Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West....
No rays from holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently....
While from a Proud Tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.Edgar Allan Poe, "The City in the Sea" [provides the title for The Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman, 1966]
The shadow of that Hyddeous Strength
sax myle and more it is of length.Sir David Lyndsay [c.1490–c.1555]; from Ane Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour [1555], describing the Tower of Babel [as quoted by C.S. Lewis, title page of That Hideous Strength, 1945]
When Republicans call something a lie, Democrats object that this is the sort of incivility that leads to political violence and terrorism. When Democrats call something a lie, this may well mean that Republicans have been accurately quoting Democrats, often extensively.
Ἐγκλινοβάραγγος (Enklinobarangus)
There's an inceasing sense in our political life that in both parties politicians call themselves public servants but act like bosses who think that voters work for them. Physicians who routinely help the needy and the uninsured do not call themselves servants. They get to be called the 1%. Politicians who jerk around doctors, nurses and health systems call themselves servants, when of course they look more like little kings and queens instructing the grudging peasants in how to arrange their affairs.
Peggy Noonan, "Our Selfish 'Public Servants'," The Wall Street Journal, Saturday/Sunday, January 18-19, 2014, A13
Vade Retro Satana, Nunquam Suade Mihi Vana;
Sunt Mala Quae Libas, Ipse Venena Bibas.Get thee behind me Satan!
Never tempt me with your vanities!
What you offer me is evil.
Drink the poison yourself!Medal of St. Benedict
I've decided that American politics is now hopeless. In the '90's I hoped that the Libertarian Party could succeed the Republicans or Democrats as a real electoral alternative. That didn't happen, and, considering what the Libertarian Party is like, I'm beginning to doubt that this is either possible or even desirable. In 2012, the Democrats are still busy trying to turn the United States into a basket case like Greece, if not Cuba; and they have minds, 
if such can still be called that, that are absolutely closed to any evidence of history, even current history, or even the evidence of their own recent claims and statements. Democrat politics is utterly dependent on loss of memory. It is the politics of senile dementia, and of audacious and astounding sophistry. Meanwhile, the Republicans are still unable to articulate some of the simplest economic truths; they react to their own faux pas by trying to out-socialize the Democrats (it can't be done); and they are still diverted into social conservative issues that are irrelevant to the current situation. There were particularly egregious examples Democrat lies and of the self-inflicted wounds of socially conservative Republicans in the 2012 election. There will truly be Hell to pay if the electorate is deceived into returning the Democrats to full power. My objections to these parties as well as the Libertarians are as follows.
The Libertarian Party is the only modern political party within shouting distance of the principles of the Founders of the United States of America. Economist Walter Williams once said something like this while guest hosting for the Rush Limbaugh show. Come to think of it, I haven't noticed him guest hosting there lately. Yet Walter himself suffers from some of the problems evident in the Libertarian Party. The late R.W. Bradford, founder of Liberty magazine, one of the premier libertarian publications, nevertheless said that the Libertarian Party was doomed to be the marginalized vehicle of followers of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. This is even worse than it sounds, since many properly orthodox Randite "Objectivists" reject the Party, as did Rand, as having "stolen" her ideas. Thus, the Party cannot benefit from the whole Randite constituency.
It is hard to bring myself to vote for anyone else, but I have come to agree with Bradford. There are four areas where the Party may be hopeless. It tends to be ideologically dominated by (1) isolationists, (2) anarchists, (3) gold bugs, (4) conspiracy theorists, and, curiously like Walter Williams himself, (5) defenders of Confederate Secession. These had been a problem for me ever since I joined the Party, but it was brought home in 2008. I had run for office as a Libertarian seven times -- four times for California State Assembly, 1994, 1996, 1998, & 2000, and three times for Congress, 2002, 2004, & 2006. In 2008, the LA Country election organizer sent out an e-mail to solicit candidates for the next election, calling for good "anti-war" Party members. Although no sensible person is gratuitously in favor of war, I had to tell him that I was not against the current war, involving Terrorism, in the way that he expected. He thought I might want to run for a State office, where the war might not be an issue, but I declined that also.
For me, enough is enough. It may be often said that the United States should not be the world's policeman. Unfortunately, somebody needs to be the world's policeman, and that task tends to fall on the country with the greatest geopolitical reach. That used to be Britain. Now it is the United States. If nothing else, the Somali pirates tell the tale. For a while, libertarian anarchists were celebrating the "success" of Somalia as a country without a government. In fact, what we got was the reductio ad absurdum, not just of that argument, but of anarchism in general. The bad guys organize. Then they do bad things. To stop them, you need at least comparably organized force. When that force gets big enough and organized enough, with laws and a judicial system, then it is a government. The organization that used to police the seas was the Royal Navy. Now there are NATO ships off Somalia, but even when they capture pirates, they don't know quite what to do with them. The Royal Navy, which used to hang pirates on the spot, now sometimes releases them (like other NATO forces), for fear of violating their human rights. This is laughable, contemptible, and dangerous. It is the result of foolish and preposterous scruples that put the innocent at risk by confusing the traditional laws of war with those of civil justice. We see something similar in Afghanistan, where, so reports have it, captured members of the Tâlibân are now being read their Miranda Rights. This is a level of stupidity now to lay at the feet of the Democrats, but, of course, the Libertarian Party doesn't want American troops there at all. Better to let the Jihadists go ahead and plan more terrorist attacks against us -- after all, many Libertarians agree with the Left that the U.S. invited and deserved the attacks on 9/11. Harry Browne, whom I was happy to give my vote for President more than once, said something of the sort immediately after the event. This didn't quite make me a "9/11 Republican," but it seriously turned me off about Browne. To the Left, of course, our self-defense and policing of pirates is "imperialism" -- by which they cannot mean something like the Râj, since the United States does not wish to conquer and rule countries as did the European colonial powers, but they must think of it that way anyway, since they can only understand political events in terms of their Marxist-Leninist paradigm. A capitalist country engaging in self-defense, or the defense of civilization, is, by definition, "imperialist."
The gold bugs are back thanks to the recession and a decline in the dollar. With the massive credit collapse of the housing bubble, the Federal Reserve has needed to create money to prevent a deflation. Of course, with the Tax & Spend Democrats back, they want more money just so they can flood the economy with their spending. They probably still believe that inflation causes economic growth (the "Phillip's Curve" popular during the stagflation of the '70's). By creating too much money, perhaps for this political purpose, the Federal Reserve can create an inflation. The gold bugs, however, don't like the Federal Reserve at all (it is part of the Conspiracy) and don't believe in the creation of money to prevent deflation. Indeed, the Federal Reserve is widely accused, and not just by gold bugs, of helping to create the housing bubble with low interest rates. In all of this, however, many have failed to remember what happened to Japan during the '90's. Interest rates there were effectively zero, but the economy stagnated and actually still experienced deflation. The decline of the dollar can be the result of loss of confidence overseas in the U.S. economy. If dollars held outside the country are dumped into circulation, this can also contribute to inflation. Thus, whether the Federal Reserve needs to create money or not simply depends on what we see happen to prices.
What is true is that most people don't know or understand the workings of the Federal Reserve, or of any central bank. The interest rate we hear the most about, the "Federal Funds Rate," actually is the interest that member banks of the Federal Reserve System charge each other. This doesn't create any new money. The "Discount Rate," is what the Federal Reserve charges to create money and loan it directly to banks. My understanding, however, is that banks don't do this very much. The principal money creating activity of the Federal Reserve is to issue new money to buy assets for itself, including Treasury Bonds, on the open market. (The Treasury itself cannot create money.) The Japanese apparently were not doing enough of this. They were trying to generate economic activity with government "stimulus" spending. Republicans and, especially, Democrats have mostly failed to notice that multiple attempts in that direction didn't do any good. And we know why. As Walter Williams himself has said, taking water out of the deep end of a swimming pool and putting in the shallow end does not make the shallow end deeper. Thus, government "stimulus" spending must involve money either borrowed, taxed, or created, and that will come out of the general capital of the economy (or by devaluing that capital in the case of inflation), removing it from economic investments that are usually more productive than when politicians buy votes with pork-barrel projects. Thus, it is widely understood that the fraudulent stimulus ("porkulus") bill begun under George Bush and rushed through (as urgently needed) under Barack Obama has not and will not make much difference (except negatively) for the economy. It is a political show designed to get votes.
The Federal Reserve also feeds into the world of the conspiracy theorists. The tragedy of the conspiracy worldview is that it directs attention away from the obvious and open activities of the enemies of freedom and Constitutional government. American politics is still simply the playing out the consequences of the New Deal destroying the Constitution. The heirs of the New Deal do not believe in a limited government of enumerated powers. In a way, it doesn't matter whatever else they believe in, whether that is the War on Drugs or Nationalized Health Care, or why. The Nation will not be back on course until those sorts of things are recognized as contrary, and properly so, to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. Yet this doesn't get said nearly enough, or clearly enough in public discourse. The conspiracy theorists are worried about the Rockefellers or why 9/11 is an inside job, and they don't seem to realize that they are themselves contributing to the smoke-screen by which the truth is obscured to the American people. They are as much part of the problem as any obvious statist like Jay Rockefeller.
When Andre Marrou was the Libertarian candidate for President in 1992, a reporter asked him what the program of the Libertarian Party was. He answered, "the restoration of Constitutional government." That was a good answer and a good idea, but unfortunately it has never been the program of the Libertarian Party. The "principle" upon which the Party is founded, and to which members have been expected to subscribe in the "Pledge," is a utopian notion that government can be built out of purely voluntary relationships. Thus, the Party does not believe in things like taxes or eminent domain, or even, really, national armed forces. Since all these things, and more, are recognized in the Constitution, one cannot say that the Libertarian Party has any particular interest or commitment to the principles or historical considerations of Constitutional government. This means that the philosophical inspirations and touchstones for the movement are not primarily Locke, Jefferson, Madison, or even F.A. Hayek, but, as R.W. Bradford said, Rand and Rothbard.
The idiosyncrasy and perversity of this ideology emerges with some regularity, but it is particularly conspicuous when the Civil War comes up. One thus commonly finds libertarians, like Walter Williams again, holding that the Southern States had a perfect right to leave the Union, that the Civil War was an act of tyranny, and that the 600,000+ deaths of the War made Abraham Lincoln one of the great mass murderers of history (a favorite accusation of paleoconservative columnist Joseph Sobran). There is a certain logic to this, if one begins with the premise that government is a kind of "contract at will" from which any party can exit at any time for any reason. This, however, is not quite what the Declaration of Independence says:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing that Forms to which they are accustomed.
So exactly what "Evils" were being suffered by the Southern States that moved them to leave the Union? Well, the threat of the Abolition of Slavery. As Ulysses S. Grant said, this in fact was "one of the worst causes ever." The evils were being practiced by the Slave States, not suffered by them; and they wished to leave the Union in order to continue practicing their evils without opposition. This being the case, the libertarian arguments in relation to Southern Secession try to ignore slavery in favor of other motives, like protective tariffs, for secession. I have examined this sort of thing elsewhere. The idea is bogus, and has been well refuted by a recent book, What This Cruel War Was Over, Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, by Chandra Manning [Knopf, 2007]. Everyone, at the time, knew that the War was about slavery. I did not know there even were Regimental newspapers in the Civil War armies, but there were; and Manning has found that in speaking of the reasons for the War, they speak of slavery, not tariffs (as do private letters, newspapers, etc. etc.). And, of course, Lincoln would not have won the election in 1860 if the Democratic Party had not split in three parts and run three candidates (Northern, Southern Unionist, & Southern Secessionist). The split was over slavery (as the Whig Party had split), not over tariffs.
Although Lincoln was an heir to Whigs and Federalists, and the defeat of secession did remove one of the threats that helped keep the Federal Government within its Constitutional limitations, the Civil War involved a noble cause and, especially through the Civil War Amendments (13th, 14th, & 15th), improved the Constitution. Focusing on the supposed evils of the Union cause, and ignoring that the cause was to abolish one of the greatest evils in history, slavery, not only conveys a message of perversity and moral confusion but, again, like the conspiracy theories, distracts attention from its proper focus, namely the outright destruction of Constitutional government in letter and spirit by the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt, despite building the Jefferson Memorial and putting Jefferson on the nickel, completely overthrew the Jeffersonian understanding of American government -- replacing it with the ideas, like unlimited Federal spending, that had been advocated by Jefferson's greatest enemy, the Federalist Alexander Hamilton. The New Deal undid the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800 and lodged a cancer in American government. The disease has grown steadily ever since, and never more rapidly than since 2008.
One can spend a lot of time with libertarians and never hear much about conflict between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians in American history. They are far beyond that in the utopian stratosphere. The result is waste and misdirection and, in terms of the policies offered (e.g. abolishing taxes), an impression that one is dealing with crackpots. I just wish that the Republicans and Democrats had something better to offer. They don't.
Thomas Sowell, "Random thoughts on the passing scene," 26 November 2013 The modern Republicans lack the courage of their (presumed and sometimes expressed) convictions. They usually praise the New Deal and make no real effort to restore Constitutional government. This has effectively made them co-dependents and enablers for the Democrats. Ronald Reagan at least promised to abolish the Department of Education, but then didn't, and didn't even seem to try very hard to do so. George W. Bush even vastly expanded the power and funding of the Department in his "No Child Left Behind" act. The complaint of the Democrats, of course, was that the Department still didn't get enough power or funding (nothing, to be sure, will ever be enough), while at the same time the act made some moves towards requiring competent teachers -- anathema to the Teachers Unions. But it is local control and educational choice (vouchers, etc.) that will keep the schools honest, not ultra vires Federal control.
This gives us the Republican dilemma in a nutshell. Rather than be accused of not caring about education, or children, or poverty, or the environment, Republicans have conceded the principle to the Democrats that all these things are proper concerns of the Federal Government. Beginning with such a compromise, the Republicans hope that their good faith will be recognized, while they try to restrain the growth of this constantly bigger and more tyrannical Leviathan. Of course, the Democrats never recognize any good faith in Republicans, and their rhetoric never acknowledges that the Republicans have been compromising with them step by step for decades. The very idea that the New Deal was a mistake, a failure, and a project of pure tyranny has thus been left behind in respectable public discourse since the early '50's. The greatest successes of modern Conservatism, the election of Reagan in 1980 and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, did not alter that in the slightest. George W. Bush exemplified the thanklessness and pointlessness of this approach, drawing nothing but bile from the Democrats and bien pensants, even while leaving office in the very act of promoting the absurd "stimulus" spending and the government nationalization of businesses that the Democrats have been happy to pursue with all their might since. George W. Bush thus made it possible for Newsweek magazine to announce, with a banner headline, "We Are All Socialists Now" [in August, 2010, Newsweek was sold for $1, yes $1, although, with its debts and liabilities, the magazine actually has a negative net worth].
On 9 September 2009, the official Republican response to Barack Obama's speech to Congress promoting the fraudulent health care "reform" advanced by the Democrats contained the sort of fatal compromise that is all too typical of them. Part of the Republican proposal for "reform" includes the requirement that insurance companies accept people who have "preexisting conditions," i.e. if you are already sick, with no insurance, an insurance company will be required to insure you anyway and pay for the treatment of the problem you already have. Well, if you don't need to buy insurance until you get sick, then why bother buying it beforehand? Indeed. There is then no incentive to spend money on medical "insurance" until you need medical care. That erases the very meaning of insurance, which is a practice to pool risk, i.e. a group of people who may be subject to some harm pay enough so that it will cover those who will suffer that harm. But if risk is not pooled, and everyone waits to buy "insurance" until they need treatment or compensation, the actual cost for the "insurance" will be no less than if the "insurance" didn't exist. Thus, as the Democrats understand all too well, if medical "insurance" must cover preexisting conditions, then everyone must be required to buy insurance -- which is indeed part of the Democrat's health care "reform." The Republicans, by wanting to sound nice, by requiring coverage of preexisting conditions, play into the hands of the Democrats, since, if the Republican "reform" is accepted, it will cause skyrocketing insurance rates, or drive companies right out of the insurance business -- leaving the smiling Democrats with their socialized "public option" to come to the rescue. Good work. Rather than explain why preexisting conditions cannot be covered by insurance, let alone why this has nothing to do with the Constitutional powers of the Federal Government, Republicans go along, again, to get along.
It is no surprise then that we see a "ratchet effect" in the growth of government and of socialism. Thus, the Democrats push through something, often with Republican support, that increases the power, spending, and taxing of the government (at any level). The results of this begin to alarm the voters, so Republicans are returned to power. They make a few changes and slow the growth of government power, taxing, and spending, but they really never roll things back to where they were. The "ratchet" of Republican timidity prevents fully undoing the damage caused by the Democrats. As with recent Republican Congresses (2001-2007), what we consequently get is "Democrat lite," which slowly begins to produce many of the same effects already experienced from Democrat policies. Republican spending began to go out of control. So where do the voters turn? The Democrats look like the only alternative. But if Republican spending looked bad, wait till the Democrats get their chance, especially after the frustration of years out of power. So the Republicans may eventually return to control; but will they undo all the new damage? Almost certainly not. They might look mean -- although the Democrats will call them that anyway.
This all began with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was in general a good President, and he was loathed by right thinking Democrats, but he began the Republican slide into fatal compromises. He announced that he would not roll back the New Deal. He was able in practice to defuse its worst effects for a while, but he left in place the mythology that the New Deal had been successful and that the changes it introduced into the Constitutional theory and practice of American government were good and useful. The time bomb that Eisenhower thus allowed to tick away later exploded in the '60's, when the worthy cause of enforcing the civil rights embodied in the 14th and 15th Amendments became the means of eliminating civil rights in the on-going totalitarian project of the Democrats. I have examined the details of this elsewhere.
Ruth R. Wisse, Free as a Jew, A Personal Memoir Of National Self-Liberation, Wicked Son, Post Hill Press, 2021, p.205; color added; if a United States Senator is thought to direct a committee of the House of Representatives, it probably means the writer doesn't know what McCarthy actually did. Not unusual. But it is possible that Eisenhower did no greater damage to the nation than when he decided that Joseph McCarthy was getting to be too much trouble. Indeed, the mythology of the New Deal pales in comparison to the lies and misrepresentations that have grown up around McCarthy.
The way history is now presented, one might miss that there were anti-Communist Democrats like John Kennedy, or that Robert Kennedy had been a lawyer for McCarthy, made McCarthy the godfather of his eldest child (Kathleen Kennedy Townsend), and quietly attended McCarthy's funeral. Instead, Joe McCarthy is one of the most reviled men in history -- far worse than his distant adversary Joe Stalin, who was busily engaged in mass murder and, as we now know, bestowing his permission and blessing on the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950.
Yet all McCarthy did, in the whole course of his brief career in the spotlight (1950-1954) and of his brief possession of political power (1953-1954), was to complain about Communists and security threats in the State Department, in the Army, and in some other Federal programs -- for instance, why Communist authors were prominently featured in American Information Libraries overseas, whose statutory purpose was to be anti-Communist. And he was quite right about all of it, as we now know both from declassified American documents and from the access to Soviet records that historians briefly had in the 1990's. We also know that many Democrats who accused him of various things knew that he was right. They deliberately lied for their own political purposes, to the detriment of the United States.
Joseph McCarthy was popular and helped Eisenhower get elected in 1952. When he became a public figure in 1950, he exercised no power in the Democratically controlled Congress. The Democrats kept investigating and smearing him (with the Tydings and Gilette Committees, both of which ignored their instructions from the Senate) because of his (true) accusations about the State Department. With the Republicans gaining control of the Senate in 1953, McCarthy had a little more than a year to do actual investigations -- before Eisenhower decided (in a now popular turn of phrase) to throw him under the bus.
Yet part of the common mythology about McCarthy is that somehow for years the Senator had been in charge of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, that he was responsible for the blacklisting of Communists in Hollywood, and that "McCarthyism" consisted of falsely accusing people of being Communists in order to silence liberalism. None of this was true, and even the substance of the Censure of McCarthy in 1954 was simply for having been rude to members of the Gilette Committee in the previous Congress -- a sanction unprecedented in American history -- when the (Democrat) Committee in question had gone outside its mandate and was maliciously investigating the finances of everyone in McCarthy's family. No other charges against him could be maintained to any standard liable to win a vote in the Senate, even among Democrats. And yet McCarthy was justified in protesting the actions, the political harrassment, of the Committee, which, of course, found nothing wrong with McCarthy's finances, or those of his family. But Democrats aren't investigating Joe and Hunter Biden's finances now, are they?
Yet now everyone "knows" that McCarthy's Censure was for persecuting innocent people with false charges, especially those gifted and honest (Communists) in Hollywood. On a recent anniversary of the censure vote, an anchor on Fox News -- Shepard Smith -- supposedly the cat's paw of Conservativism, announced that McCarthy had "ruined the lives of hundreds of people". This was hardly possible in the brief period when McCarthy had any real power (1953-1954).
A recent McCarthy scholar, E. Stanton Evans (1934-2015), enjoyed statements like this at his lectures, because, out of the "hundreds" of McCarthy victims, he then would ask the audience, "Name one." Respondents, if they could name anyone, characteristically named people who had nothing to do with McCarthy (e.g. the Communist Dalton Trumbo) or people who, from available evidence, almost certainly actually were Communists (e.g. Annie Lee Moss, the cleaning woman who had curiously been moved from the lunch room to the code room). The iconic American writer Dashiell Hammett, who was quite openly a Communist, did appear before McCarthy's Senate committee (as a Communist author) but avoided trouble by taking the Fifth Amendment -- he had previously gone to jail for simply refusing to answer questions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities [note].
Having laid the groundwork for this mythology, we might ask what benefit Eisenhower derived from it. Well, the Democrats won Congress back in 1954 and kept control of all or half of it for the next 40 years. And children are taught in American schools that to be a dissimulating and treasonous agent of totalitarian tyranny and mass murder -- which is what members of the Communist Party were -- is morally laudable and politically exemplary.
It is perhaps no surprise then that in 2021, thirty years after the collapse of Communism, socialist economics and totalitarian politics are more threatening and popular in the United States than ever. And after the eloquence of Ronald Reagan, the "Great Communicator," the Republicans were unable to provide better Presidents than the inarticulate and uninspiring two Bushes -- who both began their Presidencies with oblique swipes at Reagan (the "kinder and gentler nation" and "compassionate conservatism") and who governed through constant (thankless) compromises with Democrats.
The Bushes both proved to be the kind of "Country Club" Republicans, going along out of good manners, that all too easily become RINO's, "Republicans in Name Only," and then perhaps, like the despicable Arlen Specter, open Big Government Democrats. On the other hand, the articulate Donald Trump was such a threat to the ruling class that virtually all of the press, academia, "deep state" federal bureaucrats, including the FBI, biased, dishonest judges, and RINO Republicans combined against him, with a blizzard of lies, distortions, and obstructions, which many voters seemed to believe.
Every Republican defeat, as in 2008, results in advice from Democrats and RINO's that the Republicans have been too extreme and Conservative. General Colin Powell, an appealing person but politically inept, announced after the election that the American people wanted bigger government and higher taxes and, of course, the Republicans were running people who were too Conservative and ideological. This was a bizarre thing for him to say after the Republican Presidential candidate in 2008 was John McCain, a Senator who had been collaborating with Democrats and thumbing his nose at Conservatives for years. McCain was supposedly just the kind of Republican that Democrats could vote for. But, of course, they didn't.
To be the Republican endorsed by the New York Times was all part of a con by the Democrats. McCain was so disliked by Conservatives that when Arlen Specter jumped parties, Rush Limbaugh exclaimed, "Take McCain (and his daughter) with you!" McCain's daughter Meghan, as it happened, someone who had previously registered as an Independent, had joined Colin Powell with the "too Conservative" complaint -- making her (temporarily) a darling of the Media. Meanwhile, McCain accompanied Democrat Russell Feingold to the Supreme Court on 9/9/09 to defend their Campaign Finance "Reform" bill. The "McCain-Feingold" bill violates the First Amendment, and McCain still did not seem to understand that he had handed the Democrats something they wanted more than anything: the ability to silence political opposition.
Now, of course, it is "Big Tech" -- Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. -- which has combined with the Democrats to censor and suppress political opposition. They think that, as private businesses, they don't need to observe the First Amendment; but there is a great deal of law saying that they surrender that immunity when they do the bidding of politicians. They have not yet paid the price for that, but multiple lawsuits have been filed -- waiting for an unbiased judge to issue the kind of injunction that the Democrats were able to get, one after another, against Trump.
Not only do Republicans often lack the courage of their convictions, but they are often so disloyal that their collaboration with Democrats serves to directly maintain Democrat power. Stunning examples of this (apart from the obvious, like Colin Powell and former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan endorsing Barack Obama -- as Riordan had previously endorsed Democrat U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein) have occurred in California. In 1994 Republicans gained a bare majority in the California State Assembly. Nevertheless, the Democrat Speaker, Willie Brown, held onto his position by suborning one Republican after another, three in all, to vote for him. As the disloyal Republican would lose a recall election, Brown would move on to the next one. This continued almost all the way to the next general election in 1996, when the Republicans lost their majority anyway (and Brown was term-limited out). Democrats are very rarely so disloyal, and it is still hard to believe that these Republicans could have been so, especially in the face of certain electoral suicide. It is still not clear what incentives or threats were offered to them, or what they thought they were doing. It almost looks like they were Democrat sleeper agents who ran as Republicans just for such an eventuality as this.
Nevertheless, other examples of the sort happened again in 2009. Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, having given up on early efforts at reform, began collaborating with the Democrats on spending and taxing. As spending went up, Democrat policies were also wrecking the economy, which meant that tax revenues sank steadily. With a two-thirds rule in the State Assembly for tax increases, they were not going to get passed without some Republican votes. The Republicans caved in, evidently as the result of a deal where particular Republican Assemblymen agreed to take the heat as long as they retained the support of the Party. This then became public.
More public and spectacular on the national scene was the 2009 election in 23th Congressional District of New York. The moderate Republican incumbent was appointed to an office in the Obama Administration, so there was a special election to fill the seat. The New York Republican establishment, behind closed doors, decided to run State Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, whose voting record, according to the Wall Street Journal (11/2/2009), was "to the left of many Democrats." She was then endorsed by Newt Gingrich and other establishment Republicans; but the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, was endorsed by Conservatives, like Sarah Palin.
