The Western Imagination  

Diana West supplies this week’s “McCarthy Was Right” entry, with a spirited version of a beloved old chestnut:

new evidence proves Lattimore was guilty of something all along!

West has a book review/interview with our old pal Stanton Evans, who paired with the tireless Herbert Romerstein recycled his Blacklisted By History McCarthy apologia into an exciting new package:  Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government.

The usual lies have been assembled, especially our favorite, that Owen Lattimore caused Pearl Harbor:

“Thus did the policies promoted in official U.S. circles by [Harry Dexter] White, [Lauchlin] Currie, and [Owen] Lattimore dovetail with those advanced by the [Richard] Sorge-[Hotsumi] Ozaki network in Japan – all converging toward the result that there would be no American-Japanese rapprochement and, even more to the point, no Japanese attack on Russia.” 

Owen did it by sending FDR a memo, single-handedly causing the wily plutocrat to drop talks with Japan and drift into war.

This sort of stuff used to be left to the openly crazed, but you work with what you have.

Especially fun is West and Evans bemoaning their inability to move the public with spy tales:

“Evans mimics the usual reaction to the specter of historical Communist penetration: “ `Well, this thing was overblown, there wasn’t a big problem, these people were persecuted.’ The new evidence, he continues, “challenges this so they dismiss it. We’re dealing with an establishment mindset that is impervious to refutation – to fact. It’s like throwing popcorn at a battleship.””

 Which particular rocks these two live under is unclear, but even liberal fever wet dream The West Wing covered this territory. Who can forget the  sprightly episode where “Sam” [pretty boy Rob Lowe] is devastated to learn that a dead accused liberal commie spy was GUILTY!

There, he said it!