As in "1984" where history is shredded or rewritten by the government to suit a current agenda.

No one was ever brought to account for telling us that we were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin - a clear fabrication to suit a political-military agenda. The Vietnam war. A war of choice.
50,000 dead Americans. No one held to account.

The history of the Vietnam war has been distilled into an "honor their sacrifice" sound bite.

It opened the door for an eerily similar frenzy with Bush getting a feverish Senate to allow him to start a war in Iraq. Not only did he infer that they had attacked us on 9/11, but they were about to nuke us. No one held to account. Good ol' Obama wants to "move on" (ie: protect their sorry arses.)

By now, we're used to it.
We're numb.

Libya - we're protecting civilians. Uh huh. Ok. WTF.

Then still later the usually reliable and talented moptop from Liverpool, Sir Paul McCartney, assured us that, finally we had a president who knew what a library is.  

And maybe that's all true, but maybe it's also true that Obama doesn't seem to have read much about FDR beyond those first few months of 1933, and even then he managed to get the history badly wrong.

I would assign him, for some overdue but essential mid-summer reading, one of the several available bios from the Library of Congress about Roosevelt (either the basic offering by Jean Smith or, better, the relevant volume from Kenneth Davis that covers the economic situation in detail) and what happened to him in 1937 when he began obsessing about cutting the deficit during a time of high unemployment.  I'm not only surprised he seems not to have read in this area, but also that no one in the press corps has recently asked him whether he has, and if so why he seems heck bent on repeating the same unforced errors as FDR.

John Kenneth Galbraith said that each generation has to re-learn the lessons; that we're too stupid to learn from the past.

As you said, successive generations always seem to believe they have all the answers; that the past was quaint and `it's' different now and we're so much wiser.  It's telling that the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 was titled the "Financial Services Modernization Act."

Galbraith was right.  It was Galbraith who coined the phrase "conventional wisdom."

...The credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's has indicated that it has so lost faith in Washington's ability to tackle big problems--because of the difficulty in solving such a simple one as how to avoid default--that simply raising the debt limit by August 2 won't be enough to spare the U.S. from what would be an earth-shaking downgrade of its credit rating.

Instead, the agency insists that lawmakers must agree to a $4 trillion package of deficit reduction, at least, either as part of the ceiling deal or soon thereafter. That puts major pressure on Obama and Congress to cut a big deficit deal, or at least agree to a framework that markets find to be credible, possibly on the order of what the Senate "Gang of Six" is proposing.

"Even if they were unconnected, S&P and the ratings agencies have taken this opportunity to tie (major deficit reduction and raising the debt limit) together," said Adam Ozimek, an economist at Econsult in Philadelphia who co-writes the popular Modeled Behavior blog on economics. "Congress has allowed them to tie it together, and the reason is because you have these people who are willing to play this game of chicken, and they may be willing to drive the car over the cliff."

It seems to me that this is a perfect example of a self-fulfilling prophecy - and the killer is that it's been engineered by someone who carries the (D) behind his name.  There can be no doubt, can there, that these events will complete the transformation of the Democratic brand, and dash any hope of realizing the dream of bringing liberal policies that are functional, fair, inclusive of the many who are on or getting closer to the margins, and improve the quality of people's lives across the income and class spectrum.

At the time, I wrote that he was saving that and the budget for ways to declare a crisis which would mean cuts to SS/MM (SocSec, Medicare, Medicaid).

As arrogant as GWB was, he wouldn't touch it even when he had the chance.

He used to belong to the DLC, but moved away because he's pro labor.

The pledge is about opposing tax increases and voting against them - that's why, in the case of any of these stupid deals that are being floated, Republicans who believe we do need to raise the debt ceiling would be breaking their pledge if tax increases are included in legislation that would do.

On the GOP side, it's jaw-droppingly stupid that no one is willing to say, "Phuck the Pledge," and on the Democratic side, that there are too few members of Congress who are willing to say "Phuck this phony crisis and the horse it rode in on."