It soon became clear that Hoffman would split the Republican vote and Scozzafava could not win. She dropped out of the race. But did she endorse Hoffman? Oh no. She endorsed the Democrat! According to Rush Limbaugh, this exposed the RINO's for what they really are -- Democrats. Scozzafava has behaved exactly like a sleeper agent or a double agent for the Democrat Party. When the Democrats in Congress are ready to pass socialized medicine and other outrages, this is the most despicable stab-in-the-back disloyalty since Arlen Specter. In 2021, two Republicans, Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who both voted to impeach President Trump, even though he would leave office days later, allowed Nancy Pelosi to appoint them to her fraudulent "January 6th" Committee, the purpose of which is obviously to blame the Capitol Hill "riot," i.e. the "mostly peaceful demonstration," on Trump. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), himself suspected of being a RINO himself, then called them "Pelosi Republicans," i.e. RINO traitors. Such people now openly despise Republican voters, repeating the behavior of the California Republicans who sold out to Willie Brown.
When Republicans do demonstrate the courage of their convictions, they often choose the wrong convictions and, like Libertarians, adopt pointless, Quixotic causes. Thus, for a few years many Conservatives have decided that their ultimate enemy is Charles Darwin. Although many Americans have religious reasons for not believing in Evolution by Natural Selection, and they are natural Republican constituents, the cause makes them look like fools to anyone properly informed about science. Nor has it even been shown to be any help in actual elections. Nevertheless, Ben Stein, otherwise a charming, appealing, and smart guy, wasted millions of dollars to make a movie promoting the "Intelligent Design" anti-evolution hoax. Weren't there any leftist documentary makers to refute? Like, say, Michael Moore? Al Gore? Couldn't Ben have shown us what the medical system is really like in Canada, Britain, or, for heaven's sake, Cuba? Apparently not.
Despite this foolishness, the religious and socially conservative side of the Republican Party, although demonized by Democrats as the "religious Right," appeals to many Democrat voters. There was an astonishing demonstration of this in the 2008 election. The Democrats won California by a landslide at both State and National levels, yet Proposition 8, which overturned the California Supreme Court's establishment of gay marriage, won with some ease. And its margin of victory was largely due to the black vote, which otherwise went for Barack Obama by 96%. The next day, demonstrating gay activists were actually using the "N" word against black bystanders -- before activist leaders wisely directed everyone to attack Mormons instead. Something of the sort with gay marriage had happened a while back in Hawaii, which has been more or less a One Party State for the Democrats. The Hawaii Supreme Court instituted gay marriage, but then they were overturned by popular vote with a Constitutional Amendment.
I have little sympathy for the causes of social conservatives, except where they object to efforts to silence religious expression in public spaces, or to the public funding of abortion. Otherwise, I might even vote for Democrats, as I used to before 1992, on issues like abortion (privately funded), gay marriage, drug legalization, prostitution, pornography, etc. Indeed, although I respect pro-life arguments, it has annoyed me to find pro-lifers in the Libertarian Party. I think it is appropriate that Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican Congressman, who is against abortion, is now in fact a Republican. However, I think that there is actually enough public support for social conservative causes, even among hard core Democrat constituencies, like black and Hispanic voters, that the Republicans are not really at a disadvantage with them on these issues. In other words, the Republicans do not fail with such voters (as they do with me) because of their social conservatism.
Republicans fail with such voters because they are unable to properly articulate the truth about economics, government, and liberty, where the collectivist Democrats are only persuasive through sophistry, ignorance, and lies. I think the Republicans hope that they can win these Democrat voters with a socially conservative message -- and that is possible (it has won a few black social conservatives, like Alan Keyes or Armstrong Williams) -- but it looks more like these voters cannot be won over as long as they believe leftist Democrat propaganda on economics, civil rights, and government. That is just where Republican politicians, since Reagan, have done the worst job getting out their message. The best that can be said for the tongue-tied, unprincipled, and often feckless Bushes is that, at any rate, they were still better than Democrats. The "hog wild" spending of the Republican Congress, so outrageous and disillusioning at the time, suddenly looks like small potatoes now that the Democrats have gotten going. Never have we heard so much so quickly about "trillions" of dollars.
In one key area the social conservatism of Republicans undermines a principle that otherwise should be a matter of prime commitment for them. The issue concerns the drug laws. All Federal laws prohibiting certain drugs are unconstitutional. This used to be well understood. When Congress wanted to prohibit opium in 1913 or marijuana and cocaine in the 1930's, they wrote the bills as tax laws (Catch 22 laws where it was impossible to legally pay the tax -- laws whose dishonesty raises a different question), since it was universally believed that the Federal Government did not have the authority to simply prohibit some kind of drug. The Supreme Court had ruled the opium law Constitutional on the grounds that it was a tax law. The prohibition of alcohol was effected by a Constitutional Amendment (the 18th, repealed by the 21st Amendment). Nevertheless, by the 1960's, the use of the Commerce Clause to regulate all activities that might "affect" commerce, led to the idea that the Federal Government had the authority to pass laws about anything -- since anything could be construed to "affect" commerce in some way. This was actually the end of Constitutional Government, since it meant that the Federal Government was no longer a government of limited and enumerated powers but a government of absolute and unlimited powers.
Republicans were therefore faced with the unenviable choice between Constitutional Government and their own conservative, paternalistic desire, so clear with alcohol Prohibition, to protect people from their own vices. Their choice, of course, has almost universally been to go along, as in so many other things, with the Democrats, scrap the Constitution, and take credit for drug prohibition. Some conservatives, like William Bennett, have even made the absurd argument that alcohol Prohibition was actually successful. Since much of the public, thanks to years of propaganda from the Democrats and their subsidiaries, public education, the press, and the intelligentsia, no longer has much understanding or sympathy for the principles of limited government, the Republicans may actually be taking the more politically popular position. Indulging their socially conservative sympathies and constituents, however, means that Republicans, in all too typical a fashion, have abandoned any principled support of Constitutional Government. In 1996, Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole got the idea to wave a copy of the 10th Amendment around at campaign appearances, indicating his support of the principle of a limited Federal Government. Unfortunately, this was about the first time that such a principle seemed to have occurred to him, since there was little he could point to in his legislative career that would testify to any awareness of it. In its own way, this was the perfect Republican moment, summing up their abandonment of Constitutional principle, their opportunistic me-to-ism of going along with the tyranny of the Democrats, and their (unwelcome to me) social conservatism.
The political season of 2010 has produced some striking developments. Respectable, incumbent Republicans have lost their own primaries. Utah Senator Bob Bennett was rejected by his Party voters in May. Charlie Crist, the Republican governor of Florida, decided to run for the Senate, but it became clear that Marco Rubio would win the Republican nomination. While Bennett seems to have taken his loss in good grace, Crist decided to run for the senate anyway as an independent, creating the danger of splitting the conservative vote and throwing the election to the Democrat. This kind of betrayal and disloyalty had already been seen in the case of Dede Scozzafava, but Crist is a much higher profile figure. Soon before the election the story has broken that Crist was working on a deal with Bill Clinton to get the Democrat nominee, Kendrick B. Meek, to drop out, with Crist's promise that, if elected, he will caucus with the Democrats! Clinton seems to have confirmed this story, where betrayal is loaded on betrayal -- the betrayal of both Republican and Democrat voters who expressed their preferences in their primaries. Mr. Meek, however, although considering the deal, did not go for it.
Crist would not remain alone in his disloyalty and selfishness. Republican Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski lost her primary in August to Joe Miller, who had been endorsed by Sarah Palin. Now, Senator Murkowski had originally been appointed to the Senate by her father, Governor Frank Murkowski, who lost his own gubernatorial primary in 2006 -- to Sarah Palin. There therefore seems to be all sort of bad blood mixed up in this business, and Murkowski decided to launch a write-in campaign to try and retain her Senate seat. Altough given little chance of success, this again threatens to divide the Republican vote and throw the election to the Democrats -- although it may turn out that Murkowski takes more votes away from the Democrat than from Miller.
Although involving no incumbents, the primary for Governor of New York was equally upsetting to the Establishment. Republican businessman Carl Paladino, endorsed by the Meanwhile, Arlen Specter, who, as we have seen, saw the handwriting on the wall back in 2008, that he had little chance against likely Republican challenger Pat Toomey, and simply jumped over to the Democratic Party. After this bit of opportunism, he ended up losing the Democratic primary to Joe Sestak! A great Sestak campaign bit was that Specter had changed Party "to save one job, and it wasn't yours." But I have not heard that Specter plans his own independent or write-in campaign. Heaven forbid that he should split the Democrat vote! Specter then passed away in 2012.
No primary, however, seemed to generate greater repercussions than did the Republican Senate race in Delaware. The Establishment Republican candidate was Congessman Mike Castle. However, in September he lost decisively to political newcomer and unknown Christine O'Donnell, who had been endorsed by the Tea Party movement. Few gave her a chance of winning the general election -- as the Democrat has been helped when local television "forgot" to run O'Donnell's ads the weekend before the election! -- and her nomination set off considerable tut-tutting by Republican insiders and commentators like Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer, who chided Republican voters for nominating a weak, ideological candidate.
The sin, of course, is not in the voters but in the Republican Establishment, which has continued to support RINO's, the way Newt Gingrich endorsed Dede Scozzafava. Mike Castle had been voting with the Democrats again and again; and when he lost his primary, instead of immediately offering the traditional congratulations to O'Donnell, he received commiserating phone calls from Joe Biden and Barack Obama. One may certainly be forgiven for thinking that this reveals where his real sympathies lay. Voters throwing out Bennett, Crist, Murkowski, and Castle were simply saying that they were tired of voting for Democrats under the false colors of Republicans. If Rove or Krauthammer don't like that, they better see to it that loyal and proper Republicans are put forward by the Party.
A considerable irony here is that Tea Party activists had previously been chided for considering the possibility of becoming a Third Party and challenging both Republicans and Democrats. This, we were told, would only split the conservative and/or liberatarian vote and give the Democrats the chance to win again with an electoral minority. Now we see how self-serving, for some, this argument was. When the Tea Party candidates win fair and square in the primaries, doing what the Republican Establishment preferred them to do, well then, it's all right for the losers to make up their own Third Party and split the vote that way! The likes of Crist and Murkowski do not receive nearly the degree of contempt from the commentators that they deserve and are not chided in nearly the same tones as the Tea Party for the help they may deliver to the Democrats.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are put off their game. At first they wanted to think that the Tea Party was a cat's paw of the Republican Party -- "astroturf" instead of genuine "grass roots" to Nancy Pelosi (takes one to know one?). When it became undeniable that the Tea Party was as angry with the Republican Establishment as with the Democrats, then Democrats decided to smear them as racists, Klansmen, lunatics, extremists, etc. When the press discovered that Christine O'Donnell had said that she dabbled in witchcraft as a teenager, the Democrats exulted -- even though one would think that "Wiccan" voters would be a natural Democrat constituency. Conservative Christians worried about Satanism would be unlike to vote for Democrats anyway. But in general, since most Tea Partiers are pretty ordinary folk, as Bill O'Reilly would say, the Democrats just ended insulting and putting off a great many mainstream and independent voters.
So the Democrats can only take comfort from their natural allies, the RINO's. After long propaganda campaigns that the Republican Party was run by Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck (both in fact long disillusioned with the Establishment), the Democrats now discover that these radicals are not real Republicans after all. Just as the Democrats helped, in their own way, John McCain get the Republican nomination for President in 2008, they now work, in their own way, to help the RINO's. They know their friends. Hence their contempt and spleen for Sarah Palin, who inadvertently was launched as a national figure by McCain, but who has been an anti-Establishment conservative her whole political career. This threatens the Democrats like nothing else, and we can tell from the devel of their contempt -- the mask of their fear.
In 2012 the Republican Establishment once again demonstrated its seeming determination to fulfill the historic role of being a punching bag for the Democrats. The 2010 promise of the Boehner, like a lot of Democrats, wanted to blame the electoral defeat of Mitt Romney on the "extremism" evident in the Tea Party. However, Mitt Romney was himself a classic Establishment, Moderate, Country Club (literally) Republican candidate, and he justly had no one to blame for his electoral defeat apart from himself. Although appearing to be a pleasing and well spoken person and candidate, Romney not only demonstrated little in the way of drive, passion, or conviction, but he was unable to articulate the defense of a free market economy and limited government or to formulate telling criticisms of the Democrats. Like John McCain before him, he snubbed invitations to appear on shows like the "O'Reilly Factor," even the weekend before the election, and, like McCain again, didn't allow his Vice Presidential candidate (Paul Ryan) to appear on the show either. Since O'Reilly draws a large audience and can be expected generally to be sympathetic to Romney, it is hard to understand what Romney thought he was doing. Either he thought that he didn't need to appear on the show, which is incredible, or he did not trust himself to face the kinds of questions that O'Reilly asks. Listening to even one speech by Ronald Reagan, one realizes that in comparison to the current batch of Republicans, Reagan's power as the "Great Communicator" not only put him in a different class of speaker, but he might as well have been Demosthenes.
Mrs. Ann Romney told reporters after the Republican National Convention that the goal of the Convention was to demonstrate that, "We are not mean." This was pathetic. The goal of the Convention should have been to demonstrate that the Democrats are mean; and the defensiveness and cluelessness evident in Romney's remark was the equivalent of a "kick me" sign on Mitt Romney's back. And he was not the one to turn anything of the sort around. Instead, after the poor performance of Barack Obama in the first Presidential debate, to the open consternation of all Democrats and liberals, Mitt Romney behaved like a shark that, with blood in the water, decided to become a vegetarian. As with John McCain four years earlier, he showed himself to be the kind of Republican that Democrats were always saying they wanted Republicans to be like, but then of course would never vote for. Afterwards, of course, the Democrats talked about Romney as though he had been Sarah Palin.
It was evident from the Republican primaries that a lot of Republican voters were eager for alternatives to Romney. Every time a new candidate entered the race, they would briefly surge ahead of Romney in the polls -- until some gaff or embarrassment would take them out of the race. Thus, at different times Republicans looked to Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum; and each time there was a kind of feeling in the air that the Party was about to be rescued from Romney. But each promise failed; and other Republicans, who then and now looked like good candidates for 2016, stayed out of the race. Why each challenger failed is itself of interest. Rick Perry was at least once unable to remember his own talking points. Since the question was about which Cabinet Departments he would abolish, and he had mentioned that it would be (only) three, one would think that the environment would be so target-rich that he could easily supply three in any combination. But he could only come up with two. Despite his success as Governor of Texas, and the success of Texas itself, Perry thus reinforced the stereotype of the stupidity of Republicans.
Herman Cain, as a successful, articulate, and aggressive black businessman, deeply frightened the Democrats. From their bag of tricks they produced the sort of thing familiar from the treatment of Clarence Thomas, namely old charges of sexual harrassment. Having hanged black men during Segregation, often for bogus rape charges, Democrats now are content to smear their political prospects with harrassment charges. The cases had all been settled, the women involved mostly seemed reluctant to say anything, and I was never clear exactly what Cain was supposed to have done. One example was him telling an employee in an elevator that she was the same height as his wife. I don't understand how that was sexual harrassment. Perhaps there were more serious charges; and in any case it was enough to drive Cain out of the race. With Cain gone, the Democrats were able to return to their favorite smear of Republicans as racists. That the Democrats had just benefited from a classic racist stereotype of black men involved the kind of irony to which they are always deaf. The comic relief of the Democratic campaign, Vice President Joe Biden, upped the racial ante by telling a black audience that Republicans wanted to put them "back in chains." The Republicans, being Republicans, never thought to respond that the Democrats had already put black Americans back in chains. Obama had certainly done nothing to help black unemployment, or to improve black education (consenting instead to their continued use as hostages to the teachers unions in public schools), yet he continued to get away with all of his failures. Food stamps and free cell-phones seemed to be enough to win the black vote -- confirming the motto of the Democratic Party, "There's a sucker born every minute."
Newt Gingrich could usually not be accused of stupidity, and there were marvelous occasions when he was able to nail the Democrats (and the Press) with sharp, brilliant, and fierce criticism. Yet Gingrich has always been his own worst enemy, and he was undone by the erratic and eccentric nature of his ideas and behavior. Thus, Gingrich had foolishly and inexplicably done a TV public service announcement with Nancy Pelosi, of all people, warning about Global Warming. If he thought this would make the Democrats like him, he may not be very smart after all. To Republicans, Tea Partiers, conservatives, and libertarians in general, it was an appalling lapse of judgment and perhaps evidence of deeper political confusion and priorities (like his continuing praise for FDR). With other such examples, and some new gaffs, enthusiasm for Gingrich faded rapidly, although he did not leave the race.
Then there was Rick Santorum. A major issue of the 2012 political season was the decision by the Obama Administration that some Catholic institutions, like schools and hospitals, whose purpose was not sufficiently or purely religious, would be required to provide birth control in the medical insurance they offered their employees. Since birth control is contrary to Catholic moral teaching, and it would also encompass the "morning after pill," which is an abortifacient, i.e. it induces an abortion, which is contrary to the moral convictions, not just of Catholics, of most conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews, this led to some controversy. Catholic leaders felt betrayed by the Administation, which had previously assured them of its sensitivity to Catholic scruples (and with Joe Biden claiming to be a good Catholic). The Democrats, however, immediately jumped on the Catholic and conservative response as a "war on women." If mandated health insurance does not cover birth control, we were told, this was the hateful oppression of women by taking away their right to birth control. Interviews with "women's reproductive rights" advocates and activists, however, almost always revealed their real feelings and complaints, which were simply hostility for the Catholic Church and its moral teachings.
In the face of this sophistry and vicious antipathy, the Republican Party rose in resolution, power, and fury -- like the French at the Maginot Line. To the "war on women," the Republicans simply never countered with accusations of a Democrat "war on religion" or a "war on conscience." Not even uninhibited personalities like Rush Limbaugh thought to use these characterizations. Yet conservatives are well aware of leftist assaults on religion and have written extensively about it. And even if they thought that a "war on religion" would appeal to too narrow a base, a "war on conscience" could be made into a electric issue for anyone. The Democrats had shoved Obamacare down the country's throat, and now they wanted to make people of conscience pay for the sexual behavior of other people, to which they have moral objections. The silence on this was deafening. And absolutely inexplicable.
Then Rick Santorum entered the lists. His response to the Democrat campaign was that maybe birth control was not such a good thing after all. This gave the Democrats a second wind: Republicans want to take away birth control!. Since this might well have been true about Santorum, it only dug the Republicans deeper into a hole that should have been there for the Democrats, not for the Republicans at all. Meanwhile, Santorum said nothing about the government despotically forcing Catholic institutions to abjure their faith. In all this, Santorum committed so many political sins that The Wall Street Journal said he should be charged with political malpractice. The worse sin, of course, was that he was saying irrelevant things that were off message -- if the proper message was that the government was forcing Catholics to do something contrary to their moral convictions. So perhaps he didn't understand what the message should have been. At the same time, the message that he did offer was going to be popular with very few Americans -- even most Catholics have no inhibitions about using birth control -- while at the same time playing right into the propaganda campaign of the Democrats, that Republicans wanted to take away women's rights. The damage that Santorum did to the whole 2012 Republican political effort is incalculable. In turn, Mitt Romney, who had nothing to do with this and was not even a conservative in the same vein (despite being a Mormon), did not have a clue how to reverse the message and retrieve the issue.
The damage of Rick Santorum's cluelessness was magnfied by more embarrassments for the Republicans. One criticism of the Tea Party in 2010 was that several of its candidates were amateurs who inspired no confidence in voters. This was particularly true of Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, who had deposed an Establishment Republican candidate, and Sharron Angle in Nevada, who was up against the nitwitted Harry Reid. Both of them had no real political experience and also seemed to have backgrounds of erratic and marginal involvements with things like witchcraft, Scientology, or fringe political movements. They seemed more perplexing than threatening, but either way they gave voters little ground for confidence. Since the Republicans nevertheless won the House of Representatives in the election, their failures seemed more like growing pains than anything else for the Tea Party movement.
Trouble, however, was brewing for the future. The stated program of most Thus, nothing hurt the Republicans and the Tea Party so much in 2012 as the candidacy in the Senate races of Missouri and Indiana of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, respectively. Mourdock had unseated the Establishment Republican incumbent, U.S. Senator Richard Lugar. Akin was up against a vulnerable Democrat incumbent in Missouri, Claire McCaskill. Both men destroyed their own chances of election and badly damaged general Republican prospects with truly idiotic statements about rape and abortion.
Todd Akin was the worse embarrassment. In order to show his Pro-Life bona fides, an issue that was irrelevant to his ostensible status as a Tea Party candidate, Akin ventured the opinion that we didn't need to worry about abortions as the result of rape because women did not become pregnant as the result of rape. He had been told this by a "doctor." Since it is obvious that women often become pregnant as the result of rape, Akin compounded his folly by making a distinction between "legitimate" rape, which presumably meant "real" rape, and the opposite, so that if the woman became pregnant, it must not have been "legitimate" rape. Thus, Akin managed to accuse every woman who has ever been raped and become pregnant of not having really been raped. There must have been some kind of willingness, invitation, or consent to the "rape."
If Rick Santorum played into the hands of the Democrats, Todd Akin gave them a gift greater than any gold. This went way beyond political malpractice. The ignorance, stupidity, folly, and callousness of Akin's pronouncements gave the Democrats a brilliant and even true example of a "war on women." It was a body blow to Mitt Romney and to all Republicans and conservatives. And then, when his resignation from the campaign was demanded by all, Todd Akin had the arrogance and selfishness to refuse. Although his money was cut off, Akin stuck it out and went down to inevitable and ruinous defeat.
This was so bad, I would not have blamed Mitt Romney if he had put out a contract, ordered a hit, and had Todd Akin killed. Indeed, he might have gained some respect from me that he never got otherwise. At least it would have shown that he understood the seriousness and outrageousness of what had happened. Desperate times call for desperate measures; and if Barack Obama can kill Terrorists with drones in Pakistan and Yemen, Mitt Romney might at least have ruthlessly taken out a man who seemed to prove true every lie of the Democrats. Akin did more than the Democrats could ever have done on their own to discredit the Republican Party, the Tea Party, and conservatives. And it sounds like he still never understood what he had done. I wouldn't blame Romney for having him killed even now, in revenge.
The sin of Richard Mourdock was less egregious and, in comparison to Akin, was almost forgetable. Yet it was still gratuitously and irrelevantly off message and managed to hand to the Democrats a Senate seat in Indiana that they would not have had otherwise (Richard Lugar would have been reelected), in a State otherwise now all but dominated by Republicans. And Mourdock got into much the same trouble for much the same reason, trying to demonstrate his Pro-Life bona fides, also in the case of rape, where it was entirely unnecessary to do so. He said:
While one can understand this as a moral position, it is not something that is going to appeal to most Americans. Even Christians might reflect that God killed the baby of David and Bathsheeba in order to punish them. A rapist deserves more consideration than the King and Queen of Israel? If Mourdock thought that a Tea Party candidate should be saying such things, perhaps he should have left it to candidates like Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, or Sarah Palin, who at least could not have been accused of hating women without some kind of cognitive dissonance. But no, the Republicans could not get women to say things that would sound foolish and unpopular, they had to be stuck with a couple of men, Akin and Mourdock, who were perfectly willing to fuel the Democrat narrative -- which is more or less that there aren't any women (or perhaps "legitimate" women) in the Republican Party, the Tea Party, or the Pro-Life movement.
So Mitt Romney, undone and defeated by nonsense like this, and demonstrating no aptitude as a spokesman for capitalism, freedom, or limited government, went down to defeat. Yet fewer people voted for Obama than did in 2008. At the same time, fewer Republicans voted for Romney than did for John McCain in 2008. He was that bad as a candidate; for, despite the embarrassments just recounted, he also had multiple opportunities handed to him, of which he did not take advantage. Nevertheless, proper Tea Party candidates, like Ted Cruz in Texas, won election; and the Party miraculously held on to the House of Representatives, even if John Boehner then dismissed the significance of Tea Party Members. But since the election it has been Tea Party favorites, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz, who have generated all the Republican heat. And Paul is actually a libertarian.
Just as disturbing as Romney's failures as a personality was the incompetence demonstrated in his campaign. The Republicans bought a software system to help them keep track of Republican voters and get out the vote on election day. It was not tested. And on election night, it crashed. The get-out-the-vote effort was crippled. Since Romney had been in earlier elections -- he had been elected Governor of Massachussetts -- we might have at least counted on him to be running an efficient campaign organization. No such luck. I never even heard any accusations that the Democrats had hacked and sabotaged Republican computers. Of course, they might have actually done that, but then Romney might have been too polite ever to mention it.
And so there are lessons to learn. On the other hand, we begin to suspect that the Democrats may have succeeded in turning the federal government into something that will simply buy votes for them. The negative examples of France or Greece -- about which Mitt Romeny managed to say little -- has left many Americans unpersuaded that the Welfare State is a path to ruin. But it is. It is also, as F.A. Hayek put it, the path to serfdom -- exactly what the Democrats and socialists want. Such politics will be the ruin of the Nation, unless Republicans or Libertarians can get their act together.
If we imagine the typical Republican politician, we may think of certain characteristics. These are people who are inarticulate, passive, timid to cowardly, confused, and disloyal. Not disloyal to a Party or person, although that may be involved, but disloyal to the principles according to which they are purported to be Republicans rather than Democrats.
And this also goes back to their being inarticulate. They usually are entirely unable to express what Republican or American principles are; or they do so in confused, deadly, and even stupid ways -- earning the label of the Republicans as the "stupid party" (as opposed to the "evil party" of the Democrats). And then they abandon their principles, as when George H.W. Bush went back on his "no new taxes" pledge, after the Democrats had rolled him on a dishonest tax and spend deal -- i.e. they would tax, and then they would promise to cut spending, which of course they never did.
Or Republican politicians simply cannot give appropriate ripostes to the kind of things the Democrats say, as when Vice-President Joe Biden told a black audience that the Republicans wanted to put them "back in chains." No Republicans, in an election year, responded that Democrats already had black people back in chains, especially when black Democrat politicans had sold out black families to the teachers unions, allowing the unions to hold their children hostages in terrible and violent public schools. This is one of the nastiest betrayals that has ever occurred in American politics, yet most black voters keep voting for Democrats, with little effort from Republicans to keep up the attack on the Democrats and expose their betrayal.
