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Tuesday, May 2, 2006

Read All About It

Posted by on May 2 at 13:35 PM

For those who were titillated by the history, but a little unsatisfied with last year’s Good Night & Good Luck, there’s a cool little book that just came out called Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy. It’s a compact primer that details exactly what happened. (It’s interesting how the GOP was split back then almost exactly as it is today, between radicals like McCarthy and the moderate wing. It’s too bad, though, that today—unlike then—the president is down with the radicals.)

If you want more than a compact little primer on the era, may I suggest this gigantic book about McCarthy’s progenitor in the 1940s, Sen. Pat McCarran.


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That would be Pat McCarran, D-NV. Let me break it down: the NV is Nevada (McCarran may have had the incipient Area 51 in mind for a preventive-detention concentration camp.) The Big D is Democrat.

Joe McCarthy was a late arrival to McCarthyism, which, as even Josh Feit knows, started with Democrat Attorney General Palmer in about 1919. FDR made political repression fashionable with the Smith Act of 1940, amd made preventive detention in concentration camps fashionable with Executive Order 9066.

HUAC (with which most public school alumnae falsely associate McCarthy) was run by Democrats through most of its history. McCarthy, with strong support from Joseph Kennedy & Kennedy's son, the senator, didn't get in the game until 1950.

Any books by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Yale, are useful correctives for leftist amnesia about the leftist subversion McCarthy ineptly tried to ride to power.

Did someone let the LaRouchies in here? Or is that Ann Coulter talking?

HUAC was run by Democrats for most of its time for the simple reason that Congress was run by Democrats.

McCarthy was a scumbag and a right-wing blowhard. Modern revisionism is trying to blame him on anything else--it's the Kennedys!--but the truth is all Republican. HUAC is the committee he wasn't a part of, but Tydings and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations were McCarthy's--and the Republicans'--babies.

McCarthy was an enemy of Truman and a friend-of-convenience of Eisenhower's.

That's leftist rebuttal for you. They refute nothing you say, then they throw their feces.

Here is the feces that fnarf flipped: "Modern revisionism is trying to blame (McCarthy) on anything else--it's the Kennedys!" Nobody sane (i.e. nobody fnarf has read) blames any McCarthy on any Kennedy. We merely note the associations. Joe the Catholic bootlegger approved of Joe the Catholic chicken farmer. Joe Kennedy's daughter dated Joe McCarthy. Jack Kennedy either approved of McCarthy or feared showing disapproval; JFK was one of the few senators who did not vote for McCarthy's censure. Bobby Kennedy worked for McCarthy on the Permanent Subcommittee.

More flipped feces: "McCarthy was an enemy of Truman and a friend-of-convenience of Eisenhower's." Well, sort of. Truman had many enemies after 1950 when he was America's most despised president before Carter. (The NYT Almanac puts Truman at 22% approval after he fired MacArthur; Carter was at 20% in 1979.) Truman & Tydings were despised, in part, because of their lamentable tendency to cover up for communist New Dealers & Fair Dealers, although Truman had the great virtue of not being fooled by progressive Henry Wallace or (for long) by progressive Joe Stalin.

Eisenhower was never McCarthy's friend, conveniently or otherwise. In 1952 Ike chose not to challenge McCarthy's vilification of General Marshall, but Ike as president engineered McCarthy's downfall, a task he delegated to Nixon. Eisenhower worked more closely with many Congressional Democrats than with the Radical Republicans that Feit mentions.

So having agreed with everything I wrote, something called fnarf flips out into the ozone on his own. He even has the wrong Lyndon. LaRouch has nothing to do with this. Lyndon Johnson, however, worked closely with Eisenhower & Nixon in working against McCarthy.

Ann Coulter is a bad guide to McCarthy & his era. That's why I recommend Haynes & Klehr.

Interesting side note, Samuel Dickstein vice chairman of the Dies Committee, which became HUAC, was on the Soviet payroll.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HUAC


Of course the original focus of the committe was Nazis and the KKK.

Yep. Haynes & Klehr have that, too.

More dull things considered: Mr. Feit's eccentric use of the phrase "Radical Republican" to define the McCarran Wing (Senators McCarthy, Wherry, Jenner, maybe Goldwater, maybe Knowland, maybe Robert Taft, maybe Dirksen) of the 1950s GOP is eccentric, particularly since Mr. Feit perversely failed to mention that McCarran was a Democrat.

