Half Ass-ed At Full Contact

Plucky McCarthy-Was-Rightists just can’t help themselves: no online forum is safe from marauding bands of make believe historians.

The latest eruption comes to us at “Full Contact Poker,” where “Balloon Guy” drills down on this Owen Lattimore fellow, and comes up with a gusher:

“There was only one problem in all of this for Lattimore: Hoover had given Lattimore’s FBI file to McCarthy and McCarthy had Louis Budenz as a witness, a former Communist, who’d worked with Lattimore. McCarthy carried the day but was forever stuck with the sobriquet “McCarthyism“

Anticipating the introduction of actual facts, Baloon Guy provides a handy checklist …”Venona” (Yale University Press); “The Secret World Of American Communism” (Yale University Press); “The Haunted Wood” (Random House); “The Venona Secrets” (Regnery); “The Secret History Of the KGB” (Basic Books); “Whittaker Chambers: A Biography” (Modern Library); and “Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the life and legacy of America’s most hated Senator” (Free Press). If at first you haven’t read the above, then you are coming unarmed for a battle of wits.”

Sadly, actual reading of the above would reveal that Lattimore is unmentioned in the Venona files, Soviet espionage reports decrypted by the National Security Agency, and that Budenz testified he had never met Lattimore.

Other than that it’s smooth sailing!

Now Your Source For Crackpot History!

YELP, traditionally your go-to source for the musings of your fellow unemployed about salad bars,  now wanders occasionally into political discussions.

What does the Common Man think of the issues of the day, and can they type?

YELP fans recently enjoyed the musings of McCarthy Denial-ist “Nick “Curmudgeon” B., who rose to the bait in an Arizona/immigration thread. Unspecified “Soviet archives” are cited  proving “how spot on Tailgunner Joe was, alcoholic megalomania notwithstanding.”

YELP’s special correspondent for fanciful history reports  “Harry Dexter White and Owen Lattimore, #1 and #2 in the State Department? Soviet spies.”

He may be referring to the Venona files, which the FBI say finger White as a Soviet source.  But as endlessly repeated here and elsewhere, Lattimore is nowhere mentioned in the Venona files.

And neither of them  was Number Anything at State.