Even the most up to date blogger is usually in thrall of the ideas of some long-dead politician, and Joseph McCarthy’s children are everywhere on the net.  Almost daily you may read full throat-ed claims for the guilt of Owen Lattimore, buttressed with a brisk re-hash of the old cause.

Sixty year old accusations of a man 20 years dead retain a lively presence, with blog comments managing to shoehorn tired charges into a remarkable variety of of topic threads.

A recent piece on Senator Jim Bunning’s unemployment compensation holdup somehow meandered into the enduring guilt Owen Lattimore. One “Bilgeman” went from the Kentucky Solon to Lattimore in a few breezy steps. He links to a 1987 piece written while Lattimore was still alive which recycles a version of the claim Lattimore sank Nationalist China, or worse, but offers assertions rather than proof. Bilgeman has what might charitably be called an eccentric view of the 1950s, chalking up Brown Vs. The Board Of Education up to reds under the beds as well.

Slightly more relevant, but still less than fresh, crank commentators on the Gateway Pundit blog offered a “McCarthy was right” defense of Liz Cheney’s recent McCarthy-ish outburst, with Lattimore among the “proven” traitors smilin’ Joe got so close to nailing.

The style is to throw in references to the Venona papers for that 90s sheen, then dash as quickly as possible to musty fifties reports and claims, ’cause Venona does nothing for their case against Lattimore.

More esoteric are fans of the Wasp Establishment’s interlocking directorates, who in the course of a rant about the League for Industrial Democracy manage to award Lattimore a 1931 Harvard degree, for which the non-college graduate full professor and department head would no doubt be grateful.