Crackpots Gonna Crack: McCarthyism Loses The Plot

 

Stuck In Lodi  hansen

From the Lodi News-Sentinel comes disturbing signs that McCarthy-Was-Rightists are having trouble keeping track of what they imagine are the facts of the case.

Local columnist Steve Hansen offers a sad sack version of today’s McCarthyism, with the usual elements of Joe the lonely prophet proven right in the end by the Venona files.

 

Hansen gets everything wrong.

Killing_Patton_cover                                                                                                    Patton Lies    

After channeling Bill O’Reilly to set up the late General George Patton as a Red Nightmare warning prophet, Hansen mangles the story by describing Stalin’s East European surge as coming along “fortuitously.”  I was always taught  Uncle Joe did it on purpose.

After that, time bends. Hansen confuses Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller, with the man Teller denounced as a security risk, Robert Oppenheimer. McCarthy’s hearings are conflated with HUAC, resulting in McCarthy being responsible for blackballing witnesses, “especially those from the Hollywood scene

He even messes up Venona, the code breaking of wartime Soviet diplomat cables transmitted home using ordinary commercial telegraph. Hansen vamps it up with spy stuff that never happened:

This covert operation consisted of intercepted radio transmissions from KGB agents, who were secretly located in our nation’s capital, to their Soviet contacts in Moscow.

Fortuitously,  Venona provides whatever Hansen imagines, “convincing evidence that Sen. McCarthy may not be the villain his opponents have claimed.”

If I can do a better paint by numbers version of McCarthy’s martyrdom then this clown we have come to a sad point.  Because as Hansen says:

Whatever one’s view of the controversial senator is, the legacy of Joseph McCarthy still deserves to have the timeframe in which he lived understood and all other facts pertinent to his story revealed.

 

 

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