Making McCarthy’s Numbers Work

 Or, Liars Can Figure

Defense of the West westcover

Last McCarthyite Standing Stan Evans has come forth with yet another defense of good old Joe, in the guise of defending fellow McCarthy-Was-Rightist Diana West.

West is apparently under attack, attacks both “brutal and unseemly” as well as “orchestrated.”

Evans teases us with numerology, promising “McCarthy By The Numbers,” but other than a 50 suspect list there is scant use of figures to prove or even assert anything. Instead we get the usual eclectic mix of spying accusations proven and imagined, with occasional references to West in order to sustain a “theme.”

McCarthy’s Fab Fifty evansmccarthylist

Our man Owen Lattimore makes the list, although that doesn’t even tell us what Evans thinks he did. Sitting among the Fifty really is guilt by association.

Evans vaguely says that all these people were outed as Reds, proven by either “sworn testimony, or in FBI and other once-confidential official security records” [such faith in the accuracy of the Bureau’s wool gathering is kind of sweet after all these years!] or that they pled the Fifth, making them spies by the power of I said so.

Lattimore is side swiped here:

McCarthy and his staffers in the usual instance did not allege that his suspects were Communists or Soviet agents–though in some famous cases (Owen Lattimore, Annie Lee Moss) this did happen–for the simple reason that the probers didn’t then know the total story.

…so he was an agent? Who knows, our numbers man has already moved on.

West and Evans have professed their chaste love previously, in a West review of Evans’ last tome enlivened by their mutual pretense of lonely struggle against the odds to prove that spies happened.

For the real self drama you need to skip past Evans and Google up some West-ern legends and lore. West World is filled with epic self dramatization and self-pity over mean things said about her work, including, shockingly, by ostensible conservatives troubled by her crack pottery.

But nothing can hold back her urge to monetize. Untitled

When David Horowitz says your McCarthy charges are a crock, you are out there.

McCarthyism & GOP: Means Not Ends

 

 

[& They Weren’t Too Fussy About The Means] http-::www.loc.gov:rr:print:swann:herblock:images:hblock4

 

Reason magazine has been the home of some Byzantine arguments over McCarthyism, from mocking would-be outrage over contemporary examples, to resurrecting it themselves when needed, to finding the redeeming facet in Old Joe’s controversial stance. Much of this emanated from Michael Moynihan, now departed to [formerly] Tina Brown’s Talk With Tweeting.

So it was all the more exciting that Reason led the razzing of an obscure Ohio political scion attempting to take on terrible Ted Cruz.

John G. Taft is the grandson of Robert Taft, Ohio Senator, presidential candidate and the “Mr. Republican” of the 40s and 50s. From this storied past John G. cries out against the Cruz/Tea Party McCarthyism of the present day, recalling a golden era when politicians settled their differences with grace and tact.

Jesse Walker calls bullshit, resurrecting the money quote from Robert Taft’s period happily using McCarthy as a club.

Taft assured the youngster that facts didn’t matter because the point was to:

“keep talking, and if one case doesn’t work out, proceed with another.”

Update!  A better rundown of Bob Taft’s many crimes from Corey Robin.

 

 

Glenn Beck Throws Joe McCarthy Under The Bus!

Humour In Uniform  beckuniform

Time was you could count on Glenn Beck to whip himself into a nostalgic, incoherent frenzy defending Joe McCarthy.  But Paula Deen’s butter-slicked departure from public life appears to have sparked a reassessment by Beck.

After likening  Deen’s racist blabber to Magellan’s quest into the unknown, and Martin Luther King, the inexplicably uniformed Beck started doing down McCarthy with the best of them.

 “The Food Network caved, and contributed to the growing UnAmerican atmosphere of fear and silence. Hello Joseph McCarthy.”

 

The New McCarthyism: Even Nazis Pickin On Old Joe!

Pride & Prejudiced  

A new low in the crusade against “New McCarthyism,” the shape-shifting menace that means whatever you want it to mean.  Now even Nazis are whining about it!

From Stormfront, home of “White Pride World Wide” comes a racist loser linking to a New York Post article, a standard issue “I’m offended that black person called me/we/them racist” story, enlivened with the stirring “New McCarthyism” claim.

Why “New?” Because Irony!  The clowns rolling out the “New McCarthyism” want to spruce up your granddad’s tired old McCarthyism in order to attack the Left, or what they pretend to see as the Left, by accusing them of using the old red baiters toolkit.  Their examples are usually come from toothless halfwits as opposed to Senate Committee Chairmen, but we must not waver in the fight.

Let’s savor the Post’s Have You No Decency Of Today:

“Racist!

It’s the new McCarthyism. Just as Sen. McCarthy, in the early 1950s, suspected a communist in every flowerpot, he’d cause lasting defensive wounds in all his targets, regardless of his accuracy. Not that he got it all wrong. But he was reckless, indiscriminate, thus within three years, he was dismissed as a political arsonist.”  [More like five years, but upbeat System Working tales can’t pause for detail]

Exciting to see that the term has been so degraded that Klan and Nazi types feel free to adopt it.

 

Now With New McCarthyism!

No Sense Of Reality: Reason‘s Why 

Those libertarian kids at Reason magazine are rightly concerned the with the endless reuse of McCarthyism, the term losing all bite and meaning as it slops around political commentary.