The discourse of many black conservatives, that the Welfare State is the new "Plantation" for black people, is only rarely featured in the speech of Republican politicians. Clearly, they simply fear the indignation of Democrats or the Media at such a characterization. But it is the truth, and Republican cowardice is the message, loud and clear, when it is not used. Democrats -- and the teachers unions -- richly deserve, not just to be confronted, but to be crucified with it.
"Inarticulate" is not what anyone would have called Ronald Reagan. The Press had about the same contempt for Reagan as they have had for subsequent Republican Presidents, but Reagan was able to speak right over them to the American People; and his good humor and good nature showed through, totally negating the sniping, snarkiness, and smears of the press and the Democrats -- although Democrats back then were often (not always) more civil than they are now.
Thus, Reagan became "The Great Communicator," to the frustration of all his enemies. It ended up just looking bad to seem like a Reagan enemy, and he didn't treat anyone like an enemy himself, except the enemies of America and of freedom, like the Soviet Union. His real domestic enemies could comfort themselves that Reagan was just an actor who read what other people, the Capitalist ideologues, wrote for him.
Unfortunately, it turned out the radio messages that Reagan had recorded for years all exist in holograph -- he had written out the original talks himself -- and even his White House speeches, although initially written by speech writers, were heavily edited and rewritten when they got to Reagan. Key phrases, like "evil empire," where his own. The result, even in comparison to those among Democrats who are supposed to be good speakers, like Barack Obama, is that Reagan sounded like Demosthenes.
There has certainly not been his like since, and the muddled thinking and speaking of the Bushes now looks like a sign of the confusion of their principles also. H.W. Bush's "kinder, gentler nation" and W. Bush's "compassionate conservativism" both look like efforts to make Democrats like them -- something that was never going to happen anyway -- until you're dead, as we saw at the funeral of H.W.
Republican voters find this all very frustrating, and they frequently express their dissatisfaction with the representation delivered by Republican politicians. Because of this, the discourse has developed about "Republicans in Name Only," i.e. "RINO's."
One must watch carefully who complains about this label. It is usually the RINO's or their media allies and enablers -- giving themselves away. Even so, Republican voters usually don't seem to have much choice, apart from staying home. Their frustration got Donald Trump elected. But it also kept getting a lot of RINO's, with no opposition, elected and reelected.
We can do a test. No Republican in Congress voted for ObamaCare. After the Republicans won back the House and then the Senate, they passed one bill after another to repeal ObamaCare. President Obama, of course, vetoed all of them. Then the Republicans kept the House and Senate and won the Presidency in 2016. Congressional Republicans immediately began talking, not about repealing ObamaCare, but about some sort of "repeal and replace" for ObamaCare. This was already the wrong idea, since Republican principles, which should be something like Constitutional principles, are that the Federal Government shouldn't have anything to do with medical care.
Even so, the Republican Congress was unable to pass any kind of repeal or "repeal and replace" over the two year tenure of the 115th Congress. This involved some Republican members simply voting against all the bills, like Susan Collins of Maine, or an extended strategy of outright sabotage, such as Senator John McCain of Arizona was apparently waging. It came down to McCain killing a bill by his own friend, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (also seen by many as a RINO), which was the last effort in the matter. Graham was later present at McCain's deathbed, with all perhaps forgiven and forgotten.
What seemed to be McCain's problem, at least publicly, was that he wanted some compromise to be worked out with the Democrats. If this was his honest desire, it exposes him as a complete fool, since the Democrats were never interested in any compromises, and said so quite openly. McCain ended up doing their work for them -- the very definition of a RINO.
Both McCain and his fellow Arizona Senator, Jeff Flake, had promised during their election campaigns to repeal ObamaCare. Flake's betrayals were so blatant that he decided not to even try to run for reelection; and he spent the rest of his term demonstrating his disloyalty to the Republican Party and Republican voters. This put him in the running as perhaps the worst and most shameless RINO ever. The low point of his performance may have been a speech he gave on the floor of the Senate defending the national "mainstream" news media. Donald Trump had characterized the media as the enemy of the American people. They are. The Democrats responded by accusing Trump of wanting to destroy the First Amendment. Of course, it is the Democrats who work tirelessly to destroy the First Amendment, as we see with their Brain Trust at American universities, where "speech codes," star chamber trials, mobs, and riots are used to silence and expel dissent. They also work tirelessly to destroy the First Amendment freedom of religion -- unless, course, it is practiced by Muslims, who now can mutilate their daughters without fear of prosecution -- while Christians, of course, cannot refuse services for "gay weddings." But Democrats have little sense, or at least demonstrate no awareness, of their own hypocrisy. And certainly no sense of irony. Meanwhile, the public has even less trust in the press than in Congress. In the 2016 election, the New York Times announced that it was going to use all its resources, not just editorially but in all its "journalism," to help Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump. Objective news is no longer an ideal, and the same academic Brain Trust has already been arguing that objectivity is impossible, and that it is all about power anyway. So, not surprisingly, the news coverage of Donald Trump has continued to be 90% negative.
Enter Jeff Flake, who agreed with the Democrats completely about the sterling honesty and veracity of the mainstream media, and he wants that 90% negative coverage to continue. Since it is now all about power, he is probably trying for a "commentator" or "strategist" job at CNN or one of the other Democrat front "news" organizations, where he may even keep pretending to be a Republican. Just to be sure, he finished off his last few weeks in office proposing new taxes, an entirely meaningless gesture that nevertheless confirms his bona fides with his Democrat friends. What karmic debt do Republic voters carry to deserve so treacherous and vicious a representative? Politicians lie, yes; but a "Republican" like Jeff Flake is no better than a mole, an infiltrator, directly from the Democrat Party into the Republican.
John McCain was not far behind. The most damning thing in his whole career, although it is hard to imagine anything topping his sabotage of repealing ObamaCare, was his cosponsorship of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance "Reform" Act of 2002. This was McCain's idea of "bipartisanship." What it was about, of course, was to enable the Democrats to cripple or silence political opposition, with the sop for establishment Republicans of simultaneously protecting incumbents from challenge. It became a crime for organizations to say anything about Federal candidates within a certain period before elections. When something like this is opposed by both the Sierra Club and the National Rifle Association, we might wonder from what part of the political spectrum its support derives. And, of course, the answer is from the totalitarian part, with clueless and disloyal Republicans hopping on board.
That included President George W. Bush, who signed the thing, perhaps with the intention that he would avoid the heat for a veto and the hope that the Supreme Court would strike it down. The Court didn't, not yet.
But when the Federal Election Commission tried to sanction an organization, "Citizens United," for publishing a book about Hillary Clinton, in 2010 the Court struck down the provisions of McCain-Feingold that allowed such a thing to happen. First Amendment jurisprudence has generally held the prohibition of publications ("prior restraint") beyond the pale.
Since then, one of the principal crusades of the Left has been to restore the law, and more. They don't want anyone speaking without their permission -- and occasionally some careless Democrats actually say so. And these are the same creeps who complain that Donald Trump is destroying the First Amendment. How can they talk and keep a straight face? The smirk of corrupt FBI agents testifying before Congress at least shows that they know what they are about.
Of course, since most of what the Federal Government does is unconstitutional and corrupt, any "shutdown" is actually just a good start. And all those public employee parasites and tyrants will get back pay anyway, unlike people laid off or striking in private industry.
The Democrats don't want to fund a border wall, to the tune of $5 billion, because it is "ineffective" and "immoral." Presumably, it is like the Berlin Wall, keeping people prisoners. However, the Democrats funded "border security" under Barack Obama to the tune of $40 billion; and Obama himself visited the border just to celebrate how effective the new barriers and surveillance systems were. Since the Republicans were still saying that it was largely ineffective (as it was), Obama even joked about it, saying, "What do they want, alligators?" This is now forgotten, when all Trump wants is a wall, not alligators.
But what is immoral is to countence the human traffickers, the coyotes, robbing, raping, and murdering migrants, just so they can jump the border and enter the country illegally. Also, it is immoral to allow this, not just when these migrants are left, or left for, dead in the desert, but when the desert itself, an "ecologically sensitive" area, is trashed with all the debris that these people scatter in the course of their entry. The hypocrisy, opportunism, and dishonesty of the Democrats is never so evident. Letting people die in the desert, be exploited by the coyotes, protecting illegal alien criminals and gang members, and allowing damage to the sacred ecology (just as they allow wind tubrines and solar farms to slaughter endangered birds), exposes the Democrats for the vicious and dishonest people that they are.
And as for "ineffective," the wall that Israel built to keep out terrorist suicide bombers has been marvelously effective. And the United States helped pay for that. Where more substantial walls have already been built along the U.S.-Mexico border, as at El Paso, illegal crossings have already been reduced close to zero. So, naturally, the Democrats want those walls torn down. At this point, one wonders what they want. They don't want immigration laws enforced. They don't want voting laws enforced. Indeed, they want laws that make it possible to register and vote illegal aliens, so that the Democrats can steal elections -- These are not people who believe in American sovereignty or in democracy. Nobody steals elections, or makes it possible to steal elections, who believes in Democracy. And when "Antifa" marches around chanting, "No border, no wall, no U.S.A. at all," we may be seeing what Democrats now really believe in. It is not in America, or in the American people. They want to replace the American people, with others who would vote for Hugo Chavez. Of course, that is a kind of suicide pact for people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer -- they are the targets, being white, of the new Leftist racism, which wants to disposses, if not massacre, white people (see the yearning for "white genocide"). And Chuck is even Jewish -- just as the Democrats elected a number of raving anti-Semites, acolytes of Louis Farrakhan, to the new Congress. So Nancy and Chuck probably will soon be gone, devoured by their own Revolution. At the moment, they are willing to do or say anything to cling to the last shreds of their power. It's pathetic. But bad news for the Republic.
All the Republicans needed to do, when they controlled Congress, was to send a spending bill from the Senate, without a wall, to the budget Conference Committee, and put the wall in it. This could then be passed in the Senate with only a majority vote. That is how the Democrats passed ObamaCare, after they lost their supermajority. But the passive, timid, cowardly Republicans just don't play hardball like the Democrats.
Another betrayal of the 115th Congress was over funding for the private organization "Planned Parenthood." Planned Parenthood is ostensively in the business of "Women's Health," which no conscientious person can oppose. Of course, no funding for any such organziation is part of the Constitutional powers of the Federal Government; and even if it were, there is a Federal Law prohibiting public money paying for abortions, which about half the country regards as murder.
The justification for public money for Planned Parenthood is that the organization uses other money for abortions, while the public money only goes for other medical treatments and counseling. However, even if abortion and other services were kept carefully separate, the availability of public money allows for the "other" money to go to abortions. Money is money, and unless the abortion business was kept institutionally separate, public money in effect was going to fund abortions. This should already have given Republican politicians pause. Even more, it turns out that abortions may be the principal business of Planned Parenthood, with other "services" minor to non-existent. At that point, Republicans had no business having anything to do with it.
However, things got much worse. Planned Parenthood was caught, in undercover stings, apparently selling foetal tissue and body parts from abortions. This was illegal. Because of that, the Republican Party -- and not just Donald Trump -- promised to defund Planned Parenthood altogether. This was a solemn undertaking to a major Republican constituency, the only place in American politics where "Pro-Life," anti-abortion people are even welcome, despite their numbers in the country.
And they were betrayed. The 115th Congress did absolutely nothing to defund Planned Parenthood. Indeed, this was largely able to pass under the radar. The national Media, so pro-abortion that it often seems to cheer on dead babies, had no interest in taking the Republicans to task. So they got away with their betrayal without any real public furor.
After multiple betrayals and broken promises, many Republicans seemed to feel the bad faith and shamefulness of their performance. Rather than face voters demanding explanations, many Republicans decided to retire and not run for reelection in 2018. We know why Jeff Flate gave up, but some 40 other Republicans in the House and Senate dropped out.
Usually, we see a lot of retirements in a losing Party, like among Democrats after the Republicans took the House in 2010. So all these retiring Republicans, including Speaker Paul Ryan, were acting like losers. And that may be the right thing to call them. They were indeed "losers" because of their faithlessness.
And two big things were tossed away in doing this. One was that the retirees were obviously not going to be saying anything during the election. The typical clumsiness and inarticulateness of Republican politicians is then replaced with silence, and new candidates, often unknown, were not in a position for their statements to claim public notice the way a sitting Member of Congress would.
And that leads us to the second point. Incumbents are typically reelected, to the tune of 90% in Congress. The power of incumbency is thus considerable, and all this was thrown away with the retirements. Consequently, the retirements, because of their number, themselves constituted a betrayal of Republican voters.
Of course, the incumbents were little deserving of respect, and the retirements were an admission of Republican poltical failure. As they slunk off in shame, Republican politicians then accomplished a final insult and betrayal, by handing the House to Democrat maniacs, with their new constituency of communists, racists, anti-Americans, and anti-Semities. Good work. A record for the ages.
Something like McCain-Feingold never would have gotten that far without John McCain, George Bush, and the other Republicans who went along with it all. But, the truth is, they are at a disadvantage. The first real RINO may have been President Eisenhower. Eisenhower was responsible for a number of enduring evils. Foremost was his openly stated policy not to challenge the New Deal.
Several things were involved with the New Deal and with Eisenhower's related actions. One was to accept the destruction of Constitutional Government, which had been effected by Franklin Roosevelt. This took two key forms: (1) Establishing the principle, supposedly based on the "General Welfare" clause, that the federal government could spend money on anything. This was originally proposed by Alexander Hamilton, when it could be sharply contradicted by both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. No one before Roosevelt had quite the audacity to accept it, much less bully the Supreme Court into agreeing. Because of this idea, the United States Government has essentially become a means of buying votes -- the "corruption" that Jefferson feared would eventually overtake it. The majority of the Federal Budget (apart from interest on the public debt) is taken up by just three programs, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. None of these are Constitutional, all of them are Ponzi Schemes that aim the United States squarely in the direction of Cuba, Greece, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and other irresponsible, tyrannical, and kleptocratic regimes. And the Democrats push constantly to make things worse. Republicans from Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich praise Franklin Roosevelt without the slightest hint that he sowed the seeds of disaster. As it happens, we must go back to Archie Bunker to find someone who got it right.
The other form of the destruction of the Constitution was (2) the interpretation of the Commerce Clause to mean that any economic activity in the country can be regulated by the Federal Government, because it might "affect" interstate commerce. This gave the Government absolute power over all economic activity, all property, all commerce, all money, and, really, all anyone's behavior. Your livelihood and substance are their plaything. Your failure to vote for Democrats "affects" interstate commerce. The Supreme Court has ruled that you can be prohibited from growing food on your own land and eating it yourself. This was a level of audacity unimagined even by Alexander Hamilton, but it was certainly part of the Fascist and Communist Zeitgeist of the 1930's. As such, it is a bomb ready to explode again after socialism has been taught in American schools for many years. The goal once again is Cuba, Greece, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, etc. Or Iran.
Another key evil from President Eisenhower was to betray and allow the demonization of Joseph McCarthy. I have previously treated this issue on this page. Even now, Republicans constantly accuse Democrats of promoting, not Stalinism, as they do, but "McCarthyism." To be brief, at this point, with Joe McCarthy we are left with two telling questions that he asked. Who moved Communist Party member Annie Lee Moss from the lunch room to the code room? Also, who in the Pentagon overruled the commanding officer of Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey -- Major General Kirke B. Lawton -- and reinstated people whom he had removed from their positions as security risks, in some cases actually being Communist Party members? McCarthy never found the answers to these questions. And we still do not know the answers. After the fall of the Soviet Union, we found out how the Soviets had infiltrated Ft. Monmouth, which was a group of sentitive research facilities. They laughed about it. Because of President Eisenhower, McCarthy's investigation into Ft. Monmouth was stopped, and he was removed from the game board. So we still do not know who moved Annie Lee Moss to the code room or who overruled General Lawton -- and also who subsequently destroyed his career for not helping in the Pentagon coverup. The real history of the Cold War, and of the United States, cannot yet be written without these answers -- and sometimes the relevant records and documents have been destroyed, the fate of a fair amount of material involving McCarthy.
Now, we know that Eisenhower, his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and J. Edgar Hoover were genuine and serious Anti-Communists. So what was going on? One possibility is that Eisenhower was simply protecting his old bosses in the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. In other words, Democrats. McCarthy's sin was not that he was wrong, but that he was too loud, too insistent, and too likely to expose too much dirty laundry. It was years, not until the Fall of the Soviet Union, before we knew the extent of Soviet penetration of the United States Government. And obviously we still do not know everything, and perhaps never will.
Three other RINO betrayals are noteworthy. While Susan Collins somewhat redeemed herself with a passionate and reasoned defense of Brett Kavanaugh, Alaska's Senator Lisa Murkowski decided to vote against him. She actually just abstained, out of deference to a pro-Kavanaugh Senator who was going to miss the vote for his daughter's wedding. That's nice. But Murkowski, who had actually lost her own Republican primary, got on the general election ballot anyway, and won with Democrat votes, showed her true nature and character.
To remind ourselves, Kavanaugh was accused by a woman from his old high school, more than 30 years ago, of having sexually assaulted her. Even the accusation may not have quite qualified as a sexual assault, like Bill Clinton's, Apart from that, the problem with this accusation was that the accuser could not say exactly when or where this assault took place, besides being at a party. But it was a party where the accuser could not remember how she got there, or left, or with who. And her story kept changing, apparently evolving, as needed. She cited a friend of hers as also present at the party; but the friend denied knowing anything about it, or knowing Brett Kavanaugh at all. Later the friend said that she had been threatened for not backing up the assault charge. At the same time, the accuser said that this assault had haunted her for life and had prevented her from flying, because of the sense of confinement in an airplane. This was all contradicted by her former boyfriend, who said that she never said anything about a traumatic assault, had flown all over the place, and had kept using his credit card after they broke up, until he threatened her with legal action.
But this was the Democrats in action. An accusation that was dubiously credible on its face, but that at the same time could not easily be disproved, unless Kavanaugh were out of the country during his high school years, was made to order for a last minute smear in the Senate Judiciary Committee. And it allowed the Democrats to trot out their favorite principle, that women don't lie and any accusation should be believed -- thus ignoring years of credible accusations against their beloved Bill Clinton, protected by his enabler, Hillary Clinton. But again, shameless inconsistency and hypocrisy is the stock-in-trade of the Democrats. They even pulled the hapless Jeff Flake into it, by cornering him in an elevator, reserved for Senators and staff alone, with screaming women claiming to be sexual assault victims, and who may have been, but who were also paid political activists who somehow had made their way through Senate security into that elevator (i.e. Democrats opened the way for them). Flake voted to pointlessly drag out the proceedings, although, astonishingly, to his credit, he voted for Kavanaugh.
So Lisa Murkowski fell into line with the dishoensty, mendacity, cynicism, and opportunism of the Democrats. Congratulations.
However, there is a suspicion about Brett Kavanaugh that he may turn out to be of the same stuff as Chief Justice John Roberts -- our next RINO traitor. Roberts, nominated by George W. Bush to be a strict Constitutionalist, has betrayed the American people and the Constitution more than once. So Chief Justice Roberts does not seem to be a person we can rely on either to enforce the Constitution or to ever restore Constitutional Government. As such, he follows a long line of Republican appointees to the Court who have not just decided to write their own laws, according to their own preferences, but have coincidentally written laws that the Democrats wanted. We expect Democrat appointees to be activists, but a dismal number of Republican appointees have acted the same way. We can only regard them as RINO's, and worse.
Finally, we get the betrayal by Mitt Romney. This took an unusual form. In 2018 Romney was elected as a Senator from Utah, replacing the retiring Orrin Hatch, who had been in Washington for decades (and regarded by many as a RINO himself). On the eve of being sworn in, Romney vented his feelings to the Washington Post, one of the principal bastions of the Democrat front "fake news" Media. Simply by speaking there, Romney exposed his desire to ingratiate himself with the Democrat and RINO Establishment. He almost could have said anything and delivered this same implicit message.
Instead, he chose that forum to complain about Donald Trump. This was also to ingratiate himself to the Establishment. Since Trump has done or tried to do everything that Republican voters wanted, something Romney had never been able to do, Romney was in effect saying that Trump's style and personality were more important than getting the Nation going in the right direction, much less responding to the frustrations of Republican voters -- frustrations with people like Mitt Romney, who simply did not know how to fight an effective political campaign against Barack Obama in 2012.
But Romney is a particular kind of RINO, not only a chump, a sucker, for the Democrats, politically passive, clueless, and faithless, but on top of it he's a "Country Club Republican," whose life of wealth and comfort, with a cute Preppy name, leave him with no connection, any more than John Kerry, to people who need to work for a living in more ordinary ways. Donald Trump, for all his faults, and for all his wealth, nevertheless knew how to connect to what the Democrats used to call "working class" Americans -- people that the Democrats now have pretty openly decided to throw overboard, and to demonize as, in Obama's phrase, "bitter clingers," or, in Hillary Clinton's, as a "basket of deplorables." To the old labor organizing question, "Which side are you on?" Romney has now answered that he is not on the side of the people who elected Donald Trump, not on the side of the people who are appalled at the anti-Americanism that has infected the Ruling Class and the schools where they used to think they wanted to send their children, and not on the side of the people who are outraged that rich football players won't stand for the national anthem, and are praised by cultural and political elites for it. Again, for all his faults, Donald Trump is on the side of America and Americans, and this cannot now be said about the Democrats, or about Mitt Romney.
"Jeff" (Jefferson Beauregard) Sessions was a U.S. Senator from Alabama (1997-2017) and then U.S. Attorney General (2017-2018). It is not clear that we might really want to call Sessions a RINO, but he is a unfortunate example of the failings of Republican politicians. The characteristics of Republicans as inarticulate, passive, and timid seem to apply to him strongly.
Thus, while Sessions bravely was early in supporting Donald Trump for President, and was rewarded with the Attorney General position in the Administration, it is not clear that he ever did anything to substantially advance the cause either of justice or of the Republican Party. Things almost immediately began to go wrong. Thus, Trump himself made the mistake of being "nice" and not immediately firing Director James Comey from the FBI when assuming office. George W. Bush had similarly wrong-footed himself, by not immediately firing all the politically appointed U.S. Attorneys, as new Presidents usually do and Democrats always do.
Comey had already demonstrated his partisanship and incompetence by protecting Hillary Clinton from prosecution in the violations of Federal law that she committed by using a private e-mail server for official and classified business while she was Secretary of State. Also, some of Clinton's aids testified to Congress that they didn't know about the server, when later e-mails were revealed that showed them discussing the server between them. Not only were they not prosecuted for perjury, but they were granted immunity and allowed to destroy evidence. Usually, immunity is granted to people who become witnesses against someone else. But immunity in this case was just to protect the guilty, as was the permission to destroy evidence.
The misconduct of Comey was so severe that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote a memo detailing his misconduct and recommending that he be fired. So Donald Trump fired him. A media firestorm ensued, with the claim that Trump only fired Comey to prevent him discovering that Trump himself was an agent of Vladimir Putin's Russia. So Trump allowed that an "independent counsel" be appointed to investigate all this. Rosenstein, who, we recall, had recommended the firing, then appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller, a friend of James Comey, and someone who previously had displayed prosecutorial misconduct, as this "independent counsel." Mueller then filled his team with partisan Democrat prosecutors, some of whom had been guilty, again, of misconduct as prosecutors, and others who were so politically biased that that Mueller himself let them go after a while, although what they had been saying and doing was only revealed later.
There is, of course, much more to this story, including the role of Rob Rosenstein himself in some of the misconduct that had been practiced by the FBI and the Justice Department. This meant that Rosenstein, Mueller, Comey, and many others were all either witnesses or participants in the matters to be investigated, making them all compromised by conflicts of interest, if not the occasional bit of perjury.
But my concern here is with Jeff Sessions. Where was he in all this? Well, missing in action. Since he was part of the Trump Campaign, which was accused of perhaps treasonous "collusion" with Russia, he recused himself from oversight in the matter, leaving the compromised Rod Rosenstein in charge. This made Sessions worse than useless.
Even if that was right or proper, or a good idea, we could ask what else Sessions did with his tenure in the Justice Department. Well, Congress had found Lois Lerner in Contempt of Congress and sent its indictment to the Justice Department. The Obama Justice Department was bound by statute to present this to a grand jury. But it didn't. Now it was the turn of Jeff Sessions, and he did absolutely nothing about it. None of the misconduct of the IRS in targeting conservative, or even Zionist, groups was ever sanctioned or prosecuted in any way -- the sort of misconduct that had been regarded as an impeachable offense back when Richard Nixon had even tried to get the IRS a to pursue his political enemies. Now, the Obama Administration had not just tried, but actually had succeeded in pursuing its political enemies, using the IRS, the FBI, and the CIA. Lois Lerner's e-mails revealed her as furiously hostile to anyone who disagreed with her politics. Thanks to Jeff Sessions, they got away with it. And Lois Lerner retired on her fat Federal pension.
Similarly, the political protection and cover-up afforded to the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Campaign by the Obama Administration was now fair game. It wasn't part of an investigation of Donald Trump being a Russian agent, but Bill Clinton receiving half a million dollars for giving a brief speech in Moscow obviously did not make him a Russian agent, even when Hillary, as Secretary of State, directed control of U.S. urantium deposits to Russian interests. Wow, I guess that had nothing to do with acting in the interests of Russia.
Also, the FBI agents or prosecutors who allowed Clinton aids to destroy evidence where themselves guilty of Obstruction of Justice. Perhaps the immunity of the Clintonistas cannot be set aside -- as it should -- but people in government who are part of a criminal conspiracy are not immune from prosecution. The grants of immunity themselves are criminal acts if their purpose was cover-up and obstruction.
The misconduct of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the State Department in the Clinton matters is something that Sessions could have vigorously pursued. What did he do? Absolutely nothing. He let the Democrats and the Clintons get away scott free with all of it. It has been left to private organizations, like Judicial Watch, to go after the Clintons -- often forcing the release of documents that the Clintons, and Obama Administration, had avoided giving to Congress, which had the right to see them.
