’t accomplish. Agent: Bob Barnett. (Nov.)