Not that they don’t dabble in it themselves, as a tool to attack opponents of a beloved climate change denier, or when pulling the grand switcheroo:   discovering the dread  McCarthyism Of The Left.

Even after September 11, left-wing McCarthyism persists on American campuses.

But the magazine is really more concerned with minimizing McCarthy, salvaging the kernels of truth they like to imagine he built his career around.

Because after all, the Reds had it coming.

Reason‘s Cathy Young just can’t stop rediscovering the left in all the wrong places, and she won’t let those stalinoid liberals paint themselves as victims:

There is a reason the Hollywood Left clings to what the Radoshes call the “fable of innocence destroyed by malice.” This fable props up its moral authority to this day. From the height of this authority, today’s celebrity radicals blast American policies while ignoring the evil of a Saddam Hussein.

Evil ignoring was more in this  Donald rumsfeld meeting saddam on 19 december – 20 december 1983. rumsfeld visited again on 24 march 1984; the same day the un released a report that iraq had used mustard gas and tabun nerve agent against iranian troops. the ny times reported from baghdad on 29 march 1984, that "american diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with iraq and the u.s., and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been established in all but name."  the image above is proposed for deletion. see images and media for deletion to help reach a consensus on what to do. fellow’s line of work,  and the authority of today’s celebrity radicals no doubt explains why everybody remembers when they first gave a sawbuck to Ed Asner’s Medical Aid To El Salvador.

Reason‘s writers spend inordinate amounts of time trying to salvage real facts they like to imagine the Red Scare exposed.

Sister Young again:

“… in the case of McCarthyism, the stubborn blindness of leftists and many liberals both to the brutality of the Soviet regime and to the extent of Soviet espionage during the Cold War undoubtedly helped create fertile ground for Coulter-style polemics.

First, stop channeling David Horowitz.  Second, in what parallel universe was Ann Coulter ever concerned with facts? And third, remember  NATO, federal worker loyalty boards and the Attorney General’s list?  Proud Truman achievements.

In Stan Evans’ McCarthy-Was-Right book Blacklisted by History,  highly charitable Reason-ette Michael Moynihan found the hidden pony about Owen Lattimore, and a role model.  Because after all, “A book can be radically wrong in its conclusions and devilishly selective in its presentation of evidence yet still be useful.

What Moynihan finds useful is imagining Evans provides “a much needed corrective to the widely held view, successfully advanced by  [Owen] Lattimore himself, that he was in fact a generic New Deal liberal and an anti-communist.”

Both in defending Evans [with an asterisk] and praising David Aaronovitch‘s Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in the Shaping of Modern History, Moynihan turns to the same would-be damning Lattimore quote on Soviet collective farms.

Moynihan’s version has Lattimore writing that they were:

a kind of ownership more valuable to [the Soviet peasantry] than the old private ownership under which they were unable to own or even hire machines.”

A reproduction of the poster "Hired hand, join the collective farm" issued during the collectivization period (RIA Novosti)

No doubt Lattimore wrote unfortunate things about the Soviet Union, but the quote above is only part of a paragraph in language you might not expect from a straight Soviet apologist.

“The identification between loyalty to the government and devotion to one’s own kind of property is a political law that is valid even in Soviet Russia. Divided loyalties weakened Russia most in the terrible and bloody struggle over collectivization, a thinly disguised civil war in which land was taken from the rich peasants and given to poor peasants, not individually but as members of collective farms. Since then, a new kind of loyalty has gradually solidified as more and more Soviet peasants in the Ukraine, Russia, Siberia, and Soviet Asia have come to feel that their individual shares in collective farms represent a kind of ownership more valuable to them than the old private ownership under which they were unable to own or even hire machines.”

I’m not certain what Lattimore meant by all this, but Kulak blood doesn’t go unacknowledged.

Aaronovitch brings out the true Lattimore obsessive in Moynihan when he points to the difficulty in squaring Lattimore as apologist with the steady stream of Lattimore denunciations and critiques in the Communist press.  Somehow Moynihan thinks this is refuted by Communist attacks elsewhere on left deviationists.

“It was, Aaronovitch writes, absurd that “someone as nonrevolutionary” as Lattimore, who “had been attacked” in the communist press, could be denounced as a Red agent. But attacks from communist writers or newspapers mean nothing (as the Spanish Civil War demonstrated, communists were more interested in attacking so-called left deviationists than members of the fascist ruling class)…”

I think he is implying that Lattimore was both a Stalinist and a POUM-ist.

Moynihan has become almost manic about force-feeding Lattimore into political consciousness, roping him with Alger Hiss to make a point about Scott Brown’s base:

“…Tea Party crowd, people who previously thought of Massachusetts as a state that would vote an Alger Hiss/Owen Lattimore ticket if given the chance.”

….sparking a reader commentery war over whether anyone recalled who Lattimore was.

Reason-ettes live in a magical place, where demagogues require facts to bolster their power building crusades.

This is a willfully naive view of the world, on a par with their touching faith in the market solving any question society ever struggled over, without all that sweaty politics.

Chicago once enjoyed the comic stylings of mayoral spouse Jay McMullen, Mr. Jayne Byrne, who did his best to be a hard drinking parody of a city hall cynic.  But he once stumbled onto the truth, when he observed that “the trouble with reformers is that they think everything is on the square.”