So what was Sessions doing all his time in office? Well he did pursue the vicious MS-13 gangsters, which made the Democrats characterize the thugs as just sweet teenagers riding their bikes -- who nevertheless occassionally hack people to death with machetes. This was good. But Sessions then also wanted to ramp up the War on Drugs again, at a time when most people had stopped thinking that marijuana was any more dangerous than alcohol or tobacco -- although the Obama Administration itself had never gotten around to removing marijuana from the "schedule one" of dangerous drugs, which included heroin and cocaine. With Sessions, that was about it, as far as I could tell. And as far as Donald Trump could tell either. Trump complained several times about Sessions being missing in action. But he remained missing. So Trump finally said that he simply didn't have an Attorney General; and after the midterm elections, Trump asked him to leave.
Meanwhile, we learned why it is usually a bad idea to fill up one's Administration with people pulled from political office. Sessions' Senate seat was won by a Democrat, after they found some dirt to smear the Republican candidate, Roy Moore, with -- he had displayed an unhealthy interest in young girls. Whether this was true or not may have been a good question, but it was enough to sink Moore, and meanwhile no discernable benefit had been derived from appointing Sessions as Attorney General.
So was Jeff Sessions a RINO? Perhaps not. Perhaps he was all too much a typical, establishment Republican, with all the political instincts and drive of the Mensheviks. This may even be worse than the RINO's. He seems harmless enough, the typical Republican punching bag for the Democrats -- but Sessions hardly did enough to make him a target of the Democrats. He was just out of the fight. They hardly needed to punch him. He took himself out.
Psalms 2:1 The Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in January 2019. Their agenda quickly became clear, which was to allow the country to be overrun with impoverished foreigners, mainly so that Democrats can steal elections by having aliens vote illegally, shepherded by the Democrats and their anti-American allies.
It is also beginning to look like this influx of "caravans," mainly from Central America, has been created and engineered by either the Democrats or their wealthy, radical supporters -- although it is a striking feature of our times that the citizens of Third World countries, not just in Latin American, but also in Africa and the Middle East, are simply abandoning their countries and fleeing, even at the risk of their lives, to Europe and the United States. This is sometimes because of wars and violence (e.g. in Syria), but it also occurs where that does not seem to be happening.
Of course, the real radicals in the new Democrat Congress, blessed by the Socialist Pater Familias Bernie Sanders, want to destroy, not only America, but industrial civilization -- while their own comfort and privileges are preserved.
That was not even the goal of actual Marxism; but the failure of Marxism to create wealth in any Marxist country, despite its ambitions and conceits, has now motivated the alternative goal of virtuous poverty as "saving the planet." Cuba has been the paradigm of this ideal already achieved, with the help of dictatorship; and the reality of the program is now revealed by Democrat support for the dictatorial chaos in Venezuela, where people are either eating pets and zoo animals or fleeing the country, much of which is currently without power, let alone consumer goods, food, or potable water.
Since economic refugees are from places, whether Honduras or Senegal, kept in poverty by socialist ideology, the irony of the moment is that American radicals, who want to accept all such refugees, at the same time want to apply the same destructive ideology to the United States. At least in Europe, they are more directly confronted with the failures of their own Euro-socialism, although they are so fenced in by their own folly (e.g. France) that they are stuck, paralyzed and dithering.
With an actual invasion of the United States underway, and the Democrats obviously complicit, Donald Trump declared a national emergency, to enable him to build a border wall -- which will not, of course, prevent the fraudulent applications for "asylum" that have become the predominant dishonest means of illegal entry. And a Quisling judge has ruled than even poeple crossing the border illegally must be accepted for "asylum."
As it happens, lying on such an application for asylum, if it is fraudulent, is a crime. In turn, the activists who bring in people and instruct them to lie on an application are complicit in the commission of a crime, and they are also guilty of a criminal conspiracy which organizes the operation. There should be arrests. There should be prosecutions.
The Democrat House has voted, of course, to override Trump's emergency declaration. But now the Senate, supposedly controlled by Republicans, has also voted to override the declaration. Trump can veto these votes, but they have served to flush out the RINO's. These are the Republican traitors to Trump, Republican voters, and America:
These names, the RINO Hall of Shame, need to be well noted and remembered by Republican voters. Collins, Murkowksi, and Romney have already been identified here as RINO's. The others have come to notice in other sources. Rand Paul and Mike Lee may have their own, ideological reasons for their votes, with objections to the emergency power laws that otherwise have stood Constitutional challenge. Marco Rubio already had compromised himself by adherence to Democrat legislation for illegal alien amnesty. In the context of the moment, however, when the Democrats are actively working to destroy America, all these votes are either ill considered to overtly disloyal and destructive to the Nation.
Do the Republicans want to restore Constitutional Government? One wonders. They may be fated to be RINO's; and even Republican voters, who like all Americans want their "benefits" (at the expense of their future), may not know what is at stake. They have themselves been corrupted by the Democrats. Perhaps that is why they keep electing the wrong people.
On December 22, 2022, the U.S. Senate voted to pass a $1.66 trillion "omnibus" spending bill. This had previously been passed by the Democrat controlled House of Representatives, and it was full of spending for Democrat pet projects and other pork. Republicans did not need to vote for this. A "continuing resolution" would have funded the government, without adding a lot of new spending, until January 2023, when the Republicans would take control of the House and send along a more sensible spending bill.
Nevertheless, 18 Republican Sentors voted for the "omnibus" bill, ensuring its passage. This was a "fuck you" vote to the coming Republican House, and to all Republican voters. Among the number of these traitors are familiar RINO's, like Mitt Romney. Mitch McConnell, with some good moves to his credit, nevertheless is often suspiciously in harmony with the Democrats. Others, it is less clear what they thought they were doing; and I am surprised that Tom Cotton went along with this. We mostly did not get explanations.
Further evidence of Republican disloyalty came on March 6, 2023, when Tucker Carlson on Fox News ran examples of security videos from January 6, 2021, released to him by Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. The videos shown contradicted the narrative of the "insurrection" that had been promoted by the Democrats and the Media since 2021. For instance we saw that the "QAon Shaman," Jake Angeli, did not represent any kind of threat, riot, or "attack" on the Capitol -- he was quietly escorted around by the Capitol Police themselves -- or that Senator Josh Hawley was running away in panic from the rioters he had instigated -- he was part of a group of Senators being evacuated by the Capitol Police -- they were all running. Selective editing, without releasing the full video, made it look like he was alone.
Nevertheless, the release of the videos, which may provide exculpatory evidence, illegally withheld by prosecutors, for many people being persecuted for their "mostly peaceful protest" on January 6th, which sent Democrats and the Media into paroxisms, was also criticized by some Republicans. These included Senators Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, and Thom Tillis (North Carolina). To Carlson, this exposed their unity of interest with the Democrats. Indeed, we have just seen McConnell and Romney betraying their voters to vote for the "omnibus" spending bill. Romney has often done nothing but betray Utah voters.
Republican voters know that they are frequently betrayed by their representatives, much more than Democrats are betrayed by theirs. It is hard to know what they can do about it. John Cornyn of Texas has also gone over to the Democrats to erode Second Amendment rights, which Texans in particular hold rather dear. Senators, of course, can be called to account only every six years, when they may be running against Democrat communists. What kind of choice do Republicans have? Occasionally there is justice. The repellent and despicable Lynn Cheney was fortunately bounced out of the House by Wyoming voters in the Republican primary in 2022. But Representatives at least come up for judgment every two years. Sometimes even that is too late, as with Cheney, for the damage they have managed to do.
Part of legislation passed by the Democrats in the 117th Congress, the falsely and absurdly named "Inflation Reduction Act," was to hire 87,000 new IRS agents, allowing for many more audits of tax returns. This was said to give the IRS new power through which they would “only target the rich.” It was going to "make our tax code fairer by cracking down on millionaires, billionaires, and corporations that evade their obligations."
However, anyone following the practices of the IRS -- the "IRS' long and ugly history of targeting low-income Americans" -- would know this was unlikely. The "rich" and large corporations are protected by their own accountants and lawyers. They are hard targets for the IRS. So, as we already know from Congressional testimony, the IRS deliberately targets taxpayers, including small businesses, that cannot afford a lot of accountants and lawyers. They are soft targets for anything the IRS wants to throw at them. And since there are a lot of them, unlike the "rich," the IRS can round up a lot of new money, with assessments that are unfair or fraudulent.
Thus, as we might have expected, the first thing we heard from the IRS about what it was going to do with its new muscle:
So, rather than "millionaires, billionaires, and corporations that evade their obligations," the IRS will go “after waitresses’ tips.” Surprise, surprise. Just what we should have expected. People who work for peanuts, stand on their feet all day, and make some of their best money off the generosity of customers, are now Enemies of the State. As in so much of Democratic Party politics. People who "earn more than $20 in monthly tips" are obviously cheating the Ruling Class. There has got to be "$1.6 billion in unreported tips" out there which poor people are criminally protecting from bloated bureaucrats and the other parasites on Uncle Sugar's gravy train.
Fortunately, despite the crimes of the RINO's, the new Republican House has voted to repeal the budget provisions for the new IRS agents. The Democrats in the Senate may stand up for their thieving, predatory government, but maybe the Republicans will learn some hardball, for a change, and demand this provision.
The Ruling Class, or the Real One Percent
The Practical Rules of Bureaucracy
Six Kinds of United States Paper Currency
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky," 1872 There is little doubt that the Democrats have sewn-up the anti-American and the "blame America first" vote, and that, as Ann Coulter has said, they have made the "treason lobby" feel at home. They should, of course, be ashamed of this; and since they are not, we should realize that this says a lot about them. Fawning visits to the Castros by Democrat politicians, culminating in Obama's "normalization" of relations with Cuba, only provide more evidence. Liberal guilt grows into liberal self-hatred, and this grows into the hatred of America that is now part of school curricula all over the country. The United States may become the first country in history to destroy itself over lies told about it by its own elites, embodied in a political party, the Democrats, who actually have this purpose.
Τηλεπατητικός (Telepateticus) That government of the government, by the government, for the government, shall not perish from the earth.
Democratic Party, effective motto and agenda Genesis 25:29-34, color added; the whole of Democrat politics A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) The Democrats supported and defended slavery. They created, supported, and defended Segregation. And they created, support, and defend the Welfare State. Frankly, I don't see much difference.
Ἐγκλινοβάραγγος (Enklinobarangus) The essence of modern Democratic progressivism is: "You will participate in what we have created for you, and you will comply with the law's demands"...
American progressivism is politics by cramdown. Daniel Henninger, "Progressive Government Fails," The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, October 31, 2013, A13 Elizabeth Warren (CP-MA), transcribed from video, house party campaign appearance, Andover, MA, August, 2011 [note], ἀνάξιος This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in -- you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money -- it would not have passed... Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass... Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.
Jonathan Gruber, Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, $400,000 consultant on the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), speaking at the 2013 Annual Health Economists’ Conference (AHEC), October 17-18, 2013, University of Pennsylvania, color added But our bill brings down rates. I don't know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT's analysis of what the comparison is to the status quo, versus what will happen in our bill for those who seek insurance within the exchange. And our bill takes down those costs, even from now, and much less preventing the upward spiral. [5 November 2009, color added]...
So I don't know who he is. He didn't help write our bill. [speaking of Jonathan Gruber, 13 November 2014, color added] Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader, denying knowledge of the embarrassing Jonathan Gruber, whom she cited as a supporter in 2009, ἀνάξιος In the Corona Virus epidemic of 2020, Democrat authorities in many American communities have been releasing criminals from prison and arresting Christians, having prohibited people from attending church. This is heaven for them. They have always wanted to do this anyway.
Τηλεπατητικός (Telepateticus)
The Democrats are in a rage for socialism [note]. The degree of their frenzy seems to be owed in equal parts to (1) a level of self-righteousness that by comparison would make Christian fundamentalists look like libertines ready for the Playboy Mansion, and (2) simple and pure lust for power. Since the latter is a moral failing that Democrats like to charge their opponents with, part of their rage looks like a psychological defensiveness that probably reflects their sense of their own bad faith and dishonesty, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. Bad faith is evident, for instance, in the way they carefully avoid admitting that they are socialists. They know that people are aware of the meaning of socialism -- the ownership and control of everything by the government -- and that Americans especially have an immediate and visceral antipathy to that. Democrats think that if they talk about freedom (while promising free stuff) while in fact creating tyranny, they will be able to deceive enough people to get away with it. They have, indeed, been doing rather well with that strategy. And they have learned that it is possible to lie in the face of overwhelming evidence and still avoid exposure.
"I did. I saw them on TV," she said. But Barney Frank did not budge.
Thomas Sowell, "Is Barney frank? In a class by himself," 19 October 2010, boldface added After outright transparent lies, we get the strategy of statements that are simply preposterous, but are presented in all seriousness and are apparently swallowed by loyalists and believers. A good example we see in the Wall Street Journal:
The preposterous thing here is that any major Democrats, especially "Chucky" Schumer (reelected in 2010), worry in the least about balancing the budget. The only reason they ever complained about Republican spending or deficits is that they wanted to sucker people into putting them in power so they can have even greater spending and deficits. The Democrat explanation for all their failed programs is always that they didn't spend enough -- the programs were not "fully funded." Since their spending will never make their programs successful, they will, by necessity, always need greater spending. If they ever worry about paying for this, they only think about raising taxes. Indeed, when it was pointed out to Barack Obama by a reporter that revenue could be increased by cutting taxing, candidate Obama responded that "fairness" was more important than revenue. Thus, although the stock Democrat response is to deny that cutting taxes increases revenue (although one of the best examples of increased revenue is when Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, did it), Obama incautiously revealed, as he has done more than once, his real agenda -- attack wealth, attack capital, regardless of the damage it may do to all. Revenues may fall, unemployment may soar, the Nation may be impoverished; but the government, and the self-righteous Left, will prosper.
Of course, when the Soviet Union owned everything in the country, there was no private economy to tax, and the economy still didn't work, Stalin decided it was time to kill people -- "wreckers" -- because sabotoge was the only explanation he could come up with for continued failure. The Democrats are not at that point....yet.
A favorite rhetorical strategy of the Democrats, as with the mortgage bubble, is to introduce a policy or program and then, when it goes bad, act as though they had never done anything and/or that their program has nothing to do with what went wrong. This strategy goes back to the Depression, when the recession created by the collapse of the Stock Market, which was recovering by 1930 (unemployment was back down to 6%), was turned into a Depression by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill and then when the Federal Reserve allowed the banking system to collapse. This was actually the fault of Herbert Hoover and the directors of the Federal Reserve System. However, the Democrats wanted to blame it on "speculators" and on the banks themselves. Thus, when FDR came to power, what was wrong was misdiagnosed and policies were implemented, usually following in Hoover's footsteps (without any credit to Hoover, except privately), that prolonged the Depression through the rest of the decade. This failure is what the Democrats have never wanted to admit, and still will not admit. Roosevelt kept attacking business and finance until he wanted to put the country on a war footing and needed industry to manufacture war materiel. Then the anti-business rhetoric stopped and the crippling policies moderated.
In the 2008-2009 collapse of the housing mortgage bubble, we get the same attacks on "speculators," finance, and banks, with calls for greater regulation of the credit and banking markets. We even see a version of this in Playboy magazine, in the course of a smear of the "conservative underground":
What the Democrats (and Mr. Frank) leave out is that banks, far from being left "to their own devices" by deregulation, were threatened by regulators (and Democrats) that if they did not make loans to underqualified, largely minority, borrowers, they would be subject to regulatory and legal sanctions.
Ed Crane, President, CATO Institute, May 3, 2010 Another area where Democrat responsibility has been deflected is in medical care. Medicare (for the old) and Medicaid (for the poor) were begun by Lyndon Johnson, with very unrealistic expectations about their cost. Of course, in Basic Economics, one learns that demand explodes for anything desirable that is offered for free. So now the programs are quickly headed for bankruptcy, even as they now only reimburse part of recipients' medical expenses (for which they need "medi-gap" insurance), while also limiting the compensation that physicians will receive for what they do -- with the result that some physicians will not treat Medicare or Medicaid patients. In Canada, where some provinces (Quebec) have simply capped the income of physicians, they often take the rest of the year off once they have hit the cap. Thus, for the most obvious economic reasons, Medicare and Medicaid can limit their costs only by price fixing -- an economic practice that then necessarily produces shortages (as, indeed, in Canada). But now enter the Modern Democrat, Barack Obama, whose argument for socialized, government run medicine is that it will reduce costs! Only in a country with a general ignorance of economics and history (the fruit of Democrat "education") could anyone actually get away with this. Indeed, I think most Americans already know that government ends up doing everything in the most wasteful and inefficient way, thanks to things like the dynamics of bureaucracies. People encounter this all too often in their own dealings with the government. The idea is simply preposterous, even if one was not aware of the dismal experience with Medicare.
A generalized use of this "deflect the blame" strategy may be seen in an interview with Playboy magazine by the Communist Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present) shortly before his death. With images of decaying Rust Belt factories, Zinn asserted that Capitalism cannot maintain employment. This is rich. Democrats and labor unions, with obvious hostility, drive industries out of whole cities and States and then lament that "Capitalism" has failed to provide employment. No. A good example is that the laissez faire Capitalism of 1906 delivered 1.7% unemployment, the very year that Upton Sinclair's The Jungle portrayed hopeless hordes of the unemployed waiting for jobs at the meatpackers in Chicago. The real hopeless hordes of the unemployed are now in France, or Michigan, where socialism has reigned for decades. In 2008, Texas created more jobs than the whole rest of the United States put together. With no personal income tax, Texas is not famous for economically restrictive government. Thus, Texas grows, while Michigan, New York, and California shrink. The simple abandonment of large parts of Michigan cities like Detroit has been in the news lately. As we should expect, Zinn was an (Communist) ideologue who was simply blind to any actual facts or falsifying evidence.
As the public has become alarmed about the Administration's intentions in the summer of 2009, and citizens have expressed outrage at "Town Meetings" called by Congressmen in their home districts, the response of Democrats has been curious. Their charge is that the angry citizens have been organized and planted by Republicans and Right Wing -- even Neo-Nazi -- groups. The irony and hypocrisy of this is stunning, although of a piece with the brazen arrogance of the Democrats. This is a President, after all, who is proud to have begun his career as a "Community Organizer," which means doing exactly what the Democrats are accusing the Ring Wing of doing now. Rush Limbaugh himself responded to these first accusations by saying that, even if the charges were true (which they weren't), "It's about damn time." The Democrats are the masters of the rent-a-mob, calling out often disruptive and violent protesters from organizations like the SEIU (the Service Employees International Union) and ACORN (the "Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now," which once asked to be exempt from minimum wage laws because, duh, they wanted to hire more people than they would be able to otherwise). The conceit of the Democrats is always that their protestors, whom Obama has now explicitly called to mobilize and attend these public meetings (when Democrat politicians will still actually hold them), show the spontaneous Uprising of the People, while their opponents can only be paid mercenaries (as with Barbara Boxer charging that the anti-socialism protestors were "too well dressed" -- obviously suits from the drug companies or insurance companies). Now we hear that Union members ("goons"? "thugs"?) have been threatening and strong-arming citizens who show up at the public fora. Democrats simply cannot believe, or don't care, that their promotion of socialism will evoke a genuine visceral and spontaneous reaction from Americans. They are also absurdly and hypocritically shocked and outraged that people should portray Obama or the Democrats as Nazis or Fascists ("We can't allow this incivil discourse!"), when we heard no such cautions for all the years that George W. Bush was portrayed as a Fascist, Nazi, or Adolf Hitler himself. The grotesque conceit seems be that, well, smearing Bush was true, while labeling Obama the same way is an intolerable misrepresentation, outside reasonable political speech! [note]
What has happened to the Democrats is that they have become the Party of Government, where all of their purposes are to promote the interests of Government, as opposed to the interests of citizens. You can spot this when Democrats say "We are the government," meaning that the interests of government and citizens cannot possibly diverge. But then we see the divergence in action when Democrat policy protects and expands the power and privileges of politicians, in the first place (hence their opposition to term limits, usually quite popular with voters), of public employees (hence the support of Public Employee and Teachers Unions for the Democrats), and of people dependent on the government -- hence Democrat support for welfare, protectionism, corporate welfare, and the other spawn of rent seeking (e.g. the Trial Lawyers). Democrats want us to think that only Republicans promote corporate welfare, but we have recently seen their participation in that form of corruption in the corporate bailouts of 2009 -- and they have all but institutionalized corporate welfare for the corn lobby in subsidies and mandates for ethanol (e.g. the Archer Daniels Midland Company). The logical goal of Democrat politics would be to put all business under the control of the government, a goal now achieved with General Motors, and to render all citizens into helpless peons who receive all goods and favors from politicians. Political enemies thus can be immediately deprived of jobs, housing, medical care, etc., as in the Soviet Union.
This danger was foreseen by John Locke:
"A distinct interest" is now the whole story of Democrat politics. It is thus not surprising that one of the brainstorms of Democrat politicians is the "full time" legislature. This was accomplished in California under Democrat Party boss Jesse Unruh (d.1987). The idea was to create a "professional" body of law-makers, who would then, of course, be all the better and wiser for it. Now, of course, California is close to financial collapse, hemorrhaging jobs and businesses, while Texas, where the legislature only meets for five months every two years, has a budget surplus, with more jobs created there in 2008 than in the whole rest of the country put together. Texas, in short, is America, while California is a France wanna-be.
After the lessons of history and economics, it is now impossible to be a socialist except out of ignorance or dishonesty. Deception, dissimulation, and dishonesty have been the bedrock of leftist politics for decades. If Communists in the '40's and '50's had publicly admitted they were Communists, all the mythology of "red-baiting" and "witch hunts" would have evaporated. If Alger Hiss had admitted he was spying for the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, decades of anti-anti-Communist rhetoric never could have happened. If Barack Obama admitted that he wants a "single payer" government medical system, and that the "reform" of the Democrats is designed to drive insurance companies out of the medical insurance business, the debate over "reform" would be a lot clearer. Obama denies this is what he wants, but then, like Barney Frank, he is on audio and video telling audiences not along ago that this is exactly what he wants and intends to do. Thus, it is not enough for the Democrats to be dishonest. They must rely on the ignorance of the public to get away with it.
On the other hand, ignorance, unfortunately, is now the stock-in-trade of American education, at all levels -- as the Democrats and the leftist allies of the Democrats have seized the educational institutions -- from the worthless Schools of Education, to the accreditation agencies, to the professional societies (the Modern Language Association, the MLA, may be the worst), to the administrations and faculty of the schools themselves. The higher the education, the purer the Marxism and Leninism, although leftist anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism infuse all levels of education. One way this could happen is that most college students who go into education major in "education" rather than in any real disciplines. What they pick up otherwise is from the humanities, rather than the sciences, and they soon discover that courses, for instance, in English departments have little to do with literature and language and much to do, like Sociology and now History departments, with political propaganda.
It usually doesn't matter how good the Economics department in a college may be, students get their economics in the form of "English Department Marxism," from professors who have no real education in economics, and usually even no rigorous philosophical education in Marxism (but may be active in the MLA). They get it all secondhand from "Theory," a cheap pastiche of Marx, Nietzsche, deconstruction, and other nihilistic knock-offs. Marx and Nietzsche, although sharing few values in common, nevertheless make a heady combined brew where everything is analyzed and explained in terms of power. There is no truth, knowledge, goodness, etc., simply power -- as Lord Voldemort says, "There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it" [Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling, Scholastic Inc., 1999, p.291]. The goal of leftist and Democrat politics then is to gain power by any means necessary.
As "tenured radicals" have come to dominate academia, the press, and the intelligentsia, a major conceit of leftist and Democrat politics is how smart they all are. The Democrats do believe that there are some smart Republicans, and their reaction makes it easy to detect such belief. Since the Democrats don't believe that Presidents like Ronald Reagan or the Bushes are smart, they suspect that there is some demonic and Svengali-like figure in the background pulling the strings. We learn of this from the vitriol of Democrat attacks. Actually, the people that the Democrats identify and attack often are Republican strategists who have hard-ball political skills that may be the equal of the Democrats. Of course, this is what makes them particularly threatening and motivates the Democrats, not just to identify and attack them, but to hope to eliminate them through smear campaigns or association with some kind of wrong doing. A good example of their approach began with Lee Atwater (d.1991), an advisor to Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In fact, Atwater's premature and sudden death from cancer may have removed Bush the Elder's anchor to political reality. Compromising with the Democrats and breaking his "no new taxes" pledge cost Bush his reelection, despite the great spike in his popularity over the successul liberation of Kuwait. It is inconceivable that Atwater would not have warned Bush away from his follies. George W. Bush, the Younger, then consistently benefited from the advice of Karl Rove. Guiding Bush through election and successful re-election, Rove earned an unprecedently level of spite and hatred from the Democrats. They also had reason to hope that they could entangle him in the bogus Valerie Plame affair. Although the Special Prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, determined quite early that no laws had been broken, he continued his investigation anyway. Since in this case, as in others, the investigation itself can generate offenses, if the testimony of anyone can be construed to involve lies (it is an offense to lie to Federal agents, whether one is under oath or not), one suspects that Fitzgerald maliciously continued on in the hope of bagging someone with such a complaint. Hopes were high among Democrats that Fitzgerald could snag Rove, and Rove worried about that himself. However, Fitzgerald could only make a case against another Bush adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Libby was actually tried and convicted over conflicting testimony about conversations that no one at the time would have had any reason to remember. Bush then commuted his sentence but didn't pardon him, leaving Libby with a felony conviction. This was no tribute to Bush's courage. Rove meanwhile had moved over to Fox News, making him a public figure the way he had not been previously. As it happened, neither the Democrats nor the public noticed any sensible political adviser behind John McCain's clumsy campaign of 2008.
On January 5th, 2010, we got a good example of shamelessly obvious falsehoods, again, from the Democrats. CSPAN had taken the unusual step of asking that the conference committee negotiations over the House and the Senate "Health Care" bills be broadcast. Meanwhile, most academic leftists are unable to write intelligible sentences. They load them with a specialized jargon, in the tradition of Hegel and Marx, in a way that provides a substitute for any real thought, and they expect people to regard this as profound. Usually the public never hears examples of it, which is fine, since academics only need to impress other academics. But if one reads this stuff with the understanding that it is all about the promotion of naked power, its mysteries usually become obvious enough.