Normal writers correctly apply 'rad republican' to Thaddeus Stevens & other radical abolitionists who basically wanted to reconstruct the post-civil-war South by abolishing it. Or at least by subjecting the South to so much shock therapy that endemic institutional racism would die in a decade. The radicals were tripped by racist Democrats (e.g. Andrew Johnson), & the Civil War continued by other means for a century. Stevens & the radicals wanted justice, and they wanted it now, not with the meaningless "all deliberate speed" that Warren's liberal Supreme Court called for in 1954. (Read about "progressive" William O. Douglas in Bob Woodward's book, The Brethren. Douglas treated the Court like a plantation & its dark hired help like house slaves.)

Dwight Macdonald demonstrated that facts are over-rated, but here are some facts: Republican Theodore Roosevelt tried to integrate the front entrance of the White House by bringing Booker T. to dinner. Racist Democrats howled & vowed to rise & fight again.

Republcan Warren Harding, America's first black president (Toni Morrison said it was Blue Dress Bill? Hardly. It was Harding) promoted anti-lynching legislation. Howled down by racist Democrats.

Republican Dwight Eisenhower integrated the armed forces. Truman signed the order, but General Eisenhower made it happen.

Republican President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to integrate Little Rock & to save America from racist Democrats such as Orval Faubus & J.W. Fulbright, Clinton's mentor.

In 1957 Eisenhower & racist Democrat Lyndon Johnson (read Caro's account of Robert Parker, the sharecropper's son who got the bad gig of driving Massa Lyndon. Or, better, read Parker's book) pushed through the first Civil Rights bill since Reconstruction.

A greater percentage of Congressional Republicans than of Democrats supported the civil rights bills of 1964 & 1965. Fulbright and Senator Weird Al Gore Sr. voted against them.

NAACP liberal Richard Nixon started Affirmative Action.

I mention these actual factual facts because some people (Leonard Pitts) seem not to know them. Last week Pitts put out a typical neo-racist smear of my imploding party.

But back to the topic: Fnarf's nonsense about Eisenhower and Joe McCarthy is nonsense, as every normal person knows. McCarthy smoothly switched targets when America switched presidents. Before 20 January 1953 he went after Truman; after 20 January 1953 he went after Ike. Ike fought back quietly and won. Having taken on Rommel & Guderian, Ike took out McCarthy with comparitive ease.

Ed Murrow & George Clooney didn't take down Tail-Gunner Joe. Eisenhower & Nixon did.

The implosion of your party began the day the Civil Rights Act passed. That's the day that all the racists in the Democratic Party started their historic switch. That's old news; all of the Southern Democrats are Republicans now, and they're still unreconstructed racists. But that doesn't have anything to do with Joe McCarthy, does it? McCarthy's Republicanism is hardly up for question, is it? But then, you obviously have no interest in talking about McCarthy; you want to talk about how bad Democrats in the 50s somehow justifies bad Republicans in the 2000s. That there were some other Republicans who opposed him doesn't change the fact of who he was or where his populist base came from. And in the next fifty years, McCarthy's style of Republicanism has utterly defeated the other kind. Nixon is dead. Trent Lott is still alive.

And I'm not a leftist.

Thought I talked about McCarthy, at length, in last nite's post. He set back a good cause, end of story, except to leftists who have conned an uninformed public into defining an era by Joe McCarthy rather than by Joe Stalin. Focusing on McCarthy gets the Old Left off the hook for it's infatuation with a psychokiller who left more corpses than Hitler left.

Random notes: About LaRouche (think I misspelled it earlier), tell me what he wrote or said about McCarthy that was similar to what I wrote yesterday. LaRouche propaganda that I pick up in the gutter sounds like press releases from Howard Dean. In fact, LaR calls himself a 'Crat, does he not? He's been blasting Cheney with birdshot for years, even before blasting was cool, & his monomania probably exceeds yours.

Tydings: Snivelers say McCarthy took Tydings down with a crudely doctored photo. Actually, Tydings took himself off life support when he covered up Amerasia. Read about it. Voters left Tydings on the respirator for a while, then they pulled the plug.

HST & DDE: Truman in his disastrous full term was too wasted to fight McC. Captain Harry had his hands full with Kim Il Sung, Mao, & Soviet MIGs. Eisenhower could fight from strength after McCarthy attacked Ike's Army Secretary. Eisenhower's bipartisan base proved stronger than McCarthy's bipartisan base, although a huge majority of the country (not just of unreconstructed Republcan trogs) was behind McC for a very long time. It's because, knowing his major premises were correct, they were too willing to cut him slack on the details.

(Just between you & me, and apropos of nothing else on this thread, I heard or read that 1968's New Hampshire voters, who almost pushed Gene McCarthy over the top & who pushed LBJ over the side, often thought they were voting for Joe. Not realizing, I guess, that he'd been dead for 10 years.)

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