McCarthy Denial-ists: The Front Is Everywhere!

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Half Ass-ed At Full Contact Full Contact Poker Your Online Poker Community


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.

Remembering Louis Budenz

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Face Booked

Former Daily Worker Editor Louis Budenz was a star witness against Owen Lattimore, not withstanding that they had never met, and that Budenz  spent 5 years telling the FBI,  HUAC, and the Federal courts what he claimed to recall of his years in The Party without Lattimore’s name coming up.

But others recall an earlier Budenz, when he was still something of a fresh face.  His first real splash was as a government witness in the New York Smith Act case, where the feds tried to decapitate the American Communist Party and did jail most of its leaders.  Budenz was rolled out as the red renegade, the Marxist newspaper man who had found Christ, and through Him the courage to rat out former comrades.

Somebody in the CPUSA with time on their hands remembers.

An apparent  dissident tendency masquerading as  the “Official Site of the National Board of the Communist Party, USA” can think of no finer slam on the current party editor than this:

“In other business Joel Wendland was presented the “Louis Budenz Award for Meritorious Middle Class Journalism” and was presented with an autographed Barack Obama coffee mug.“

Wendland is popular in other circles as well, staring in the Islamo-Marxist wet dreams of tin foilers everywhere.

Forever Youngdahl

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Our Hero 

This [actually, that] Day In History.

May 2, 1953 was the beginning of the end for efforts to get Owen Lattimore.

He had been indicted on a motley group of perjury counts growing out of his record 12 day encounter with the McCarran Senate Internal Security Committee.  The McCarran Committee was an effort to clear up Joseph McCarthy’s loose ends. McCarthy failed to prove his claim that Lattimore was the top Soviet agent in the United States, or much else, but Lattimore’s contempt for his accusers spurred them to more thorough efforts at burying him.

McCarran forced Truman’s last and Eisenhower’s first Attornies General to pledge Lattimore’s indictment, and Truman left the case as a parting gift to Eisenhower.

But Federal Judge Luther Youngdahl dismissed the key charges, particularly Count One, a catch-all claim that Lattimore had promoted the Communist Line in East Asia.

Youngdahl was upheld by the Appeals Court, leading the Eisenhower Justice Department to try yet another Hail Mary indictment, only to have those charges shot down by Youngdahl as well.

By 1955 it was all over – the feds gave up the effort.


Lattimore Limited Time Offer!

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Attorney For The Damning 

Owen Lattimore is charged with Contempt of Congress, and you are there!

From now till April 30 a somewhat educational web site is offering free access to its many videos, most of them old newsreels and 50s interview show kine scopes.

Among the treasures on display is an interview with Robert Morris, McCarran Committee Counsel, just as the Senate Internal Security Sub-Committee unleashed its 1952 report claiming Lattimore perjured himself.

In the Committee’s investigation of the Institute of Pacific Relations Lattimore was interrogated for 12 days, a record which may still stand.   From this the Committee, and later the Eisenhower Justice Department, drew 7 counts against him. http://skinnydiet.commonsenseliving.com/notavail.JPG

The indictment failed, dismissed by the federal courts despite the legal craftsmanship of boy prosecutor Roy Cohn, who had run the Lattimore grand jury fresh from helping convict the Rosenbergs, but before his service with Senator McCarthy.

Glenn Beck’s McCarthy-Was-Rightists: Dead Horses Can’t Be Broken

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Glenn Beck, America’s proven reserve of comic delight, drills once more into the buried treasure which is McCarthyism.

Thursday Beck launched a spirited defense of the late Senator’s good works, in the midst of an insane roundup of the history of the Roosevelt administration.

Attention to detail suffered in Glenn’s thrilling tale, as he recalled [at 3:30] Hitler’s 1939 pact with the Nazis.

Stalin For Time

Perhaps he meant the better known Hitler-Stalin pact of that year?

Beck also gets Alger Hiss’s conviction date off by a year, and somehow wanders into American intervention in Vietnam without mentioning the name, substituting trite facts about the dead-on-arrival South East Asia Treaty Organization. http://kcm.kr/dic_image/985689aa1930506b816f96034cd7ff22.jpg

Suddenly the long dead Solon and his vivid imagination were all the rage. Salon posted the Beck video, Steve Benen commented,  Balloon Juice linked to that, and it’s commentariat sprang into action, rushing once again to assure the nation that something somewhere someday nailed Owen Lattimore.

“The FBI had a source claiming that Lattimore was indeed feeding information to the Soviets. I would hope that you could concede the difficulty of providing evidence which could compromise intelligence sources, which given the FBI report I provide you seems to be case.“

Which of the ninety-one pages this clown links to substantiates the bold claim is unclear, or why the entire FBI file [which Lattimore himself FOIA’d] isn’t linked to.

McCarthy had a source who confidently told the Senate he’d been informed as early as 1937 that Owen J. Lattimore was a secret Communist.  Confidence by some in Louis Budenz is undiminished despite Lattimore’s tragic lack of any middle name.


Tune in Monday night, when Becky threatens to roust the Reds creepin’ round Obama.Threat or menace?

Owen Lattimore, Internet Star: The Half Life Of Crazy

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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.