Schools for such acts are, indeed, American universities, where theft, vandalism, disruptions, and even assaults are generally tolerated by administrators, as long as the targets are conservatives or libertarians. Far more outrage is expressed over outrages by the Right, which not uncommonly turn out to have been faked by Leftist radicals, just so that La Raza, etc., can have something to scream "racism" about.
Τηλεπατητικός (Telepateticus)
And when it comes to power, the Democrats know their hardball. This is where, to be sure, they make the Republicans (except the occasional Atwater and Rove) look stupid. Everyone knows about Democrat political machines, whether historically in New York or Kansas City, or with a long tradition in Chicago; and many people know about the Democrats stealing elections, including the 1960 election, where Illinois and Texas went for John Kennedy just because Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, and Duval County, Texas, cooked up enough votes to swing the States. (Richard M. Daley, J's son, has been Mayor of Chicago since 1989.) What is different now is the open and shameless way in which the Democrats have learned to do it. As with Barney Frank on the mortgage collapse, they've discovered that the more open and outrageous the lie, the better the chance they may have of brazening it out. It is an infantile attitude, but they have discovered its usefulness. This may have started in 2000. The election was close, and the outcome would be determined by Florida, where the vote itself was very close. The strategy was adopted of successive recounts. With each recount more Republican votes could be disqualified and more Democratic votes "discovered." This was done so openly that in one news report, the vote counter held up a ballot that had no vote for President and said it would be counted as a Democrat vote because the other votes were for Democrats. There was a furor that the computer card punch ballots were unfair because people didn't check whether the "chad," the small piece punched out, had actually come out and detached. The implication seemed to be that the Democrat voters, being stupider (the opposite of the usual conceit), were more strongly affected by this. The result, however, was that vote counters could make subjective judgments about votes that, obviously, the vote counting machines would not have done.
As the Florida Supreme Court was going to allow endless recounting in the whole State, contrary to all State and Federal law, the United States Supreme Court stepped in and stopped the farce. The Democrats, having brazened out their own attempt to steal the election, then began screaming that the Republicans had stolen the election. This went on for years -- even until today. Meanwhile, the Democrats have perfected their strategy and have now stolen two major elections. In 2004 the Republican Dino Rossi won the Governor's race in Washington State by a small margin. The Democrats then began endless recounts, especially in urban districts with Democrat officials, until the Democrat, Christine Gregoire, moved ahead and could be proclaimed the winner.
The next case would be of greater national significance. In 2008, Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman won his race by 725 votes. After eight months of recounts and challenges, Democrat comedian Al Franken ("Stuart Smalley") was credited with a victory by 312 votes. Perhaps an all too typical Republican (i.e. a chump), Coleman, instead of appealing to Federal Courts, conceded defeat, as Richard Nixon had in 1960. The result was firm Democrat control of the United States Senate, enabling them to pass national socialist medicine, or whatever else they want, and override all opposition -- until Ted Kennedy died and Republican Scott Brown won the Senate race for a replacement, to the astonishment of the Nation, in January 2010. Massa-clue-less voters had suddenly wised up.
It is remarkable to me that people in a democracy would want to steal elections, but I have no doubt that the Democrats are willing to do this, as historically they often have. Indeed, since 2000, they have learned that it is possible to openly steal an election, while accusing the Republicans of doing it. This is no less brazen than Barney Frank denying that he made statements that he has been shown making on video. Well, he got reelected in 2010, so not all of Massachusetts has turned over a new leaf.
Sometimes self-righteousness and lust for power may not be enough to explain this sort of thing. Or, since the most radical Democrats and their supporters are clearly Communists, it is obvious that they have no respect for elections, majorities, legality, democracy, free speech, or anything else that would stand in their way. But I am also perfectly willing to consider the possibility that Supernatural Evil is involved, as in the N.I.C.E. ("National Institute for Coordinated Experiments") institution of C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength [1945]. Much of what the Democrats do looks like N.I.C.E., in both its rhetoric and its police state reality [note]. If I were a Christian, and if I thought that abortion or homosexuality were morally wrong, I think it would be hard not be believe that Satan, as in Lewis' novel, was personally behind Democrat politics. The mix of lies, seduction, death, sterility, and corruption seems Satanic in its combination of fair face and vicious substance, hedonism and rot, glowing rhetoric and iron fist. As it is, self-righteousness and lust for power will have to suffice, and Thomas Jefferson understood the dynamic well enough:
Unfortunately, there is no modern politician with the wisdom of Jefferson, the wolves are among us, and the teeth and claws are in us. These are the Democrats, supposedly the heirs of Jefferson's own Party. The result is that I don't know where the American people can turn. The Democrats are liable to get their way just because they are the most ruthless and shameless in the mix. Even if they drag down the economy into another Depression, they may still get away with it. FDR did, and we know that Obama is expected to provide a New New Deal. So we may be entering a very long night of decline, corruption, decay, and tyranny in American history. We will really know it when the Democrats commission a monument to Fidel Castro in Washington. I am sure, after the Congressional (Democrat) Black Caucus went to Cuba to praise and adore Castro early in 2009, and Representative Diane Watson recently made the statements below, that they already want to do it.
And And you know, the Cuban revolution that kicked out the wealthy, Che Guevara did that, and then, after they took over, they went out among the population to find someone who could lead this new nation, and they found... well, just leave it there [laughs], an attorney by the name of Fidel Castro... [Democrat Member of Congress Diane Watson, 27 August 2009] Since what Castro "put in place" in Cuba is a totalitarian police state, one properly wonders about the nature of Watson's political values. Also, by the way, Castro was not some lawyer minding his own business who was then "found" by the "Cuban revolution" to lead it. He was the leader already. Most of the comment here on the 2012 election and the behavior of the Democrats is in regard to the Republicans and their own behavior. However, there was one incident that all by itself may be taken as characteristic of the Democratic Party, its mentality, and its conduct.
When this became public, Oren released a statment saying, "I categorically deny that I ever characterized Republican policies as harmful to Israel." Wasserman Schultz then responded that she had said nothing of the sort and was "deliberately" misquoted by a "Republican newspaper." Unfortunately for Wasserman Schultz, the reporter of the story, Washington Examiner columnist Philip Klein, had her statements on audio tape. He had not misquoted her, and she had said exactly what she had been reported as saying.
Thus, Wasseman Schultz was exposed in a double lie, first to misrepresent the Israeli Ambassador, and then to falsely deny that she had perpetrated that misrepresentation.
The lesson here is what happened next. Nothing. Wasserman Schultz did not resign in disgrace. She did not apologize. No Democrat complained. She remained the DNC Chair. Being caught in a barefaced double lie evidently meant nothing, and the accepted Democrat response for all involved was to shamelessly and brazenly ignore the whole business. The Democrats, both professionals and constituents, are simply not embarrassed by such lies. One wonders if Democrat voters (the "low information" voters) even pay enough attention to events to know about it all.
This may not be as absurd as Barney Frank denying he said things that he had just been shown saying on video. But it is all of a piece. It does not matter what the truth is. Democrats can just say anything, however mendacious, outrageous, or demonstrably false, and they can and do expect to get away with it. One wonders if they derive confidence from the "post-modern" epistemology that there is no truth, only power. The more brazen the lie, and the more trival the consequences, the more effectively is Democrat political power demonstrated -- as Wasserman Schultz now says that, despite Obama's famous "you can keep your plan" lie, nothing Obama ever said was a lie. The proper "truth" is simply whatever will discredit and defeat the Republicans. Not surprisingly, it is a totalitarian and Orwellian mentality.
The continuation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the Chair of the Democratic National Committee meant that the Party and all its leadership were comfortable with the exemplary leadership of a shameless, pathological liar, a person evidently without honor or conscience, honesty or sincerity. Again anyone might be forgiven if the thought crossed their mind that this would be most pleasing to the Father of Lies, as a demonstration that the work of evil at some point does not even need to conceal the effective use of open lies as a means of conquest. The Democrats are well past that point, and their Lord Satan would be proud.
Wasserman Schultz eventually was forced out as DNC Chair, when it was discovered that she had used her position to sabotage one Democrat candidate and help another. That was too much. It had nothing to do with lying, just betrayal. You can't betray Democrats, after all. Nevertheless, she has been reelected to Congress again and again, and continues to lie and poison American politics. When Satan some day collects her soul, there will not be enough "gnashing of teeth" to make up for all of this.
Clinton had her own particular negatives. While Secretary of State, she set up her own private e-mail server at her home in New York, and used it for official business, which violated Federal Law about official records. When this became known, she made a show of turning over copies of all her e-mails, except for thousands that she had deleted as "personal," including ones she said were between her and her husband, Bill, who then helpfully revealed that he doesn't use e-mail. Since e-mails she had sent were kept by others, a steady stream of them kept turning up that were official business, and even secret, but that apparently were among the ones that had been deleted. She later explained her failure to observe the security and records laws upon which she had been instructed as the result of the concussion she had suffered in a fall. This kind of thing, and a string of obvious, transparent lies about the whole buisness did not add to her appeal.
The opposition to Clinton in the Democrat primaries was farcical. Two governors, with nothing from the performance of their States to boast about -- one being Maryland (Martin O'Malley), which recently had riots in Baltimore -- were entirely forgetable; and Lincoln Chafee even ran with the Quixotic promise to impose the metric system. On the other hand, it looked like a serious challenge came from Senator Bernie Sanders [ἀνάξιος], a Brooklyn-accented New Yorker who somehow has ended up with a political career in Vermont. Sanders kept saying that he was a "democratic socialist," which began to sound like "he protesteth too much," considering his history of love, esteem, and visits to Sanders benefited from the ignorant enthusiasm of the young and the clueless, i.e. young people who have been the victims of the farce of American "education" and older people who have remained fools for many years, with "clueless" as a category that overlaps or encompasses both groups. Sanders would have posed a real threat except that the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which was supposed to be neutral in such contests, stacked the deck, in great measure by lining up unelected, Party-loyalist Convention delegate hacks who would vote for Clinton. That the fix was in was revealed when leaked or hacked e-mails exposed the doings of the execrable Party Chair, our old friend Debbie Wasserman Schultz [ἀνάξιος], who was finally forced to resign, not over her many, many lies and idiocies, but for obviously being in the tank for Clinton. Although subsequently shouted down by delegates from her own Florida delegation, she was reelected to her seat in 2016, thanks to the legions of zombie Democrat voters in her District.
The exposure of this scandal was part of the larger embarrassments that followed from the publication of the DNC e-mails. Part of the revelations, as the State Department also officially released batches of Clinton's e-mails that had been required by Freedom of Information Act requests and court orders, involved more about the Benghazi scandal. This was right before the 2012 Presidential Election, and the concern was apparently that such a terrorist attack would contradict what President Obama had been saying, that the Terrorist were on the run and that "the tide of war is receding." It would be more than awkward to admit that, at the moment, the Terrorists were doing rather well, with growing outposts of the Jihad in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, and elsewhere. The fiasco of ISIS invading Iraq and seizing Mosul was in the future. But the Democrats needn't have worried. Hurricane Sandy and a diffident Republican candidate, Mit Romney, helped Obama get reelected. Later, when Clinton was being questioned before Congress about Benghazi, she exclaimed "What difference does it make?" In other words, we don't need to trace out the web of neglect, incompetence, and lies surrounding the scandal because, I suppose, they're all already dead. But there are still unanswered questions. American forces were never sent to the rescue, and there is some dispute about whether a rescue was authorized or not, and if so, who dropped the ball. "What difference does it make?" This all allows the guilty to hide and avoid accountability.
The DNC revelations fuel continuing political activity. Were the e-mails leaked or hacked? Wikileaks, which published them, said they were leaked, and an employee who is now suspected of perhaps being the leaker was soon mysteriously killed. The mainsteam press displays little interest in this. The people really appeasing the Russians, however, had been the Obama Administration all along; and the people really in bed with the Russians, in terms of deals and big money, were no less than Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and their Clinton Family Foundation. Nevertheless, the Democrats still today are pushing the idea that Putin stole the election for Donald Trump. How he did that is unclear, since the only remotely credible charge made is that he hacked the DNC and released all these embarrassing but true e-mails. Indeed, a common theme of Democrat discourse is that Trump is indeed somehow "illegitimate," although it is not clear what their real argument is there. They don't need to like the Electoral College -- a lot of people don't -- but they can hardly hope that a Constitutional Amendment would abolish the College when it would need to be passed by the very States whose power and influence depend, to a great extent, on the leverage that the College gives them. The Democrats did start an unprecedented campaign of trying to getting Electors pledged to Trump to vote against him, just on the grounds that, well, they don't like him. One nut from Texas, and one other elector, went along with this, although it turned out that more Hillary Electors voted against her than Trump Electors did against him. Then, as the votes of the Electors were being counted in the House of Representatives, some Democrat Congressmen tried to protest; but the rules were that no protest could even be entertained without the concurrence of a Senator from the relevant State. That didn't happen.
So, after open attempts to subvert the electoral system failed, a lot of the freight of "illegitimacy" seems to be carried by charges that Trump and his friends and supporters are all racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, white "supremacists," etc. Of course, many people voted for Trump because they are tired of hearing smears like that involving a litany of Leftist political crimes -- often directed at them just for being white, Christians, male, etc., or for just wanting the immigration laws, which the Democrats left in place when they controlled Congress (2009-2011), enforced. The behavior of the Left on college campuses, where conservatives and others are "disinvited," shouted down, An observer might wonder how the Left could be so stupid. Why not a banner, "America Is Already Great"? But no. We all know that America, capitalism, Christianity, men, and white people are evil; and only a real Revolution is going to change that. The protestors after Trump's election seemed to think they could make that happen, and they apparently didn't understand that signs saying "This Is What Democracy Looks Like" were profoundly ironic, or just plain oxymoronic. No, the election, which you lost, was democracy. A demonstration or a riot is mob rule or anarchy. The actual rioting Anarchists, such as were arrested in Washington but tolerated in Berkeley, were more honest.
The Democrats now are openly anti-American. Their goal is the destruction of America and its reduction to a Cuban police state. This is somewhat disguised by many Democrat politicians. Nancy Pelosi actually recited the Pledge of Allegiance in the well of the House of Representatives, something a lot of Democrats would not be caught dead doing -- certainly if it includes "under God." Pelosi's act was part of the fraudulent impeachment of Donald Trump, when Democrats tried to wrap themselves in the flag and make it look like they actually cared about America, the rule of law, the American People, or anything else.
But the truth of their hatred of America cannot be concealed. It has been building for years, anyway. But the poison at the universities, long familiar, now spills out into the body politic. A clear sign of this was the "1619 Project" of the New York Times, which claimed that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery. This was preposterous and dishonest. Its only toe in reality was the fact that in 1772 slavery was effectively abolished in England by case law, in Somerset v. Stewart. Since there was no slave law in the English Common Law, slave owners had no grounds to hold anyone against their will. However, this had no legal consequences beyond England; and Britain did not abolish slavery anywhere else until 1833. The school districts that have now adopted the "1619 Project" as part of their curriculum simply expose their participation in the anti-Americanism of much of American "education." It is a sad and deadly legacy for our Nation.
In America, if the Revolution was fought for slavery, it is hard to understand why Jefferson would have written a condemnation the slave trade into the Declaration of Independence, why seven of the Thirteen Colonies had abolished or would abolish slavery in short order, and why the Constitution scrupled to avoid the word "slave" altogether. What then became the slave States (Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) were able to demand compromises; and Jefferson's condemnation was cut from the Declaration; but the Constitution did allow that the slave trade could be abolished by 1808, which is when President Jefferson, with Britain, did so. This was not well received by African rulers, whose business was slaving; and Britain embarked on years of naval patrols to suppress the trade. Since Brazil didn't abolish slavery until 1888, the Atlantic slave trade continued to be a problem. Afterwards, Britain could focus its attention on the Indian Ocean, where Zanzibar was a center of the Arab trade until occupied by Britain in 1890.
The only reason the "1619 Project" exists is to smear and discredit the United States of America, in the interest of promoting a socialist and totalitarian, i.e. communist, state. Everything the Left doesn't like it calls "racism," whether it has anything to do with racism or not, and this is now the foundation of all Democrat politics. It often sounds like racism is the only issue that exists, and that if somehow racism could be eliminated, then all other evils, like poverty, would evaporate. At the same time, of course, telling little fourth grade white kids that they are racists because of their race is itself the purest form of racism. There is an enthusiastic audience for that. "Liberal" guilt becomes race guilt and racial self-hatred. So it is often white "liberal" parents who are telling their fourth grade kids that they are racists. This is a psychiatric as much as a political problem.
But there is so much more. Democrat anti-Americanism means that Democrat politicians no longer represent law-abiding Americans. Their constituency is criminals and foreigners, especially foreigners in the country illegally, and especially foreign criminals and gansters in the country illegally. Borders, after all, are "racist," and the Democrat program is to abolish the borders of America along with all immigration law. Enlightened countries like Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, of course, have no borders and just allow people to come and go freely. Oh. They don't. Never mind.
The demands of "Black Lives Matter" are to "defund" and so abolish the police, and to abolish prisons and the criminal justice system. This is because the only crime in black neighborhoods is the police carrying our their genocide against black people, while all black people in prison are victims of the racist criminal justice system. In 2020, New York State early on eliminated bail requirements for many crimes, and its response to the coronavirtus epidemic was to release prisoners so they wouldn't catch the virus in prison. This became the norm in much of the country. Those benefiting from bail "reform" and prisoner release were supposed to be non-violent defendants, but there was little enforcement of this requirement. One result was that crime began to go up, even though most people were supposed to be in "lockdown" and so, presumably, safely shut away from criminals.
This got kicked into overdrive after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This led to demonstrations that quickly became riots, arson, and looting. Local businesses have always been the target of rioters, even when they obviously have nothing to do with whatever the police have been doing. But "Black Lives Matter" activists actually celebrated arson and looting as direct attacks on guilty white people. That racism again. And even when the businesses might be owned by minorities and immigrants, including black people. No matter. But we knew already that black lives actually did not matter to "Black Lives Matter," or the movement would have shown some concern, ever, about the toll of crime and murder on black people. The weekly and even daily gang slaughter on the South Side of Chicago occasions no protests; and I begin to wonder if its toleration by the City of Chicago is intentional.
Which leads to the next thing. If the police are "defunded," then gangs will rule. This is how the regime is enforced in Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. Also, it is like the Red Guards during the "Cultural Revolution" in China. Democrats openly want a "Cultural Revolution" and the practice of their supporters of silencing and physically attacking opposition is exactly what the Red Guards did. We also begin to see the Maoist "struggle session" (pīdòu dàhuì), where heretics and ideological deviants are bullied, humilated, and beaten, sometimes even to death. This goes well with the self-hatred of "liberal" whites, who beg to get down on their knees, confess their racial sin, and be humiliated. There is a kind of sick sado-masochistic aspect to this. "Liberal" whites seem to be attracted to some kind of sex slavery. Since Lefist metaphysics involves the Hegelian principle of the unreality of the individual, and the reality of nothing but the State, "liberal" white people are drawn to be sex slaves of the State, i.e. the State can fuck them whenever it wants. They love it.
So much of the sick ideology of all this has been cooked up in American universities since the 1960's, if not earlier. It is vicious stuff, but also so incoherent that posterity will be astonished that it is promoted by "intellectuals" who pride themselves on their intelligence, knowledge, and perspicacity. They are actually idiots, a circumstance that was already discerned by George Orwell, who famously said, "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual would believe them." Here I have been interested to examine this phenomenon in terms of "moralistic relativism," where a Nietzschean denial of the existence of morality is coupled to a moralistic condemnation of all political, and moral, opposition. In other words, evil doesn't exist, but "fascists" and "racists," or those against abortion, are evil. People can say this with a straight face. Which should be some kind of definition of insanity.
The other Nietzschean principle involved is the denial of the existence of truth. Without truth, academics are relieved of the necessity of argument, evidence, and logic. All of these are part of "white supremacy" and oppression. Only dogma remains; but this, of course, is self-evidently True, beyond honest dispute. All that activists need to do is scream, shout down or literally attack speakers, and make sure that opponents get purged or fired from their jobs. Nietzsche's principle, after all, is that only power matters. And we know that we, "our side," deserve all the power. And we deserve power because we are Good and True, even though goodness and truth don't exist. It's self-evident; and anyone who disagrees with us is obviously evil, even though "evil" was only invented by the Jews in revenge for their (well deserved) conquest by the Romans. That's Nietzsche, anyway.
But the idiocy of this all may not matter. The Big Lie is pushed by most of the media every day; and the zombie voters of New York, California, and elsewhere -- who actually gave the pathological liar and rape enabler Hillary Clinton the majority of the vote in 2016 -- probably will continue voting for the Free Lunch that they expect to get from the Democrats. The "Green New Deal," of course, means that they won't be able to drive or fly anywhere, will need to live in darkness, won't have a job, and will be thrown in a dungeon or concentration camp for disagreement or protest, but, hey, it works in North Korea, doesn't it? It worked even better in Cambodia.
I should also add some recognition of the high art to which the Democrats have elevated the craft of lying. Everyone expects politicians to lie; but previously there was a sense that some shame should be involved when a blatant lie is exposed. No longer. If there is no truth, indeed, then a lie is a perfectly legitimate way, as Nietzsche would say, to pursue power. In fact, the more blatant the lie, more more obviously it reflects one's power. So lies are actually preferable to what anyone might see as the truth. One aspect of this can be seen in Hillary Clinton, who sometimes seemed to prefer a lie when the truth might have worked just as well; and we've already seen the shamelessness of the pathological liar Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who continues to stain Congress with her presence. Obviously, no one cares.
Three classic examples of shameless lies can be found with Congressman Barney Frank, Senator Harry Reid, and Congressman Adam Schiff. Frank had spent years claiming that the mortgages held or insured by Fanny Mae and other federal agencies were perfectly sound, and that questions about them were motivated by, you guessed it, racism. After the mortagage market collapsed and caused a recession, Frank would be shown videos of his claims that the mortgages were sound. Frank's response? "I never said that." At least Frank had enough of some sort of contrition to retire from Congress.
Harry Reid, the Democrat leader in the Senate for many years, told blatant lies about Mitt Romney on the floor of the Senate, where he was immune from libel law. After he retired, Reid actually boasted of this; justifying his actions with, "It worked," i.e. Romney was defeated in the 2012 election. No one could believe in Divine Judgment or karmic recompense and say something like that. At the same time, while it wasn't a matter of lies, Reid changed Senate rules for his convenience, which benefited the Republicans when they took over Congress in 2017. This was not a matter of truth but of principles. Reid seems to have none. The Republic has fallen far when creeps like this are in positions of public trust. But he is really only the beginning.
Best of all, and creepiest of all, may be Adam Schiff, senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. For much of the first term of the Trump Presidency, Schiff would claim to have himself seen evidence of "collusion" between the Trump campaign and Russia. When the Mueller Report came out in 2019, finding that there was no evidence of any "collusion," Schiff never bothered to explain why he had evidently told nothing but lies for years. Even better, early in 2020, House testimony was released in which multiple Obama Administration officials, who had been claiming on television that Trump and others were Russian spies, admitted under oath that they had no evidence of any "collusion" or any connection between the Trump campaign and Russia. They apparently were hoping that the testimony was going to be kept secret. Schiff was present for that testimony, yet he would leave the hearings and tell the press that he had just seen evidence of "collusion." After the release of the testimony, Schiff actually said that it supported all that he had been saying. Lying at that level is not just politics, it is delusional, no less than mental illness -- although it was not so different from what Barney Frank had done some years earlier. Schiff seems to be the sort of person who cheats at Solitaire, or steals candy from children.
These are the people who want to rule the country. They do not believe in any principle of American government. They do not even believe in fundamental principles of morality. If the zombies vote them in, American will go, not the way of Rome, but the way of Russia and China. After all, we know that it was the Clinton Campaign, not the Trump, that was engaged in "collusion" with Russia.
To summarize:
That's it in a nutshell.
The Ruling Class, or the Real One Percent
The Practical Rules of Bureaucracy
Six Kinds of United States Paper Currency
I see another example of Conservatives ritually willing to trash Joseph McCarthy in an August 6, 2009, column by Paul Greenberg, who says, "Joe McCarthy remained on the prowl for non-existent Communists in government, which meant the real ones might be overlooked." What is this even supposed to mean? If there were "real ones" in the government, who "might be overlooked," then there were real Communists, and not just "non-existent" ones, for McCarthy to look for. Doesn't Greenberg know that there were real Communists and spies? Greenberg is apparently assuming, ambiguously, the Democrat canard that there weren't any Communists and that anti-Communists were on a "witch-hunt" for non-existent witches.
This reminds me of one of the first things I remember hearing about McCarthy, when a high school teacher of mine said that McCarthy gave a speech where he waved a blank piece of paper and claimed it was a list of Communists in the State Department. This must have been a reference to McCarthy's Wheeling, West Virginia, speech in February 1950, which began McCarthy's career of public controversy; and the implication the teacher was conveying was that, not just that McCarthy may not have had the list with him, but that there was no such list -- and that McCarthy was blindly claiming that there were Communists when he really knew of none.
While McCarthy in fact did not have a list with him, this was not quite the nature of the controversy at the time. There was indeed a list, indeed two of them, and more. And they were not McCarthy's own lists.
The first list of security risks in the State Department was compiled in 1946 by a State Department official named Samuel Klaus. This included suspected Soviet agents and Communists -- thirty-three of them -- together with "suspects" and "sympathizers" -- more than ninety of them. Alger Hiss was already on the list. For years, little was done about any of these people, even though, at the time, the Cold War was well under way.
The number of Communists and others that McCarthy was accused of using in his Wheeling speech derived from a letter from Secretary of State James Byrnes to Congressman Adolph Sabath in 1946. Byrnes said that 284 persons in the State Department had been found "unfit for permanent employment" and then 79 of them had left (retired or allowed to resign). The difference produced the number 205 that McCarthy had written in the original draft of his speech and that got out to the press at the time. Byrnes did not provide a list, so these numbers were called "statistics" by McCarthy and others.
However, McCarthy knew of a list, more recent list than that of Klaus, prepared by the House Appropriations Committee in 1947/1948, which had been obtained by the Washington Times-Herald reporter Ed Nellor from House staffer Robert Lee -- hence the "Lee List." The House Committee identified 108 security risks in the State Department, of whom 57 were still there. This was the number McCarthy said he actually used in the Wheeling speech, and that he certainly used in subsequent speeches. Since the Wheeling speech had been broadcast but not permanently recorded, Democrats decided to make an issue of whether McCarthy had used the 205 number or the 57 number.
