"The Only Thing We Have To Feah Is Feah Itself"

This isn't a factual quibble, but a historical one. Franken's parallel between 9/11 and the Depression is rather ridiculous if extended beyond "They were both Bad." FDR's famous statement was not a declaration that we should never fear anything--he was talking about a specific economic situation. During the Depression, people were afraid to put their money in banks or stocks or open a business or whatever. Being afraid, they essentially kept their money in their mattresses. This deprived the economy of liquid capital, so banks couldn't lend money, businesses couldn't buy machinery, workers couldn't get jobs at working the machines that hadn't been bought, etc. There was, in fact, a lot of productive capacity sitting idle because of the reality that, if you built widgets, no one could afford to buy them anyway.

The only way out of that problem was for people to stop worrying that the banks and stock market were unsafe--the major problem holding back that part of the economy was fear of the economy getting worse. The legitimate parallel here is to Bush's widely (and semi-justly) mocked advocacy of shopping to show the terrorists that we weren't intimidated.

Franken's theme here, that Bush should have reacted to 9/11 by ignoring the threat of terrorism and organizing a national (global?) group hug or something is as asinine as if FDR reacted to the continuing Depression by organizing a large army and overthrowing Juan Peron.