Praising with faint damn

Heritage responds to criticism from Media Matters and others that its assessment of unemployment during the New Deal excludes those employed by the government:

Committed to the belief that bigger government is always better, Media Matters and Campaign for America’s Future are pushing back data showing that the New Deal never solved unemployment. Cutting through their rhetoric, both leftist organizations make the same narrow objection: that the data we use does not count make work government programs like the Civil Conservation Corps as employed.

Now we will always maintain that not counting government work programs as employment is the more accurate measure.

...

But for the sake of argument, lets cede the point that anyone receiving government employment assistance is ‘employed’. Does that end up changing the the impact of New Deal spending on unemployment? No. As the chart above shows, even when using the numbers preferred by the leftist proponents of big government, the story is still the same: Unemployment never made it near the 1970-2008 5.5% normal unemployment rate until well after the U.S. entered World War II.

Got that?  Heritage sniffs that the New Deal "never solved unemployment" because it did not bring unemployment from 25 percent all the way down to 5.5 percent.

If the worst the far-right Heritage Foundation can say about the New Deal is that it failed to cut the unemployment rate by 80 percent, that sounds like a pretty solid, if accidental, endorsement to me.