McCain/McCarthy, Palin/Cohn - past is prologue

[Joanne98]

by napalminthemorning

Sun Oct 12, 2008 at 08:54:30 AM PDT

In the Vice Presidential debate, Joe Biden answered Sarah Palin's remark about looking back at the last 8 years by saying past is prologue. It is interesting, McCain loves to say look at my record, that is until you actually look at his record. The McCain/Palin campaign's total abandonment, as many conservatives now repeat, of the concept that ideas are good, education is good, and varying points of view to arrive at the best conclusion are good has completely morphed into a new age of McCarthyism. I was born in 1957, so all I know of it is what I have briefly been forced to learn through various educational degrees (which makes me evil in the new GOP I know), so I decided to go back and look in some detail at McCarthy and see how closely today's environment in the GOP aligns. I was shocked. When you read the items below, and to site the source they are all simply taken from Wikipedia's Joe McCarthy bio, some of it is stunning in its parallels, particularly where Palin is concerned.

napalminthemorning's diary :: ::
In one of Joe McCarthy's subcommittee hearings the following took place regarding censoring of books in libraries. Sound familiar?

The subcommittee then turned to the overseas library program of the International Information Agency. Cohn toured Europe examining the card catalogs of the State Department libraries looking for works by authors he deemed inappropriate. McCarthy then recited the list of supposedly pro-communist authors before his subcommittee and the press. The State Department bowed to McCarthy and ordered its overseas librarians to remove from their shelves "material by any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc." Some libraries actually burned the newly forbidden books.<60> Shortly after this, in one of his carefully oblique public criticisms of McCarthy, President Eisenhower urged Americans: "Don't join the book burners. <...> Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book."<61>

There were some very famous hearings based upon McCarthy's alleged communist infiltration of the Army. See any Ayers-like parellels here?

In the fall of 1953, McCarthy's committee began its ill-fated inquiry into the United States Army. This began with McCarthy opening an investigation into the Army Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth. McCarthy, newly married to Jean Kerr, had aborted his honeymoon to open the investigation. He garnered some headlines with stories of a dangerous spy ring among the Army researchers, but after weeks of hearings, nothing came of his investigations.<64>

Unable to expose any signs of subversion, McCarthy focused instead on the case of Irving Peress, a New York dentist who had been drafted into the Army in 1952 and promoted to major in November 1953. Shortly thereafter it came to the attention of the military bureaucracy that Peress, who was a member of the left-wing American Labor Party, had declined to answer questions about his political affiliations on a loyalty-review form. Peress's superiors were therefore ordered to discharge him from the Army within 90 days. McCarthy subpoenaed Peress to appear before his subcommittee on January 30, 1954. Peress refused to answer McCarthy's questions, citing his rights under the Fifth Amendment. McCarthy responded by sending a message to Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens demanding that Peress be court-martialed. On that same day, Peress asked for his pending discharge from the Army to be effected immediately, and the next day Brigadier General Ralph W. Zwicker, his commanding officer at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, gave him an honorable separation from the Army. At McCarthy's encouragement, "Who promoted Peress?" became a rallying cry among many anti-communists and McCarthy supporters. In fact, and as McCarthy knew, Peress had been promoted automatically through the provisions of the Doctor Draft Law, for which McCarthy had voted.<65>

Now getting closer to today's environment. As more and more conservative thinkers are standing up to the Joe Sixpack school of governing, you see some of the same things happening to McCain/Palin as happened to Joe. I particularly relate the quote about the American people getting to know Joe McCarthy over the last six weeks and that he wasn't fooling them - very Sarah.

But of far greater import to McCarthy than the committee's inconclusive final report was the negative effect that the extensive exposure had on his popularity. Many in the audience saw him as bullying, reckless and dishonest, and the daily newspaper summaries of the hearings were also frequently unfavorable to McCarthy.<71><72> Late in the hearings, Senator Stuart Symington made an angry but prophetic remark to McCarthy: "The American people have had a look at you for six weeks," he said. "You are not fooling anyone."<73> In Gallup polls of January 1954, 50% of those polled had a positive opinion of McCarthy. In June, that number had fallen to 34%. In the same polls, those with a negative opinion of McCarthy increased from 29% to 45%.<74> An increasing number of Republicans and conservatives were coming to see McCarthy as a liability to the party and to anti-communism. Congressman George H. Bender noted, "There is a growing impatience with the Republican Party. McCarthyism has become a synonym for witch-hunting, star chamber methods and the denial of...civil liberties."<75> Frederick Woltman, a reporter with a long-standing reputation as a staunch anti-communist, wrote a five-part series of articles criticizing McCarthy in the New York World-Telegram. He stated that McCarthy "has become a major liability to the cause of anti-communism," and accused him of "wild twisting of facts and near facts repels authorities in the field."<76>

Here, you see how the McCarthy manner needlessly trashed a young man who had nothing to do with the case at hand, but was simply an attempt to spread fear.