Democrats liked to dismiss the Lee List as dated, and that everyone on it had been cleared by the previous, Republican controlled, 80th Congress. That was an audacious lie. Also, McCarthy's staff had already tracked down most of the people on the list, to see if they were still in the State Department, or even had just moved to other Federal employment. So McCarthy's information was mostly up to date -- and some new names had been added to the list already.
All of these lists or reports of Communists or "fellow travelers" in the State Department most importantly included the group of "China hands," people like John Stewart Service (1909-1999), who spent World War II passing along Communist propaganda and working to discredit or sabotage the Nationalist government of China. This continued after the War and substantially contributed to the Communist victory in 1949, something that was fresh in everyone's mind when Joseph McCarthy spoke out in 1950. They surrounded George C. Marshall (1880-1959) when he was a "special envoy" to China, 1945-1947, and filled him with lies about the respective conditions and intentions of the Communists and Nationalists.
They succeeded in getting Marshall to impose ceasefires on the conflict, which only benefited the Communists, and at times actually got Marshall to cut off military and financial aid to the Nationalists -- while the Soviet Union fully supplied the Communists. Even when the Nationalists were supposed to receive military and financial aid, its delivery was continually obstructed, indicating a conspiracy in depth. One of their more successful lies was the myth that, during the War, the Communists had been fighting the Japanese while the Nationalists had been collaborating. This was the opposite of the truth. Similar lies and sabotage enabled Tito, with British and American support, to annihilate the anti-Nazi and anti-Communist nationalists in Yugoslavia.
Far from McCarthy destroying the lives of these blushing innocent diplomats, they almost entirely got away with it -- apart from the ones who revealed themselves by defecting to Communist China after its victory -- like Solomon Adler (1909-1994). John Stewart Service, like Alger Hiss, never admitted, until his dying day, to what extent and in what ways he helped the Communists come to power. We are still dealing with the appalling consequences of the Communist takeover of China, while its agents, like Service, are celebrated as "victims" of Joe McCarthy.
It really doesn't matter which number McCarthy used in West Virginia. There were security risks in the State Department, and McCarthy wanted to know why they were still there and what was being done about them. The centerpiece of McCarthy's speech was actually an attack on Secretary of State Dean Acheson -- a man who had advised President Truman to abandon Taiwan and South Korea and recognize Communist China -- who, even as Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 1950, expressed his support for him -- "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." It is still part of leftist mythology that Hiss was neither a Communist nor a spy. Harry Truman himself later expressed some certainty about Hiss's innocence. Yet the evidence against him at the time was decisive and damning, as it still is.
One might wonder even today about the judgment and motives of anyone defending Hiss. The Democrats, including Truman, just did not like the political embarrassment; but it was not absurd for someone like McCarthy to wonder at the time if the protection of security threats and Communists was as much a matter of sympathy as of ass-covering. There is no doubt that someone like Acheson, ironically, felt a class connection with Hiss, sharing Northeastern and Ivy League backgrounds -- the beefy and brawling Whittaker Chambers (physically much like CPUSA Presidential candidate Gus Hall, or, for that matter, "sympathizer" actor Ed Asner) was just declassé -- attitudes we still get from the Modern Democrats, vacationing on Martha's Vineyard -- "Marxist Vineyard" -- and sneering at "fly-over country," i.e. the Heartland.
Something of the sort had already happened in 1939. When Whittaker Chambers left the Communist Party, he quietly went on with his life -- although prudently saving some incriminating documents in case they became necessary. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, however, when the Communists became allies of those they had always claimed were their greatest enemies, Nazi Germany, Chambers became alarmed enough to tell his story at the State Department. This included information about Hiss's espionage and membership in the Party. The story got all the way to President Roosevelt, who literally laughed it off. Joe Stalin would not be spying on us, and certainly not through such a fine upstanding man as Alger Hiss. Communists then (and now) must have had a good laugh that the class solidarity of the well-born, privileged, and wealthy protected a man who worked to destroy them.
This disconnect from reality evident in my high school teacher's statement continues today in what ought to be better informed and more conscientious venues. Thus, in 2016, the Smithsonian Channel aired a two hour documentary on Joseph McCarthy. It did not address the question of whether McCarthy talked about 205 or 57 State Department personnel in his Wheeling speech. Instead, it said that McCarthy accused the State Department of harboring 205 Communists. This was not true. The documentary also said that McCarthy "named names" and identified the Communists. This is also not true. Curiously, the documentary interviewed a former KGB officer who happily admitted that the Soviets did indeed have agents in the State Department, just not anything like the 205 in McCarthy's absurd accusation. He said it was more like 49.
The documentary thus entirely misrepresented the situation. Rather than acknowledge that McCarthy's concerns were valid, and that 49 agents was damn close to the 57 number that McCarthy subsequently used, the documentary construed the presentation to continue the narrative that McCarthy was just throwing around wild accusations. Also, the documentary never acknowledged that McCarthy did not name names, explicitly because State Department personnel about whom there were questions of security did not deserve to be exposed in public. Names, however, were required by the Democrat controlled Senate at the time. The Democrats accused McCarthy of not really having any names (the "blank paper" canard), and demanded that he release them. When he did, the Democrats then accused him, as they still do, of smearing innocent people with unfounded (or unproven) accusations of Communist connections. This was obviously entirely dishonest behavior, never mentioned by the documentary.
The documentary also never mentioned that until 1953 the Senate was controlled by the Democrats and that Joseph McCarthy actually did not have the power to do anything but talk. While interviewing a victim of prosecution for Contempt of Congress, the documentary did not bother to mention that McCarthy had no power to bring charges of Contempt of Congress and that the "victim" therefore had been charged by a Democrat Congress (both Houses of Congress must agree to such charges) and prosecuted by the Democrat Administration of Harry Truman. He could not have been charged or prosecuted on the basis of anything that Joe McCarthy said or wanted.
Instead, one would never know from the documentary that all the Congressional investigations at the time were directed at rather than by Joseph McCarthy. The Democrats were protecting themselves from the embarrassment of McCarthy's substantially true charges. One could gather from the documentary that the later Army-McCarthy Hearings, allowed by both Republicans and President Eisenhower, were about accusations of favoritism by Roy Cohn for a friend (& lover?) of his in the Army. Whatever the merits of those accusations, McCarthy himself had nothing to do with them, and neither the contents nor the results of the hearings were related to the trumped-up charges for which McCarthy was then Censured by the Senate. Yet those Hearings are generally taken to damn and discredit McCarthy, despite proving nothing. See more about this as follows.
Thus, the Smithsonian Channel in 2016 has perpetuated lies, distortions, and smears as the historical record of Joseph McCarthy. The documentary featured a couple of people who could have spoken up and corrected the record, but they were not allowed any say in the matter and were entirely ignored once the tale of McCarthy's misdeeds got going. The documentary even featured M. Stanton Evans (1934-2015), whose 2007 book, Blacklisted by History, the Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy [Crown Forum, Crown Publishing Group, Random House] got into all these issues; but they didn't bother asking him about any of the false or deceptive statements in the documentary. It is a shameful business; but Democrats, and even quite a few clueless Republicans, are still engaged in covering up the presence of Communists and Soviet spies in the American government, even when, oddly enough, they admit, incongruously and by the way, that there were such people.
The phenomenon of clueless Conservatives accepting the premises of Leftist political narratives continued in 2012. A column by Theodore Olson, "Obama's Enemies List," appears in the February 1 Wall Street Journal. Olson, a lawyer who represents Koch Industries, writes about the Obama Administration targeting David and Charles Koch as part of President Obama's reelection campaign. Since the theme of the campaign is How Evil are the Rich, the Koch brothers, who contribute to various conservative and libertarian causes and think tanks, have been openly attacked. The cutest example is that the Democrats wanted to call the Koches to testify before Congress about the Keystone XL oil pipeline, whose building Obama had recently cancelled to curry favor with the "back to the Pleistocene" environmentalists, even though the Koches had nothing to do with the pipeline.
Nevertheless, Olson can't resist calling the Democrat practices the equivalent of "McCarthyism":
Lies about Joe McCarthy will indeed "forver be synonymous with un-Americanism" as long as people who should know better, like Mr. Olson, continue repeating them. Olson may need to be reminded that McCarthy held no "powerful position in the Senate" from 1950, when he entered the public eye, until 1953, when the Republicans took over the Senate. He then only had a year to conduct his investigations. What were the examples of "bullying, oppression and slander" from that year? Most of the inquiries involving Joe McCarthy, before 1953, and then in the "Army-McCarthy Hearings," when Joseph Welsh -- in the middle of his own "bullying" questioning of Roy Cohn -- voiced his grandstand-for-the-cameras reproach to McCarthy, were directed at Joe McCarthy, first by Democrats and then in the end with the cooperation of the Eisenhower Administration and the Republicans in the Senate, who were very far from doing "nothing to stand up to him."
Even worse is the implication that McCarthy was censured for "McCarthyism," as so defined. But this is now a familiar political technique of misrepresentation. Martha Stewart was not convicted of insider trading, although most people probably think so. Scooter Libby was not convicted of "outing" Valerie Plame, although the Democrats got their Hollywood friends to even make a movie saying so. And Joe McCarthy was not censured for accusing innocent blushing liberals of being Communists; yet Theodore Olson presupposes that this is something that "everyone knows" to be the case. Indeed, the Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954, which we are given to understand discredited McCarthy, where not only directed at him, instead of by him, but also resulted in clearing him of the charges at issue (which involved favoritism for a friend, and possible gay lover, of Roy Cohn).
And what "opposition" was being "suppressed" by McCarthy? Certainly not the Democrats, who never shut up, any more than they do now. Communists? Well perhaps that should be stated openly: "McCarthy inconvenienced people who were spies and agents for the Soviet Union." We can't have that. Like the famous rhetorical question of Joseph Welsh, the context of "McCarthyism" makes its whole presentation, by Academics, the Press, Leftists, Liberals, Democrats, and now Mr. Olson, a lie. They are the ones lacking any sense of decency -- like Democrat National Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in January 2012, still repeating the canard that the lunatic Jared Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords because of the "incivility" of Conservative political rhetoric. But as a supposed Conservative, Olson has no excuse. He should be aware of several recent books setting the record straight about McCarthy. No, like Paul Greenberg, he is pandering to an audience that is going to hate him anyway and is just going to use his endorsement of the McCarthy myth to help perpetuate it.
We are still getting this sort of thing in 2014. In book review of A Very Principled Boy, by Mark A. Bradley, about Soviet spy Duncan Lee ("Hiding in Plain Sight," The Wall Street Journal, April 26-27, 2014, C7), Michael O'Donnell discusses the consequences of the failure of the U.S. Government to prosecute Lee, even though he was exposed by Elizabeth Bentley and his guilt confirmed by the Venona decryptions -- the Government wanted to keep the Venona information secret, even though, as we know now, other Soviet spies had already passed on reports about the program, rendering secrecy about its very existence pointless.
O'Donnell says:
This is an astonishing statement, assuming as it does the entire Leftist narrative and slander about "witch hunts," i.e. that no Soviet spies existed to be found after the 1940s (or, since the Left never admitted that there had ever been Soviet spies, before). From Soviet records themselves, when they were available, we now know that there were over 300 agents acting for the Soviet Union in the United States (Bentley had named 150), only about half of whom (Bentley's number!) were ever identified or caught.
All that Mr. Bradley "nicely puts" is the standard anti-anti-Communist line, whose perpetuation by people in The Wall Street Journal is a disgrace -- not to mention its occurrence in a book about someone who was never actually convicted of being a Communist or a spy, and who, like Alger Hiss, maintained his innocence until his dying day. This is a candidate for Progressive victimhood -- a Martyr in the face of an exposé targeting him with the disapprobation of the world after his death.
Bradley and O'Donnell should be ashamed of practicing this kind of McCarthyism (!?) against someone who can't even defend himself. Perhaps it is their unease at such an accusation -- made all too characteristically -- that moves them defensively to condemn the "real" McCarthyism. After all, they wouldn't want to be associated with the execution of people after show trials, or all of those worked to death in labor camps... oh. That would be Joe Stalin, not Joe McCarthy, who did those things. Never mind.
Some faculty and students at Middlebury College, Vermont, invited quixotic libertarian Charles Murray to speak at the college on March 2, 2017. As has now become common, radical students mobbed the event and shouted down Murray. The college, somewhat to its credit, had Murray deliver his talk anyway, on video. The students, of course, shouted down the video feeds. As Murray was leaving campus, his group was mobbed and assaulted by students, who actually injured one of the faculty sponsors of the event, Allison Stanger, sending her to the hospital. It is not clear if video is available of the assault. Some of the participants were said to be masked, like the now familiar Anarchists of other "progressive" riots. Whether there is video or not, the students involved should be identified, arrested, charged, and expelled from the school. It is not clear that any attempt has been made to do any of this. The students who merely distrupted the event and shouted down Murray should be disciplined or suspended from school. There is no word that this has been done. This is not at all to the credit of the college.
Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger commented on this in a piece from March 9, 2017. This was titled "McCarthyism at Middlebury"; and in it, unfortunately, he went out of his way to associate the behavior of the students (and their faculty enablers, of course) with Joseph McCarthy, misrepresenting McCarthy's history and not even correctly using "McCarthyism" in the way the enemies of McCarthy and anti-Communism use it themselves.
Since the day the Founding Fathers planted the three words, "freedom of speech," in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Americans and their institutions have had to contend with attempts to suppress speech.
The right to speak freely has survived not merely because of many eloquent Supreme Court decisions but also because America’s political and institutional leadership, whatever else their differences, has stood together to defend this right.
But maybe not any longer.
America’s campuses have been in the grip of a creeping McCarthyism for years. McCarthyism, the word, stands for the extreme repression of ideas and for silencing speech. This is all fine until the last paragraph. Joseph McCarthy had nothing to with "repression of ideas" or "silencing speech." The "ideas" he was against, of course, where those of Communism, as advocated at the time by the living and breathing The problem was not innocent Communists being silenced. It was hidden Communists, members of the "underground" Party, who concealed and dissimulated their loyalties and convictions, while covertly promoting Communist ideas and even engaging in espionage for the Soviet Union. Sometimes such Communists, or their supporters, claimed they were martyrs to the First Amendment; but they didn't take advantage of Free Speech by candidly voicing their loyalties and convictions, and they actually didn't believe in Free Speech or the First Amendment. Uncle Joe Stalin certainly didn't.
People who ended up on the Blacklist of the Hollywood movie producers generally just refused to "name names," i.e. identify people that they knew as Communist Party members or "fellow travelers." They justified their silence by saying they did not believe in "ratting out" friends or people they knew. Their appeal, therefore, was to the ethics of the playground or of gangsters.
Although refusing to "inform" on friends and colleagues was held up as the highest of high moral principles by those who refused to do it, the irony is that in their beloved Soviet Union it was a civic virtue, and a duty, to inform on anyone suspected of subversive opinions or actions. It didn't matter if it was neighbors, fellow workers, family members, or even parents. A whole Communist cult was built around a 13-year-old boy, Pavel Morozov (Pavlik), who informed on his father (who died in a labor camp) and who was then killed by his family for doing so. It turned out that this story was mostly fiction, but the ethic of spying and informing was certainly lauded by the Soviet Union, as it continues to be in Communist Cuba and China.
Thus, Hollywood Communists and sympathizers who refused on principle to "inform" about Communists they knew, actually didn't really believe in any such principle -- any more than they believed in the First Amendment or the Fifth Amendment (Russians were required to testify against themselves). It was all a lie and a deception, and yet they obviously enjoyed and relished signaling their playground virtue by despising "tattle tales," all while invoking the freedoms and rights they were intent on destroying.
Americans who did what in the Soviet Union would have been their duty, and "named names" of Communists they knew, have never been forgiven by the Left. One of those was director Elia Kazan, Ἠλίας Καζαντζόγλου (1909-2003 -- his name ends with a Turkish patronymic).
Kazan's own answer to his critics was the classic movie On the Waterfront [1954], about a washed-up boxer, played by Marlon Brando ("I coulda' been a contenda"), who must decide whether to testify against the gangsters who run his longshoreman's union. He does testify, after the gangsters murdered his brother, who worked for them.
When Kazan was awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar at the 71st Academy Awards on March 21, 1999, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the Los Angeles Music Center, actual Communists showed up to picket and protest the event. I know, because I was there. An organization of Ayn Rand enthusiasts organized a counter-demonstration. I joined them.
It is about the only political demonstration like that, the kind likely to be on the news, in which I have ever participated. I don't know how much did make it to the news. At Wikipedia, the demonstration, but not the counter-demonstration, is mentioned. Without the detail that the demonstators were Communists. Typical.
I had been attending many libertarian events in Los Angeles for several years, and it was curious that the "Objectivists" in the demonstration were entirely unknown to me. I figured that, while many libertarians like Ayn Rand, a lot of Rand devotees don't much like the libertarians. Rand had accused libertarians of "stealing" her ideas, as though she had copyrighted capitalism.
I did miss out on the group photo, because, after some time, it didn't seem like much more was going to happen. I walked down to a hotel and got a taxi back to the Beverly Center, where the participants had parked before taking a bus downtown. I wasn't looking forward to another bus ride like that. So if anyone comes up with the group photo from that event, I won't be there.
At the actual Oscar ceremony, Leftist actors like Nick Nolte and Ed Harris refused to applaud for Kazan, while other actors joined in a standing ovation. I wonder if Nolte and Harris later went out to give a pep talk to the Communists, about how great they were. And, not to worry, the Democrats would see about restoring Communism, bye and bye.
Although I knew a couple members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) back in the 1970's, I would not be comfortable if pulled before a Congressional Committee and asked to identify them. Not caring for the Soviet Union, I actually don't believe in the civic virtue and duty of informating on others, unless they've committed actual criminal acts. But then, you see, to Communists, political disagreements are criminal acts. Whether I answered about people I knew might depend on the level of threat I saw in the Party. The CPUSA was no threat to the United States in 1977, although the Soviet Union was still a threat overseas. Ironically, communists are more of a threat to America in 2021 than they were in 1977.
At the same time, the CP was a real threat in 1950, when Stalin green-lighted the invasion of South Korea (partially because he then had the Bomb, after its plans had been stolen by his spies, i.e. people like the Rosenbergs), and at least until 1956, when the "De-Stalinization" of Nikita Khrushchev disillusioned many members, whether they supported Stalin or were genuinely surprised (!) at Khrushchev's revelations. Some who refused to "name names," like Zero Mostel, left Hollywood for Broadway, evidently without much complaint. Others wrote for Hollywood movies under pseudonyms, with the cooperation of friends. Some of these, like Dalton Trumbo, thought this was funny. In the end, "liberal" opinion regarded them as martyrs to anti-Communism, when, if they had gotten their way, we would all have been executed or sent to the GULAG. That's how Joe Stalin ran things.
The actual accusation against Joe McCarthy was that he falsely accused innocent people of being Communists, a practice generalized into the Red Scare "Witch Hunt" of spreading false accusations and pursuing Communist suspects, when actually hidden Communists didn't exist, and the beloved, peaceful, and free Soviet Union was engaged in no espionage or subversion against the United States. The truth was that anti-Communists, long before Joe McCarthy, were largely able to target real Communists, whose own principal narrative, of course, was this fairy tale about the peaceful and benevolent Soviet Union, who wasn't using people like them to spy on the United States.
Now, the rioting students and activists at Middlebury and elsewhere have been running around accusing people, like Charles Murray, of being Fascists and Nazis, but this doesn't amount to quite the same thing. They cannot and have not been accused of being members of self-identified Fascist or Nazis Parties, and they can hardly be agents of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, both of which ceased to exist in 1945. Republicans have been accused of supporting the Ku Klux Klan, which does exist, and perhaps this amounts to "McCarthyism"; but mostly the charges leveled by the Left are just lies and smears, unpacked from Leftist demonology, which to most Americans would sound preposterous or unintelligible. As George Orwell said, some things are so absurd that only an intellectual would believe them; but that is what a college education buys you (dearly) these days.
The notion that Joseph McCarthy himself possessed a comparable anti-Communist fantasy demonology requires that the realities of Communism be ignored or whitewashed. But that is, of course, the agenda of the Left. And this means that Daniel Henninger has misidentifed the ideology and the nature of the misconduct of the students at Middlebury. They are not McCarthyites. They are Stalinists. That is the ideology that denies Free Speech. That is the ideology that physically attacks political opponents. That is the ideology that would send us all to the GULAG, if it could, or have us shot. Since Joseph McCarthy didn't sent anyone to the GULAG, or have anyone shot, the beginning of wisdom is to realize that Joe Stalin, not Joe McCarthy, was the real enemy of democracy, humanity, and civilization.
As noted, E. Stanton Evans likes to ask audiences, "Name one." Like Shepard Smith, Daniel Hennigen just assumes that McCarthy was running around ruining "innocent individuals' careers and reputations." This is nonsense. He barely had the time or position to do anything of the sort. To be sure, people had gone to jail, but this had all been because of Contempt of Congress and perjury convictions, usually in relation to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, as prosecuted by the Justice Department of the Administration of Harry S Truman. The Rosenbergs had been convicted of espionage and would be executed after Dwight Eisenhower became President. By the time actual Communists, like Dashiell Hammett, testified before McCarthy's Senate committee, they had wised up and were taking the Fifth Amendment. Hammett had already been to jail. McCarthy's Senate Committee, in 1953 and 1954, did recommend some people to the Justice Department on perjury charges, but the Eisenhower Administration mysteriously never pursued the cases. Mostly McCarthy just wanted people who were security risks removed from sensitive positions, but those he got the Administation to actually remove were usually quietly restored (for a while) after McCarthy, not his "victims," had been destroyed.
Questions remain about a few people, like John Stewart Service at the State Department, who was identified by McCarthy as a security risk, and who had been caught red handed, long before McCarthy, passing secret documents to the Communist Front magazine Amerasia. During the War in China, Service roomed with Chi Chao-ting, a Communist agent who had infiltrated the Kuomintang, and Solomon Adler, a Treasury official who, in league with Soviet Agent and Assistant Treasury Secretary in Washington, Harry Dexter White, was engaged in sabotaging a $200 million loan of gold to the Nationalist government to help stabilize its currency. Both Chi and Adler revealed their true colors by later defecting to the People's Republic of China, but Service, who was arrested by the FBI in 1945, never admitted that he had anything to do with his roommates, although reports he wrote about the Nationalist Government passed on the same Communist propaganda and was being created by Chi and Adler.
The prosecution of Service was quashed, as we now know from recently released FBI files, by a high level cover-up and conspiracy to obstruct justice, orchestrated by Soviet agents like White House assistant Lauchlin Currie. Although Service would be publicly exposed (again) by McCarthy, and J. Edgar Hoover knew everything that had been going on, the Eisenhower Administration, for its own obscure reasons -- part of which may actually have been that Hoover and Eisenhower did not want the Soviets to know how much they actually knew -- silenced McCarthy and allowed Service to continue with a quiet but harmless career. This strategy, unfortunately, allowed the essentially pro-Communist narrative of the Democrats to become the "public record." So today, people like Daniel Henninger can remember McCarthy as the villain in the business, not people like Service, Adler, White, or Currie.
One of the first politicians to speak against this mood in 1950 was Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. In her speech, "Declaration of Conscience" [June 1, 1950], Sen. Smith said: "The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as 'Communists' or 'Fascists' by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others." Since no one had heard of Joe McCarthy before February, 1950, while the Democrats controlled Congress and Senator McCarthy had no power, and she didn't name McCarthy, what was Margaret Chase Smith talking about? McCarthy could make accusations, but nobody would have paid any attention to them if there had not already been a history of Communist spying and subversion. Alger Hiss had just been convicted of perjury (January 21, 1950). The Korean War would begin on June 25th.
Nobody was being smeared as a Communist because they were speaking their mind. If Communists had been speaking their minds, no accusations would have been necessary. It was precisely because Communists concealed their beliefs and loyalties that accusations were necessary. Meanwhile, the Left, then and now, has shown no reluctance to accuse anyone, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, of being Fascists -- yet, despite Smith's nod in that direction, the complaints have really all been about anti-Communists, not about those who style themselves "anti-Fascists" -- realistically kind of a dead letter in 1950.
I begin to wonder if Smith was a RINO-before-her-time, currying liberal favor, and mainly complaining at that point about the rather long history of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), so that people who had no worries (or worse) about Communism would think well of her. But the Korean War started less than a month after Smith's speech; and it was McCarthy, not Smith, who helped elect Eisenhower in 1952.
So what was Eisenhower talking about? One of McCarthy's investigations, after the Republicans took control of the Senate in 1953, was why Communist authors were featured in so many American Information Libraries overseas. Americans had no trouble reading these books in the United States, but why would the United States Government be furthering Communist propaganda through its own agencies -- especially given the purpose of the libraries, to fight Communism, according to the law, sponsored by a Democrat, that authorized them?
Note, McCarthy wasn't burning books, or proposing that they be banned, but asking why the ostensively anti-Communist U.S. Government was promoting Communist authors. In his round-about way, was Eisenhower objecting to this inquiry? Actually, books that were removed from the libraries were "disposed of," in ways that sometimes may actually have involved burning. But this had nothing to do with Joe McCarthy. It was the work of Dwight Eisenhower's own Admiminstration, i.e. himself.
Yet someone got to Eisenhower and told him that McCarthy was burning books. He seems to have believed it, or was willing to use the lie to smear McCarthy. None of that reflects well on Eisenhower, regardless of what Daniel Henninger thinks about his Dartmouth speech. As it happens, not many years ago our communist friends at Berkeley actually were burning books, under the banner "Fight Fascist Censorship!" The irony of their acts escaped them.
It is not clear to me what "smear" Mr. Henninger is talking about. But the action of the Middlebury faculty is clear enough. They don't want to hear "Murray's ideas," which to them are beyond the pale. But where anti-Communists wanted Communists to candidly confess their loyalty and profess their ideas; the modern Left wants people silenced and shut out. Whatever Joe McCarthy was doing, that wasn't it. It's what Joe Stalin did. So, again, it is Stalinism at Middlebury, not "McCarthyism."
