The Chinese Roots Of A Kenyan Anti-Colonial Worldview
Barack Obama Birthers continue to seethe and churn, and now their obsessions have reached a moment which comes to every crackpot crusade: their enemies’ sneering mockery has become further proof of the righteous cause.  Birthers now embrace random assertions linking them to McCarthyism, because McCarthy Was Right too!
Elitist contempt only makes them stronger, and getting called out on facts only spurs them to greater feats of makebelieve history.
Owen Lattimore has now been joined to the Birther defense in the dusty corners of America’s internet, if only indirectly.
The commentariat argument is that Birthers and McCarthy have both been called fact-challenged, but Joe was right and so are they.
One “BarryObam” takes to the pages of the Glen Burnie Forum, claiming Lattimore and others named by McCarthy were found out by subsequent historians, ergo, nanny nanny boo.
As your correspondent has reported, endlessly replicated assertion does not make fact, and the case against Lattimore remains a vague hash of McCarthy/McCarran charges sprinkled with claims unnamed historians or Soviet documents vindicate the cause.
Lattimore’s previous afterlife brush with presidential greatness came when he took some of the blame for turning a boyish Bill Clinton into the Soviet’s willing servent.
Bill Clinton’s “Road To Moscow” is one of the highlights of recent crackpot history, with the ’88 campaign’s dark muttering about Bill’s student travels taken to insane levels. The glancing reference to Lattimore shows how the deed is done.
Well, sort of. Starting in 1952 Fall was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. Up in Baltimore, Lattimore was on leave fighting McCarthy and McCarran’s charges. And in 1953 Hopkins abolished Lattimore’s Walter Hines Page School of International Relations in an effort to get rid of him altogether.  But other than that he and Fall worked in lockstep for America’s downfall.