So are the RWers working on discrediting Teddy Roosevelt now?

[Enrique]

I haven't listened to the radio today, does anyone know what the talking points are?

edit: it looks like they got a head start, this is from early 2010:

The GOP's War on Teddy Roosevelt

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/03/09/the-gops-war-on-teddy-roosevelt.html

Here's how crazy our politics have become: Legendary Republican President Theodore Roosevelt is being called a socialist by conservatives like Glenn Beck. The man on Mount Rushmore, the Rough Rider president, is getting caught up in a party-purity dragnet 91 years after his death, an exaggerated symptom of the rabid hunting of RINOs—"Republicans In Name Only"—that could tank the Grand Old Party.

If conservatives want to kick TR out, Obama seems ready to welcome him in. As if on cue, the president's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, announced yesterday that the president is now reading the classic The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, a book that inspired Reagan's senior staff to tap Morris as their in-house historian during the 1980s.

Balance seems too subtle a concept for all-or-nothing absolutists.

Beck's departure point for his now-frequent attacks on our 26th president was a post-2008 election snide swipe at John McCain, who he characterized as "this weird progressive like Teddy Roosevelt." In his subsequent book, Glenn Beck's Common Sense, Beck devoted a chapter to "The Cancer of Progressivism" and lays the blame at TR's feet, in addition to Roosevelt's rival Woodrow Wilson. It's a theme he has continued to hit on radio and TV and speeches like his keynote address at CPAC—claiming TR represents a road to "fascism"—because of actions like creating the national park system, his anti-monopoly trust-busting and his support of government interventions like the Pure Food and Drug Act. "It's big government, it's a socialist utopia and we need to address it as if it is a cancer," Beck said.

It's all part of a determined rewriting of history that casts any Republican president not named Coolidge or Reagan as a progressive and therefore a socialist determined to undermine the Constitution. Beck proudly announces that he now uses a bust of TR as a doorstop in a symbolic show of his displeasure.

(...)