Democrats, as partisans of the Left, naturally have no objection to silencing their opponents. Their most recent strategy has been to use "campaign finance reform" to do it.
But "let's recognize" that Daniel Henninger has cluelessly accepted the Democrat and Leftist narrative about "McCarthyism" and has failed to recognize Leftist ideology for what it is: Socialist, totalitarian, and Stalinist. This is admitted quite openly on college campuses like Middlebury, but somehow Henninger has missed the memo. Indeed, the Communist tactic of dissimulation and concealment continues; and when embarrassing statements by radical professors become public, most of the outrage is not about their content, but about how such accurately reported statements by professors have been allowed to become public. They have the right, you see, to maintain the secrecy of their (publicly funded and presented) teaching, and even of their posts on public media -- i.e. we don't have the right to know about anything they say. Because we might find out what they mean and intend.
The rest of Henninger's column is salutary, as would be the whole thing without his misuse of "McCarthyism." But, as I have been examining, it is not unusual for Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians to accept Leftist narratives about Communism and anti-Communism and to, in effect, participate in the cover-up of Soviet spying and subversion and the whitewash of Americans who accepted Soviet ideology and who planned, planned, on turning the United States into a totalitarian police-state. You see, they are still at it, and in the same way as before.
What is it about the Wall Street Journal? Does it have a style code that requires disparaging references to Joseph McCarthy? On March 22, 2017, we have a column from Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. entitled "Leakgate Finds Its Joe McCarthy." At least Jenkins used "McCarthyism" in the dictionary defined and politically correct way, saying of California Democrat Congressman Adam Schiff:
Now, what Schiff is engaged in is the Democrat strategy of contending that Donald Trump won the election in 2016 in collusion with Vladimir Putin of Russia. After the Democrats realized they couldn't win the election by recounts (although they recruited Green Party candidate Jill Stein to ask for the recounts for them, although she really didn't have any grounds to do so anywhere), and that accusing Trump of winning because of "fake news" meant that he could accuse them with greater justice of using "fake news" (so that reporters began bleating that the accusation of "fake news" was like using the "N word"), they settled on a permanent strategy of portraying Trump as a creature of the Russians. With Schiff carrying water for this, Jenkins associating it with Joe McCarthy is rich, since it relies on the Democrat narrative and the conventional wisdom that McCarthy never identified any Communists, that there were none for him to find, and so the whole business was a "witch hunt" for non-existent, or falsely accused, witches.
Since Joe McCarthy accused people of being agents for Russia, perhaps there is a parallel with the Democrats now accusing Donald Trump of being an agent for Russia. Although why he would be is a little obscure, since Trump has no ideological commitment to Putin's dictatorship (it's the Democrats who like dictatorship) and he has no real business interests in Russia. But Trump laid himself open to such charges by saying kind things about Putin during the Presidential campaign. But whatever sort of appeasement or accommodation Trump might seek with Putin, the Obama Administration had already beat him to it.
This is one of the great ironies of the Democrat narrative, since Barack Obama and John Kerry did very little to block Putin's conquests and encroachments. At one point Kerry seemed to be doing no more than begging Putin not to conquer any more land from the Ukraine, and Obama himself was caught on an open mike telling Dmitry Medvedev (President, as a place-holder for Putin, 2008-2012) that after the 2012 election he could be more accommodating. Obama and Kerry invited Russia into Syria, rather than doing anything about Obama's "Red Line" ultimatum about the use of chemical weapons, and they could only sputter in mortification when Putin went on to support the Assad dictatorship and bomb rebels who were actual allies of the United States. The rebels, who had held on grimly in Aleppo, were finally driven out, with the help of the Russians bombing things like hospitals. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration, no more than the Trump Administration agenda, ever provided the Ukraine with even the weaponry to defend itself. This has allowed Russian infiltration and low level combat to continue, which somehow has been fine with both Presidents.
So if "McCarthyism" means making political hay with false accusations of innocent people, the Democrats are probably guilty of it. Just not Joseph McCarthy. And it is a little late in the day for Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. to still be buying the Democrat and anti-anti-Communist narrative and using the term in the politically correct way. But that is one of the biggest problems with Republicans, as I have been detailing on this page. They are continually displaying their bona fides as dupes and suckers of the Democrats.
Prior to the column by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. just examined, The Wall Street Journal ran a review by Thomas Mallon, entitled "The President Fells a Demagogue" [March 18-19, 2017, p.C7], on the book Ike and McCarthy by David A. Nichols [Simon & Schuster]. The "demagogue" of the article is, of course, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the "president" is Dwight Eisenhower, who, keeping a low profile at the time, is now more generally recognized as behind the destruction of McCarthy.
Indeed, at a time when the Republicans controlled the U.S. Senate, it should have always been obvious that this could not have been done to McCarthy without the consent and direction of the President. Why Eisenhower did this is properly one of the great stories of the age. It is also the story of a near mortal blow suffered by the Republican Party. While the Republicans had at times controlled the House and Senate in the years after World War II, in the election of 1954, despite a popular Einsenhower in the White House, Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress until the Reagan Administration, and did not again hold control of both until the election of 1994.
When Eisenhower was elected in 1952, there had been Democrat Administrations for twenty years; but then from 1954 forty years would pass before voters gave Bill Clinton a fully Republican Congress. Did the destruction of Joe McCarthy have something to do with this? I think so. And this means that Dwight Eisenhower was in great measure responsible. The first Republican President after the New Deal was no boon to the Republican Party.
First, I should note some things about the review. Whatever Mr. Mallon knows, or has gotten from the book by Mr. Nichols, it isn't enough. A key statement is "Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and a close presidential adivsor, believed that McCarthy decided to go after the Army because of Eisenhower's indelible identification with it..." However, McCarthy did not decide to "go after the Army." He never went "after the Army." He was tipped off that there were security problems at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, were a great deal of secret work was done, at various scattered locations, in technology and communications. The commander of the post, Major General Kirke B. Lawton, agreed about the problems and testified that people who had been removed from sensitive positions because of obvious security problems, i.e. they had Communist associations, were being reinstated by a review board at the Pentagon, without explanation.
For his testimony, the Army destroyed the career of General Lawton -- something Mr. Mallon doesn't bother mentioning, although we hear that McCarthy "humiliated" General Ralph Zwicker, who actually was scheduled as a friendly witness, until he apparently was visited and threatened by people from the Pentagon -- specifically by Army counsel John Adams. Then he became uncooperative, ultimately to be richy rewarded by the Army.
But Mallon trivializes these issues by reducing the problem to "an Army dentist with onetime leftist affiliation" (i.e. Communist Party membership), which happened to be the specific case involving Zwicker -- ignoring everything else. And this was at Camp Kilmer, not the main scene of scandal at the laboratories of Ft. Monmouth. So the case involving Zwicker was a kind of sideshow -- except for what it revealed, in the treatment of the two Generals, about the practices of the Pentagon.
So Mallon doesn't seem to know what the problems were at Fort Monmouth. But, without pause, he does continue that "the senator and Roy Cohn had been risibly at war with the service for months." This is nonsense. Since the people in New Jersey were alert to the security problems, McCarthy simply wanted to know why the review board at the Pentagon kept reversing the decisions of the competent authorities, especially General Lawton, on the spot. We have literally never learned why. McCarthy was stopped, and the people involved, and their motivations, have never seen the light of day -- just as we still don't know, as McCarthy asked, who had moved the Communist Party member Annie Lee Moss from the lunch room to the code room. When things like this are still mysteries, more than sixty years later, any disinterested observer would say that something very peculiar was, and is, going on.
Mallon continues that McCarthy staffer and Cohn friend:
This is a biased, hostile, and distorted representation. Schine had already been in the Army but then was passed over with a 4F deferment because of a slipped disk in his back -- not a trivial injury. In 1953 he was at the upper limit of draft elegible age and ordinarily would never have been considered for any more service. However, the Army had a history of drafting Congressional staffers to hold, essentially, as hostages when the Army didn't like what a Congressional Committee was doing.
This had been done with Robert Stripling, who was the chief intestigator for the House Un-American Acitivites Committee. In 1944, the Roosevent Administration didn't like the Committee's anti-Communist acitivities and wanted to shut it down. That failed, but they decided to inflict some damage on the Committee by drafting Stripling, who was 31 years old, married and a father, with a draft exemption from the Legislative Deferment Committee of Congress. Men like Stripling were not being drafted in 1944, and certainly not with Congressional exemptions. But they did it anyway, and so Stripling was probably doing something like peeling potatoes for a year and a half, before returning to the Committee anyway. This sort of malicious and vindicative practice is what we see continuing in the McCarthy years. It is also what we see in the FBI and the Justice Department in the present day, many of whose arrests and prosecutions are obviously selective and political; yet its viciousness is rarely noted by the political forces that use it.
As it happened, the "secure passes and privileges" for David Schine were a concession to McCarthy for Schine to complete his work for the Senate Committee. However, this was all a trick. The Army and Eisenhower Administration would then accuse Cohn and McCarthy of threatening the Army to get unwarranted privileges and favored treatment for Schine -- even though the whole buisness was an attempt to stop the Congressional investigation of the security practices of the Pentagon.
This Army conspiracy was the basis of the Army-McCarthy hearings, which then investigated Cohn and McCarthy for the Army charges against them. Of course, Schine should not have been in the Army anyway, and the whole business now looks like a fraud and a set-up, designed to distract McCarthy from his investigations. Which it did.
The hearings, televised, were designed to make McCarthy look bad, which in great measure they did; but nothing actually came of it. The Army could not prove that Cohn or McCarthy had ever really done anything improper; and when information began to come out that the whole thing was a political plot against McCarthy, Eisenhower cut off witnesses and documents with a novel claim of "Executive Privilege." McCarthy had wanted to subpoena members of the Pentagon review board that had been overruling General Lawton; but this never happened.
Mallon at least admits that this principle, of "Executive Privilege," praised by all at the time, was dropped like a hot potato when Richard Nixon tried the same claim -- a claim simply repeated by him from his years as Eisenhower's Vice President. The famous Nixon White House tapes were exactly the kind of records that Eisenhower had refused to turn over to Congress. At the same time, the supposedly damning Army-McCarthy hearings had nothing to do with the subsequent censure vote against McCarthy, yet the impression of post hoc ergo propter hoc remains.
Looking at it now, the secrecy of orders of both President Eisenhower and, previously, of President Truman were illegal:
The practice of the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower Administrations was indeed to deny or "interfer with" information that those in the Civil Service of the United States might supply to Congress. We are left with Stanton's rhetorical question, "whether a presidential order can nullify a statute." While, "In our system, the theoretial answer to this is 'no,' but the de facto answer at the time was 'yes'" [ibid.]. Yet the whole history of Congress, and not just Joseph McCarthy, trying to find out about security problems in the State Department, Army, etc., continued for years with violations of this statutory law. During the Censure investigation of the committee chaired by Arthur Watkins (R-UT), McCarthy actually brought this up; but Watkins simply dismissed it, as he often did with anything, however relevant or cogent, that stood in the way of condemning McCarthy.
If Mr. Mallon's treatment faithfully represents the level of Mr. Nichols' book, then I think we can expect that the book is no more than another contribution to the anti-anti-Communist propaganda that is too typical of Cold War and Joseph McCarthy scholarship. Another cute bit is Mallon saying, "McCarthy went after the Voice of America's supposedly slack anti-communism and sent Cohn and Schine on a sort of honeymoon hunt for subversive literature in U.S.-run libraries abroad." I have discussed some of this business above. The "subversive literature" means, of course, the books by Communists that by law should not have been in U.S. information libraries at taxpayer expense, whose purpose, by law, was to fight Communism. If Mr. Mallon does not know that from the Nichols book, then we have a good clue about its honesty and value.
Similarly, the problem at the Voice of America were people who had broadcast pro-Soviet propaganda during World War II, when this was excused for an Ally against Germany, but who maintained the same line when things had become very different after the War. Mallon can say things like "slack anti-communism" when he doesn't need to give us any details of what was going on.
Almost approaching a bit of honesty is Mallon admitting that Joseph Welch's famous rebuke of McCarthy -- "Have you no sense of decency, sir..." -- was something that "he had dilgently prepared to be ouraged at just the right moment." Mallon does not give us the context, however. In an aside from Welch's badgering of Roy Cohn, the ostensible witness, Welch solicited from McCarthy an example of someone with subversive associations, to which McCarthy answered with the example of one of Welch's own lawyers, Frederick Fisher, who had belonged to the National Lawyer's Guild, which had been identified as a Communist Front organization by the Attorney General (it still exists and is still reliably radical in its Leftism). Welch was self-righteously indignant over the "cruelty" and "wrecklessness" of McCarthy naming this young man, who thus "shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you."
Unfortunately for the myth, Fisher had already been exposed, in an article published in the New York Times, by none other than Joseph Welch, who stated that Fisher would not be on his legal team at the hearings precisely because of his association with the National Lawyers Guild. So Welch knew about Fisher, and McCarthy was telling him something that he not only knew about already, but that he had acted on, in full publicity. Which was why Fisher was not at his side in Washington.
So the whole performance, so famous, and so commonly cited as the ultimate shaming and condemnation of Joseph McCarthy, was precisely that, a performance -- a fraudulent, dishonest, act -- that was staged for no reason than the effect it would have on television. It continues to deceive, as it would still deceive anyone reading Mallon's article, despite the limited admission it features.
This merits some reflection. Joseph Welch deliberately, consciously, and with forethought acted out a lie and a fraud. Yet he continues to be celebrated as a hero for exposing the morally debased character of Joseph McCarthy, when the facts of the case do exactly the opposite and instead expose Welch as an unprincipled and dishonest opportunist, with accomplices among the press and historians who continue the deception even now. Every time someone runs the sound bite of "Have you no sense of decency, sir...," the lie is repeated. Often enough, this may be done by people who don't know any better; but it can be exposed in the easiest way, by showing the page of the New York Times with the story about Welch disqualifying Fisher from his team. When this is not done, we see the result of a decades long effort to conceal the full story, for which the number of guilty increases steadily, obviously including David A. Nichols.
Why would Eisenhower allow and promote such a circus? Why would Eisenhower do something that, in effect, would discredit the Republican Party for decades? My God, the Party of Joseph McCarthy, the man who falsely accused people of being Communists and ruined countless lives! This is still used in what is essentially Communist propaganda in American "education," politics, and the press. As with the book by Nichols and the review by Mallon. So what was Eisenhower's problem? Well, perhaps he wasn't that much of a Republican. The military prided itself on being above politics, but Eisenhower had made his name working for Democrat Presidents, FDR and Truman. He had friends. And Joe McCarthy had complaints about a lot them, since they had done little about Soviet penetration of the U.S. Government and had helped deliver Eastern Europe and China to Communist forces -- including George C. Marshall, a personal friend of Eisenhower. So Eisenhower personally disliked McCarthy. Also, Eisenhower openly declined to undo any of the destruction of the Constitution effected by the New Deal. We still live under this lawless regime.
We can still wonder why Truman was so tolerant of Communists and Soviet agents in the U.S. Government. One suggestion is that Omar Bradley had never given him the Venona transcripts, which had been decoded from Soviet cable traffic and that detailed much about Soviet espionage in the United States. However, Truman does seem to have received this information, and also everything that the FBI knew about Soviet espionage and Communist Party activity, which was considerable. Some of it Truman simply does not seem to have believed. He never accepted the guilt of Alger Hiss, despite the damning evidence against him. So part of that may have been self-deception and wishful thinking, qualities that are usually not otherwise attributed to Harry Truman -- but are the most charitable interpretation.
There never were more than two reasonable motives for obstructing security inquiries and timely action against Communists and Soviet agents. Either the Democrat Administrations were actively protecting Communists and Soviet agents, or they wanted to hush it up and cover it up to avoid the political embarrassment that would follow. If Joe McCarthy accomplished anything, it was to blow the lid off the cover-up. Which helped get Eisenhower elected (although Mallon says that McCarthy was on Eisenhower's "coattails," although that doesn't explain the defeat of McCarthy's Congressional enemies -- including Senator Millard Tydings [D-MD], who had already been defeated in 1950, and who was such a sore loser that he wanted to blame McCarthy, legeally, for his defeat). But then Eisenhower didn't want to embarrass his friends and mentors, so in effect the hush-up and cover-up continued. Anti-Communism was OK, as long as it was quiet and unembarrassing. But there was a price for this, for the Republicans at the time and for an honest history of the Cold War now, when the Left is just as active as ever, with all the same goals, regardless of whether they call themselves Communists, or perhaps something else, like "Democratic Socialists."
Let's see some final indications of the quality of scholarship that we are dealing with in Mr. Mallon. He says, "The chairmanship [of his Senate subcommittee] allowed the Wisconsin senator to hire as the subcommittee's counsel the cunning Roy Cohn, along with G. David Schine, the Tab Hunter-ish object of Cohn's affections." Notice the contemputous language here, and the implication that Schine was Cohn's lover. But more important than the scorn and implications is the omission. McCarthy also hired a young, admiring attorney, the later sainted and martyred Robert F. Kennedy. But was Kennedy "cunning" like Cohn? We don't know, since he isn't mentioned.
Kennedy did not get along with Cohn (perhaps because he was Jewish and a homosexual -- prejudices that Kennedy had that are not generally included in the Kennedy Mythos) and later left the team, but McCarthy remained close to the Kennedies. McCarthy became the godfather of Robert's first child, Kathleen Hartington Kennedy, later Townsend, who was named after his tragic sister, Kathleen Agnes Kennedy. Kathleen had become the Marchioness of Hartington by marrying William, Marquess of Hartington, the equally tragic heir to the Dukes of Devonshire.
They all died young, as would indeed Bobby Kennedy. And as would Joseph McCarthy. As would John F. Kennedy, who carefully absented himself from the Senate on the day of the Censure vote against Joseph McCarthy -- and who may have owed his Senate seat to McCarthy standing aside when Kennedy unseated Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (whom we have seen as a subsequent member of the Eisenhower Administration) -- perhaps the only case of McCarthy, if only by inaction, favoring a Democrat over a Republican. Bobby quietly attended McCarthy's funeral; and in later years, when reporters tried to solicit anti-McCarthy remarks from him, Kennedy refused to take the bait.
This is one of the great ironies of the McCarthy story. No one is more hated by "liberals" than McCarthy, or more loved than the Kennedies. Yet the Kennedies would not turn on him, as so many others did, as members of his own Party did (but not Barry Goldwater or Evertt Dirksen, who voted against Censure), and as his own President did. In the end, it was McCarthy's enemies who generally had "no sense of decency." They also seemed to be protecting Communists and Soviet agents.
Last but not least, although at the beginning of the article, we have Mr. Mallon referring to McCarthy's "demagogic and spectacularly ineffective hunting of communists in government (of which, yes, there were some)." This is nonsense, although part of the canard promoted by the anti-anti-Communist Left. In 1950, McCarthy eventually produced the names of 100 individuals, both from the inherited lists and the work of McCarthy's own researches, who were in or had been in the State Department, who were either Soviet agents, Communists, or sympathizers and "fellow travelers."
His information initially was from the FBI or from previous Congressional invesigations, and none of them was falsely accused, although this is what their defenders and "liberal" opinion claimed then and often continue to claim now. Also, McCarthy did not want to make the names public, since he did not want to expose people who might turn out to be innocent. The Democrats forced him to make the names public -- obviously so that they could subsequently smear him as exposing innocent people -- a strategy conducted simultaneously with the accusation that he had no names in the first place. That, indeed, was the level of game played by the Democrats -- an exercise in dishonesty and cynicism that staggers the mind. If Mr. Mallon is not aware of this, and of the results of McCarthy's later invesitigations, he has no business writing about these things. Is this the same kind of partisan dishonesty and cynicism? Has he no sense of decency?
We just keep getting more of this stuff from The Wall Street Journal. On September 11, 2017, we have a column by Philip Terzian, an editor at the presumptively conservative Weekly Standard, called "I Guess We're All McCarthyites Now" [p.A15].
Terzian's initial focus is Democrat Congressman Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois. Gutiérrez seems to have felt betrayed by General John Kelly, whom he understood to be favorable to legalizing children who arrived in the United States illegally. But Kelly then went along with Donald Trump's notice that the program of (illegally) tolerating these children would be discontinued in six months. Of course, Trump simply told Congress to write actual law that would legalize the program, so the accusation that he was eager to deport the children, who usually have no memory of living anywhere else, was not true. But Gutiérrez was livid, and he denounced General Kelly as "a hypocrite who is a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear... He has no honor and should be drummed out of the White House, along with the other white supremacists and those enabling the president's actions by 'just following orders.'"
Of course, Gutiérrez is simply a Democrat eager to invoke the lies and smears of recent Leftist politics. The idea that enforcing immigration law, which the Democrats left in place in 2013, is a matter of "white supremacy" is part of the typical libel and hyperbole of anti-American people in Congress, who now often happen to act like they represent Mexico or Central America rather than their American constituents. Somehow Trump's determination to do his Constitutional duty, by seeing that the laws are "faithfully executed," is something not to be "enabled."
The rest of the piece by Mr. Terzian follows from what it is that Mr. Gutiérrez's words remind him of. And that is, of course, Joseph McCarthy, who had nothing to say about immigration but who is, as we know, a whipping boy for all sorts of irrlevant issues.
Already Terzian has made a mistake. The dentist did complete loyalty forms, when he joined the Army, but later refused to certify his lack of Communist connections on similar forms. This raised the question of perjury on the original forms. Testiying before McCarthy's committee, Peress took the Fifth Amendment in response to questions about all this -- Terzian only says that the dentist was "defiant and evasive," which is typical of Communists but isn't quite the whole story. Nevertheless, Peress was going to receive an Honorable discharge.
What Terzian leaves out is that McCarthy did not just "summon" General Zwicker. The General had interviewed and cooperated with McCarthy's Committee staffers, going over what his testimony would be. He was expected to be a friendly witness. Instead, he double-crossed the Committee and, "patiently and, presumably, very carefully," acted to protect the Pentagon and cover up what had been done. McCarthy, naturally, was furious. But Zwicker had been threatened. We still don't really know by whom -- point man for the Pentagon against McCarthy, Army counsel John Adams, looks like the perpetrator -- but it must have included the people who all along had been obstructing McCarthy's investigation into the irregularities in security at Ft. Monmouth and elsewhere in New Jersey. The "the base" that Terzian mentions, Camp Kilmer, is where the FBI, not just McCarthy, "believed" that Peress was a Communist.
With all this, course, we are a long way from Luis Gutiérrez and immigration policy.
Since the Army-McCarthy hearings had nothing to do with the Peress case, and also nothing to do with the issues for which McCarthy was dishonestly censured by the Senate, Terzian can only say that one "led directly to" the other in terms of the "fake news" that was generated by the Democrats and by the people who actually were, apparently, in the business of protecting Soviet spies at Ft. Monmouth -- about whom we later learned more from Soviet archives.
But the funniest part of Terzian's comment may be about McCarthy's "descent into oblivion." Not much oblivion if Philip Terzian is still talking about him.
Terzian then gives us some details about how Zwicker was "an honorable officer." As it happens, the Pentagon repaid Zwicker hansomely, while the previous commander at Ft. Monmouth, Major General Kirke B. Lawton, who had cooperated with McCarthy, and who had many complaints about how the Pentagon was handling security at the base, found his career ruined in vindictive retaliation. Mr. Terzian doesn't mention that, of course. It might raise questions, as McCarthy did, about what was going on.
So we might wonder. Who gets attacked more by Philip Terzian? Luis Gutiérrez? Or Joe McCarthy? We could do a word count. But, either way, this is a lot of (incomplete, deceptive, redacted) information about McCarthy just to accuse Luis Gutiérrez of being a dishonest politician. And the whole business is a long way from demonstrating that "We're All McCarthyites Now." So Philip Terzian is a "McCarthyite" too? If a dishonest portrayal of Joseph McCarthy is "McCarthyism," perhaps he is. But it is as though there is a standing order, obeyed by Terzian, to take a swipe at McCarthy, and perpeduate the lying narrative about him, whenever possible. It is almost as though there is a vast conspiracy...
Michael Blechman, at 26 years old, worked for Robert Kennedy in 1968. He says that he was in the "honor guard" at Kennedy's funeral. He has, he says, remained a liberal Democrat ever since. However, in a Wall Street Journal column, "Liberalism Isn't What It Used to Be" [June 21, 2019, A15], Blechman expresses dismay at what the "progressives" of the Party are now becoming. Along the way, he compares such progressives to Joseph McCarthy, which is what caught my attention. So Blechman is not one of the Republicans or Conservatives trying to appease Democrats or the Press with disparagements of McCarthy, as I have been considering above. He is, perhaps, one of the people that those Republicans or Conservatives are trying to appease. Thus, his own disparagements of McCarthy are the paradigm followed by appeasers and RINO's. So it is nice to examine what the paradigm is.
The points where Blechman now disagrees with the progressives are:
Apart from perpetuating the bogus McCarthy narrative, there are some curious things about Blechman's column. One is his failure to note that all of the problems he identifies are nothing new. There have always been people who did not believe in equal opportunity based on merit or character, or due process, or in the presumption of innocence, or in the right to counsel, or in free speech. There was a name for such people. They were called "Communists"; and the "tenured radicals" who now dominate American education are simply the New Left ideologues who set out to achieve power back in the 60's. But calling them what they are, "Communists," and what the ideology at American universities now is, i.e. "Communism," cannot be spoken, because that would be "McCarthyism." So the impression that Blechman gives, that the turning away from liberal ideals, is something new, is not true. It has a long history. It is just that part of that history is to smear and falsify anti-Communism. Indeed, we can imagine how essential that is to the whole process. It is certainly effective with Michael Blechman.
Another curious thing about Blechman's column is, of course, Robert F. Kennedy, whose face beams out from the midst of the Wall Street Journal page. But Blechman doesn't mention that Robert Kennedy worked for Joseph McCarthy, who was a family friend of all the Kennedies. McCarthy was the godfather of Robert Kennedy's eldest child. Jack Kennedy, whom McCarthy had supported against the Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, deliberately missed the censure vote against McCarthy. And Robert quietly attended McCarthy's funeral. The press could not get Kennedy to say anything disparaging about McCarthy, at whose knee, we might say, Robert learned how to prosecute and convict Jimmy Hoffa.