The most famous incident in the hearings was an exchange between McCarthy and the army's chief legal representative, Joseph Nye Welch. On June 9, the 30th day of the hearings, Welch challenged Roy Cohn to provide U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr. with McCarthy's list of 130 Communists or subversives in defense plants "before the sun goes down." McCarthy stepped in and said that if Welch was so concerned about persons aiding the Communist Party, he should check on a man in his Boston law office named Fred Fisher, who had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, which Attorney General Brownell had called "the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party." In an impassioned defense of Fisher that some have suggested he had prepared in advance and had hoped not to have to make,<77> Welch responded, "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness<...>" When McCarthy resumed his attack, Welch interrupted him: "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" When McCarthy once again persisted, Welch cut him off and demanded the chairman "call the next witness." At that point, the gallery erupted in applause and a recess was called.< [br />
This quote from Walter Winchell is so to the point today that it is almost as if the ghost of McCarthy has infused the bodies of McCain and Palin.

His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. <...> We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it -- and rather successfully.<79>

We can hope that this past-parallel can be a future parallel as well.

After his censure, McCarthy continued senatorial duties for another two and a half years, but his career as a major public figure had been unmistakably ruined. His colleagues in the Senate avoided him; his speeches on the Senate floor were delivered to a near-empty chamber or were received with conspicuous displays of inattention.<92> The press that had once recorded his every public statement now ignored him, and outside speaking engagements dwindled almost to nothing. President Eisenhower, free of McCarthy's political intimidation, quipped to his Cabinet that McCarthyism was now "McCarthywasm."<93>

It is interesting to look at Ann Coulter's love of McCarthy. I didn't realize, until I dug into it for this diary, how much she identifies with the man, his views, and his paranoia of seeing enemies of the USA around every corner. The far right is so far right they are the socialists they accuse the democrats of being. Well, not really socialists. What is a socialist who wants to control the country with narrow definitions of who is "like us" per Sarah Palin? What do you call this version? Ah yes, fascism. John McCain loves to say there will never be another holocaust, but he doesn't mind running on the same platform that Hitler used to rise to power. Those Jews don't see Germany like we do, they aren't like us. The holocaust of ideas and of inclusion is exactly what the play to the most simple-minded right wing voters this campaign has undertaken is engaged in.

In the view of some modern conservative authors, McCarthy's place in history should be re-evaluated. Ann Coulter's book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism is a notable example of this. Coulter, a controversial right-wing author, devotes a chapter to her defense of McCarthy, and much of the book to a defense of McCarthyism. She states, for example, "Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis."<99> Other authors who have voiced similar opinions include William Norman Grigg of the John Birch Society,<100> and M. Stanton Evans<101>

These authors frequently cite new evidence, in the form of Venona decrypted Soviet messages, Soviet espionage data now opened to the West, and newly released transcripts of closed hearings before McCarthy's subcommittee, asserting that these have vindicated McCarthy, showing that many of his identifications of Communists were correct. It has also been said that Venona and the Soviet archives have revealed that the scale of Soviet espionage activity in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s was larger than many scholars suspected,<102><103> and that this too stands as a vindication of McCarthy.

These viewpoints are considered revisionist by most historians,<104> and have been specifically challenged by Kevin Drum<105> and Johann Hari.<106> Historian John Earl Haynes has also argued against this "rehabilitation" of McCarthy, saying that McCarthy's attempts to "make anti-communism a partisan weapon" actually "threatened anti-Communist consensus," thereby ultimately harming anti-Communist efforts more than helping.<107> With regard to Coulter's views in particular, the response among scholars has been all but universally negative, even among authors generally regarded as conservative or right-wing.<108>

Although there are some cases where Venona or other recent data has increased the weight of evidence against a person named by McCarthy, there are few, if any, cases where McCarthy was responsible for identifying a person, or removing a person from a sensitive government position, where later evidence has increased the likelihood that that person was a Communist or a Soviet agent.<109>

It may just be me, but taking a few minutes to go back over the details of the hate mongering, fear spreading and divisiveness of Joe McCarthy does give me hope, because I don't believe the crowds that show up at the McCain/Palin rallies represent all of conservative America. The recent comments of Brooks, Will and Buckley (the son, not William F) let me know that all who say they are conservative are not simple-minded sheep who can get excited with a mob mentality. It was, in the end, McCarthy's own party that snuffed him out, as well as the majority of Americans. When McCain hears the crowd boo for saying Obama isn't an Arab, he must sense the same feeling that Dr. Frankenstein felt when he realized he couldn't control the monster that he had created. In the end, the monster consumed its creator.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/12/11521/593/210/628290