So Michael Blechman's lament about the totalitarianism of the "progressives" in his own party is missing a critical element, namely the history of this kind of business. "Democratic Socialism" means East Germany -- where Berthold Brecht (1898-1956), one step ahead of Contempt of Congress, settled down to Soviet Block celebrity, safe with his Austrian passport, his West German publishers, and his Swiss bank accounts. The Progressive Niravna for yet another "Commie Martyr."
If The Wall Street Journal has a policy to smear Joseph McCarthy for things that had nothing to do with him at every opportunity, the New York Post may have a similar rule. Thus, on February 23, 2020, we find a column by Kevin D. Williamson called "Crush and Bern, The Bernie Bros have turned McCarthy with their terrifying witch hunts" [p.30]. Williamson definitely gives us a heads-up with both "McCarthy" and "witch hunts" in the subtitle of his piece.
So let's review. A "witch hunt" is an investigation for something that doesn't exist. There were no real witches in Salem. Instead, a "witch hunt" is in the business of accusing people of being something that they are not, and that, in fact, doesn't exist. This is just for the purpose of smearing such people, and discrediting their politics, or their character. Innocent people were killed in the Salem witch trials, based on "spectral evidence," which meant the testimony of young girls who had seen in their dreams defendants communing with the Devil. This was taken seriously, for a time, with shameful consequences.
Kevin D. Williamson mentions both Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in association with "witch hunts." Since both were investigating Communists and agents of the Soviet Union, categories that significantly overlapped, if not coincided, this would mean there actually were no Communists or agents of the Soviet Union to be investigated. This is nonsense.
To summarize, first, Joseph McCarthy mainly wanted to know why security risks in the State Department, identified by Congressional investigators and the FBI, were still there. And, later, he wanted to know why security risks at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, who had been dismissed by the Commanding Officer, were being reinstated by anonymous authorities at the Pentagon. For his investigation into the latter, McCarthy was thrown under the bus by President Eisenhower and the Senate Republicans. We have literally never learned who was overruling the CO of Ft. Monmouth, which was a complex of secret research facilities. The Russians later boasted that they knew all about what was done at Ft. Monmouth.
Second, the Democrats, to this day, have never forgiven the House Un-American Activities Committee for exposing Alger Hiss as a Communist and a Soviet agent. The extent of the damage that Hiss did to the national interest of the United States, and indeed of civilization and humanity, in working for the Russians has yet to be fully revealed. There are still books written white-washing the betrayal and deceptions perpetrated at the Yalta Conference in 1945, which condemned Poland and Eastern Europe to decades and tyranny, poverty, and murder. Sometimes the role of Hiss there isn't even mentioned.
What Williamson's article is mainly about is the desire of supporters of Bernie Sanders to "blacklist" people, especially Democrats, who didn't support Bernie. I count the word "blacklist" and its verbal reflexes no less than seven times, and I may have missed some. But the infamous anti-Communist "blacklist" was no creation of either Joseph McCarthy or the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was used by the Hollywood Producers Association to keep people out of their industry who had not co-operated with Congressional investigations of Communists, etc. When Ronald Reagan was the President of the Screen Actors Guild, he just wanted to be sure that no one was being falsely accused of being a Communist. Some people, of course, like Zero Mostel (1915-1977), got blacklisted because they refused to "name names" of Communists they knew. This violated their playground ethos of not "ratting" people out, even people who were the moral equivalent of Nazis. Mostel then moved to work on Broadway, where there was no blacklist.
So let's review. Conservatives or others on the Right who adopt the narratives, paradigms, and terminology of the Left, without challenging their premises or presuppositions, are fools. The confusions and stupidities involved can go pretty deep. Thus, Williamson has an illustration of Bernie Sanders wearing a T-shirt with what, I gather, is supposed to be an image of Joe McCarthy on it. This is captioned, "Some of Bernie Sanders' fans sound more like proponents of anti-communist Joseph McCarthy than college-campus icon Che Guevara." No, Kevin. It's Che. And that is because (1) Joseph McCarthy was not responsible for the Hollywood Blacklist, and (2) the practice of the "Sanderistas" is precisely the Stalinism enforced by Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and countless universities in the United States. This is where the term "politically correct" comes from, and where it is applied, which is why, for a whle, the Left furiously denied that there was such a thing as "political correctness." Now they don't bother.
Kevin D. Williamson does not mention Joseph Stalin, or the practices of Communist regimes, or even politicaly correctness, even once. This makes it more likely that the supporters of Bernie Sanders will get the Communist regime that they hope and work for. The Wall Street Journal of July 11-12, 2020 [pp.C7-8], features a book review, "Bully's Pulpit," by Duncan White, who is identified as "associate director of Studies in History & Literature at Harvard University," and as the author of Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War [2019]. Thus, while we might think that White is an actual Cold War historian, he may really be more in literature rather than history. Not that it makes much difference. This sickness of "English Department Marxism" now infects academic history as much as literature. His review exposes him as biased and either ill informed or deliberately deceptive in these matters.
The book White reviews is Demagogue, a biography of Joseph McCarthy, by Larry Tye. Tye is a journalist and biographer. Of special interest in this case is his 2016 biography of Robert Kennedy. From the title of Tye's book, "Demagogue," and the word "Bully" in the title of White's review, we can see that neither of them much likes or respects Joseph McCarthy. We are tipped off. Given the association of Robert Kennedy (and, really, all the Kennedies) with McCarthy, we might wonder whether that even comes up in either Tye's Kennedy or his McCarthy books. It certainly doesn't come up in White's review, a fact that contributes to the impression of bias and deception we find in it.
White doesn't mention that Kennedy quietly attended McCarthy's funeral, or that he would not disparage him to the press. What we do get, however, is that Roy Cohn later taught his evil ways to, guess who, Donald Trump -- without mentioning that Robert Kennedy had learned his techniques as a prosecutor, which bagged Jimmy Hoffa, from Joseph McCarthy himself. This leaves one wondering, not just about Tye's treatment of McCarthy, but whether his biography of Kennedy was a fawning apologia. It would be surprising if the hostility and animus for Trump evident in White's review does not reflect that in Tye's book, if not his other book also.
It still intrigues me that in treatments of a man who is typically accused of lying, and White is explicit about that, we find one false statement after another about him, even apart from the half-truths and distortions. A good example is this:
For a quote that includes the word "mendacity," this statement itself contains a serious lie. McCarthy had a list, not of communists, but of "security risks," who might be Communists, Soviet agents, or "fellow travelers," in the State Department. It wasn't his list. It was a list compiled by Congressional investigators and the FBI. In fact, as I have examined above, there was more than one list, and a pointless controversy developed over what list McCarthy was referring to in the Wheeling speech.
But White relies, not on actual information about the speech, but on the sort of fairy tale that my high school teacher invoked when he said that McCarthy had waved a blank piece of paper -- meaning he had no list at all. McCarthy simply wanted to know what was being done about the remaining security risks in the State Department. Congressional Democrats required that McCarthy reveal the names of the people on his list, which he did; and then, of course, the Democrats accused him of smearing people who might be innocent, which is what McCarthy had said himself. The dishonesty of all that is characteristic of almost all references to Joseph McCarthy ever since.
White follows up one lie with another. He says:
McCarthy only had the power to "pursue" anyone from January 1953, when the Republicans took control of the Senate, until McCarthy's censure in December, 1954. Since much of the time in the previous months had been taken up dealing with investigations of him by the Senate, McCarthy had little time for his own investigations in much of 1954. White says that McCarthy's "act would run for four years," yet little of that was when McCarthy had any power to do anything. Instead, Democrats, as long as they controlled Congress, went after McCarthy himself with continuing investigations, including fruitless and unwarranted inquiries into the finances of his relatives, which White doesn't mention.
So how did "10,000 Americans" lose their jobs over that? How did Joseph McCarthy put anyone in jail, by running a Senate sub-committee for a year or so? Of course, Americans lost jobs because of the "loyalty oath" program of the Truman Administation, or the "Black List" of the Hollywood Producers Association. McCarthy had nothing to do with those things. And it was the Truman Administration that had been putting people in jail for Contempt of Congress, perjury, and other crimes. White implies that the "some 200" who "spent time in jail" were victims of McCarthy, when he had no such power and no such role. There were suicides in the course of the investiation of communists by Congress, but that was before anyone had heard of Joe McCarthy.
So White has committed a common sophistry, smearing all of anti-Communism as a "witch hunt" and attributed its supposed excesses to Joseph McCarthy. The "witch hunt" was "McCarthyism." White then does mention that House Committee on Un-American Activities had already long existed, and that "eleven high-ranking members of the Communist Party USA were imprisoned in the fall of 1949," but without clarifying that many others were prosecuted for other crimes, none of which had anything to do with McCarthy.
White goes on to tell us:
If we wanted to regard Duncan White as a proper Cold War historian, this tears it. We know from Russian Sources, before Putin shut things down, that only about half the Soviet spies were ever caught. White is clearly trying to split the difference between the old Leftist denial that there were any spies, and the truth that spies and communist influence continued through the 1950's. No, he wants to say, there were no spies left by the time McCarthy got going, so all of his accusations and investigations were bogus.
We see a response to this sort of claim, that the spies had all been caught, here:
Nevertheless, White admits that McCarthy got some some communists, but "those genuine communists McCarthy did expose were, as Mr. Tye puts it, 'small-time union organizers or low-level bureaucrats'." OK, so they just weren't important enough.
But they were. The "China hands" who condemned millions of Chinese to tyranny and murder simply got away with it. Many were still in positions of respect and influence in 1950. More importantly, the people at Ft. Monmouth who were passing military secrets to the Russians in 1954, well, as far as we know, they were never stopped and never brought to justice. General Lawton knew who a lot of them were. But because the Army stopped Joseph McCarthy and destroyed him, nothing was ever really done about it -- except that many who were removed, were then afterwards restored to their positions.
When it comes to what McCarthy did actually investigate, we get no illuminating details. He says:
How these limited, focused investigations would then put "10,000 Americans" out of work is a little mysterious. However, White's dismissal of "the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth" is a deception that evades the issues involved. He says, "the evidence of spies at Fort Monmouth was thin," but that was not the primary issue. McCarthy wanted to know why security risks at Fort Monmouth, which had been removed by the commanding officer, were being reinstated by anonymous powers at the Pentagon. And White doesn't mention why this was important. Fort Monmouth, although perhaps no big deal as part of the "Army Signal Corps," was actually a string of research facilities of serious military importance.
Why was the commanding officer being overruled? And whether the "evidence of spies... was thin" or not, we know from Soviet records that the facilities were heavily pentrated by Soviet intelligence. There were spies. And we never found out who all they were. We know from Soviet sources and defectors that the Ft. Monmouth facilities leaked like a sieve and that the Russians had volumes of stolen documents. It is not clear that anything was ever done about this by the Army.
McCarthy never found out who was overruling the commanding officer. And, even decades later, we have never found out. If White were a real Cold War historian, he might be curious about that. But, of course, he isn't; and it sounds like he may not even be aware of the actual issue, for which Mr. Tye presumably has been no help. Why no one seems curious is about as curious as "the curious case of the dog in the night." The Pentagon keeps its secrets, even now; and the work of people like Tye and White makes sure of it. A properly paranoid conspiracy theoriest might wonder, "Are they actually getting paid off by the Pentagon?"
White doesn't mention that the Army-McCarthy hearings were of McCarthy, not by him, although we might get the drift from his other comments, for instance that "the army counterattacked by revealing the pressure Cohn and McCarthy had applied in trying to get [G. David Shine] Shine out of military service and, when that failed, to ensure that his time here was cushy." Both of these claims are false or deceptive, without, say, mentioning Shine's 4F draft status.
White also goes out of his way to characterize Shine as an "heir to a hotel fortune," unlike, say Robert Kennedy, who was only heir to the Wall Street and rum running fortune of old Joe Kennedy. As I have discussed above, Shine had already had a medical exemption from the draft and was already too old for the ordinary course of such things. The "pressure" is what was applied by the Army itself, which used the draft as a way of threatening people in Congress, depriving them of key staffers. They did draft David Shine, but the "cushy" service McCarthy negotiated was to allow Shine to finish the work he was doing for the Congressional committee. But that was a set-up just to make accusations against McCarthy and Cohn.
The Army-McCarthy hearings were then the investigation into whether McCarthy or Cohn used undue influence in all of this. They had not, and the hearings came to nothing -- which we wouldn't know from what White says -- except for the drama that was visible on television. The high point of that, of course, was the grandstanding Joseph Welch proclaiming, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" As we know now, this was all a fraud. White does not enlighten us.
Instead, he says, "McCarthy [was] claiming one of Welch's colleagues had links to a communist group." As it happens, Welch himself had previously admitted, to the press, that this staffer did have "links" to a communist front organization, which is why Welch had not brought him along down to Washington. At the time, McCarthy was perplexed how Welch could make is issue out of something he knew full well was true. But it made good television, good propaganda -- "McCarthy's reputation never recovered" -- and a good element in the fairy tale that Duncan White continues to mendaciously perpetrate on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
And, of course, White doesn't mention that McCarthy and Cohn were exonerated by the Army-McCarthy hearings, as McCarthy had been cleared in all the other "witch hunt" investigations of him. If they were going to get McCarthy for something, they would need to come up with some other sophistry, which they did.
Why does anti-anti-Communist propaganda continue to be promoted in our own time? The reason may be more clear now than it has been for many years. Bernie Sanders says he is a "democratic socialist"; but if we attach his socialism to the fascist totalitarianism evident at American universities, in the American media, and increasingly even in American business, However, you cannot call Sanders a "communist," because that would be "McCarthyism." Angela Davis, who was the Vice-Presidential Candidate of the actual Communist Party USA, cannot be called a "communist," because that would be "McCarthyism." Thus, the enemies of freedom, of America, and of civilization cannot be identified for what they are because the continuing demonization of Joseph McCarthy puts the proper terminology out of polite discourse. And Republicans, being the passive cowards that they are, go along with it, as we have seen with many examples on this page.
That did not happen right away. The censure of Joseph McCarthy was not for the cause of his falsely accusing people of being communists. Duncan White doesn't mention what McCarthy was censured for. It was for being rude to a Congressional committee, the committee of Senator Guy Gilette (D-IA), which exceeded its powers to investigate the finances, not just of McCarthy since he had been elected, as had been ordered by the Senate, but the finances of McCarthy and his entire family for their whole lives. This was pure political harrassment, and McCarthy was justified in refusing to cooperate for things the Committee had no business doing. And the committee came up with nothing anyway.
Censuring McCarthy for this, when the Committee was in the previous Congress, was a sanction unprecedented in American history. But this is part of the deception that McCarthy was censured for accusing people for being communists, i.e. for "McCarthyism." But if McCarthy wasn't censured for "McCarthyism," then what was the point?
Well we see the point. By obscuring the true business, the Left has been able to slowly discredit anti-Communism itself, as though McCarthy were actually censured, not even for "McCarthyism," but for anti-Communism. It was all a "witch hunt." Which, as White says, put those 10,000 Americans out of work, and others in jail, probably with Joe McCarthy personally and gleefully turning the key.
The result we are left with is that communism must have been innocent and good. And since the word "communism" is banned from public discourse, we are left with a majority of ignorant and foolish youth believing that socialism is innocent and good. America could be destroyed because this long running strategy.
But there is more. The political side of the work of Tye and White is exposed by the attack on Donald Trump in White's review. Roy Cohn taught McCarthyism to Trump, therefore Trump, and his voters, are just as bad as Joseph McCarthy. The bien pensants know that it is all of a piece with the evil of America:
Heaven forbid that anyone should "attack" the "Washington establishment" or the "East Coast elite." I don't know about Joe McCarthy, but these are certainly targets of Donald Trump, or of all Americans who are tired of their government being stolen from them by a hostile ruling class. As for "Jews," perhaps White has not noticed that "Cohn" ( And perhaps White has not noticed that the attempt of Democrats to disprove the Communist Party membership of Annie Lee Moss, who was black, consisted of arguments that black people are too stupid to be communists. That from a Democratic Party that at the time was still four-square for Segregation. As for the "legacy of Roosevelt," the downfall of McCarthy now looks like betrayal by Dwight Eisenhower, who didn't want to discredit colleagues from the Roosevelt years. This caused profound damage, not only to the Republican Party, but to the United States, that persists, and worsens, even until now.
As an example of how everyone foolishly accepts Leftist narratives, we have a column in the Wall Street Journal the Monday following the piece by Duncan White. This was "The Ideological Corruption of Science," where the physicist Lawrence Krauss points out that science departments are now infected with the "anti-racism" (i.e. anti-capitalist) ideology of the radical Left. This includes the "cancel culture" where physicist Stephen Hsu, the vice presient for research at Michigan State University, was forced to resign because they didn't like his research on genetics, and because of his "support" for research that showed no racial bias in police shootings. Of course, the existence of racial bias in police shootings is an unquesionable postulate and dogma of all Leftist politics. Thus we see how research is required to conform to political narratives, not only that can be falsified, but have been falsified. Everyone involved must be silenced.
Krauss has come in for notice in these pages for his endorsement of the atheism of George H. Smith. We have also seen some evidence that Krauss is not well informed on the history of astronomy.
Whether or not these problems make Krauss unreliable, his concern about the politicization of science is serious and well taken. But he falls prey to Leftist narratives:
For one thing, Krauss might explain why, when Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), who definitively showed that there had been "Ice Ages," and who previously had been against racism, came to accept it, this was all due to "bias" and not to evidence that he regarded as important. Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), to his great credit, resisted simplistic characterizations of such historical figures. Krauss should read him. But, of course, Krauss is repeating a political catechism to try and establish some kind of "progressive" credibiltiy even while he promotes heresy. He should know that never works.
My concern here, however, is Krauss's final comment, which continues the catechism. Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance in December 1953. It was not because of the science he had been doing, or for his "political views." It was over policy issues, such as the development of the hydrogen bomb (which the Soviet Union would build whatever we did), with lingering suspicions of Oppenheimer's communist (i.e. Soviet) connections, to some of which he admitted. Krauss must explain how his loss of a security clearance damaged Oppenheimer's research. It is not clear that Oppenheimer had actually been doing any research in years. He had been an administrator, with the Manhattan Project, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Atomic Energy Commission, etc. Krauss would also need to explain exactly by whom Oppenheimer was "ostracized," when his clash with Cold Warrior physicsts like Edward Teller (1908-2003) made him a hero and a martyr to many. And, of course, Oppenheimer's career and troubles had nothing to do with Joseph McCarthy.
So, as we have seen above, Krauss reaches for "McCarthyism," and accepts a Leftist narrative, when he is actually dealing with practices and ideologues that are Stalinist in both form, practice, and inspiration, by people who are totalitarian socialists, who might reasonably and honestly be called "communists." But we know why he can't go there, even if he wanted to.
The Wall Street Journal of December 19-20, 2020 [A13] featured a column, "The Monday When America Came Back," by Peggy Noonan, who was a speech writer for Ronald Reagan and has been a columnist and author since. Noonan has been favorably quoted on these pages but turned into a dangerous RINO during the Trump Administration. Her column in this case angered me, and I wrote a letter to the Journal:
Peggy Noonan laments the way that America’s elites have been destroying small business and the lives of working people, and that the elites not only don’t seem to care, they don’t even try to appear to care. Noonan reminds us that she has been writing about this for years. Which is true. However, she has begun her column by celebrating the election of Joe Biden, an absolute creation of the elites, whose election was arguably engineered, if not stolen, by them. And Noonan helped them. As much as she could.
She has said that Donald Trump is a “bad man” and “half-crazy.” But we have known for a while that Biden is a bad man, and senile dementia is also arguably worse than whatever Noonan thinks is Trump’s craziness. So her column doesn’t make any sense. And certainly America did not “come back” when the elites, in hock to China, have no care for working people, and not even for America’s national interest. Trump manifestly cared about both. Noonan’s incoherence makes her seem more than a little “half-crazy” herself. Noonan had written a previous column, "Who'll Be 2020's Margaret Chase Smith?" in the Journal on December 5-6, 2020 [p.A15]. In that column, Noonan celebrated the late Senator Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995), who gave a speech against Joseph McCarthy in June 1950. This makes it relevant to the issues I have been discussing here, and I have already mentioned Senator Smith above. Noonan's idea for writing column was to compare President Trump to McCarthy:
Noonan, indeed, has become very good at repeating Democrat talking points, as any good RINO should. That she is apparently unconcerned about election fraud, and how the Democrats were able to corrupt "an entire system" in many States, with the expressed intention of doing the same on the national level if elected, now exposes her as a prime enabler of the destruction of the Nation.
Over the years, the Democrats have been pursuing their strategy quite openly, since everything they've done about the election laws has made election fraud easier, and their opposition to voter ID laws has only one purpose -- so that fraudulent votes can be cast for the dead, for aliens, for people who are not who they say they are, and for others not qualified to vote in a particular election. When it is possible to register cats and dogs to vote, we know what is going on.
But we also have the phenomenon that the more open and obvious the strategy of fraud and lies, the easier somehow it is for the partisan liars to repeat slogans like "baseless charges." As Noonan has done here. The actions of Democrats and election officials in Pennsylvania, especially, were so blatant that no conscientious person can possibly say that there was no prima facie crime and misconduct involved. Thus, Noonan has left the ranks of conscientious commentators.
That Noonan writes a column comparing Donald Trump to Joseph McCarthy is, of course, a smear against Trump, even as it continues smears against McCarthy. The question in the title, "Who'll Be 2020's Margaret Chase Smith?" apparently is soliciting Republicans in Congress, like Mitt Romney, I suppose, to denounce Trump the way that Smith denounced McCarthy. This is both vicious and pathetic. Meanwhile, with the Democrats and their ideological minions denouncing everyone as racists, and America as racist, for all its history, Noonan doesn't seem to be looking for anyone to denounce that. This is especially eggregious when, defeated, Trump is no longer a threat to whatever it is that Noonan holds dear, but the Democrats and their companion totalitarian ideologues are a threat, a very grave one. If Noonan does eventually come around to noticing that, I wonder if she will even admit the guilt of her complicity.
Donald Trump conducted a barnstorming Presidential campaign, with up to five rallies a day, in different States, with thousands of enthusiastic people attending. Joe Biden spent the campaign, mostly, in his basement. To Peggy Noonan, Trump supporters apparently were the "deplorables" referenced by Hillary Clinton. They certainly get no notice or respect from Noonan, even though they are the very people despised by the elites whom Noonan supposedly opposes. Instead, they voted for Trump because they were voting against the elites. I don't think Noonan cared, or even tried to looked like she cared. The very sins Noonan identifies in those elites. It just means that now she is one of them. She does get to work from home, unlike all the people who have lost their job, or their business, with the draconian "lockdown" of restaurants and other small businesses.
But if Noonan now wants Trump, and his voters, denounced like Joseph McCarthy, she illustrates this by invoking the speech of Margaret Chase Smith against McCarthy in 1950. The timing of that speech was awkward. She was responding, on June 1st, to a speech that McCarthy had only given previously on February 9th. The dust had barely settled from her speech when North Korea invaded South Korea, on June 25th, raising the temperature considerably for Anti-Communism. Noonan protests that Smith was Anti-Communist herself; but let's see what Noonan has to say about her speech.
Noonan exposes herself as not knowing much about this issue, which is not unusual, as we've seen, with people who write about it. As a matter of fact, Communists and Soviet agents had "infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels"; but McCarthy himself, at that point, was only talking about the State Department. And he did not have a list of "known communists," only people, according to others, who were security risks because, like John Stewart Service, they might be Communists or Soviet or Chinese agents. And, as we have seen above, more than one list was involved, none of them compiled by McCarthy -- hence the confusion about the number of names on the list. Noonan's use of "claimed" is characteristic of this kind of rhetoric. Later, McCarthy's staffers were able to refine a list and add extra names. The names on the list were only publicly disclosed at the demand of Senate Democrats, who wanted to "claim" that there was no list at all. McCarthy didn't think that the names should be made public because those involved were only suspected, not proven, to be disloyal. This is the opposite of the reputation that has been fixed on McCarthy.
Noonan awkwardly asserts, on behalf of Smith, that, in the face of Communism, "you don't defeat it with lies." Unfortunately, the lies so far in her column seem to be her own, or those she repeats from the pro-Communist apologetics that have been current ever since.
Well, of course it proved nothing, at least not about the subjects of the list. It did prove that McCarthy had a list, which some later, as I have noted, wanted to claim that he didn't. This must have been before the Democrats, who, of course, controlled the Senate at the time, and who were going to investigate McCarthy, not Communists, demanded be made public.
That is the last we hear from Noonan, or Smith, about actual Soviet espionage. Instead, Noonan quotes some of Smith's defense of free speech, which was totally irrelevant to the issues at hand.
People are tired ot "being afraid of speaking their mind lest they be politially smeared as 'Communists' or 'Fascists.'... Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in American."
She took on both parties, accusing the Democrats of showing laxness and "complacency" toward "the threat of communism here at home" and the Republicans of allowing innocent people to be smeared. Much of this actually had nothing to do with Joseph McCarthy. Who was this, by the way, who had lost "his right to his livelihood"? People on the Hollywood Producers' Black List? They got there, usually, for Contempt of Congress; and anyone who "happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs" would only be in trouble if those "unpopular beliefs" happened to be Communism, or Fascism, and they were asked out them, under Oath, under subpoena. If the issue was "freedom of speech," why were people concealing their beliefs, or those of other people they knew, and not forthrightly expressing them? There was nothing illegal about even being a Communist. All that was going on long before anyone had heard of Joseph McCarthy.
If it was true that the Democrats were "showing laxness and 'complacency' toward 'the threat of communism here at home'," how was one supposed to do anything about that without being smeared with "McCarthyism"?
Noonan's column would be more honest and relevant if, instead of an attack on Donald Trump and his voters, it was an attack on the way that now anyone can be and are being fired and lose "his reputation or his right to his livelihood" for saying things like, "All lives matter," or that the Marxist group "Black Lives Matter" doesn't care about the "black lives" lost to crime and gang shootings. But Noonan continues the distortions of the polemics of Democrats against McCarthy and Anti-Communism, in great measure by failing to identify the sickness at American universities, now spreading to government and business, not as "McCarthyism" but as Stalinism. The actual Communists are back, but, of course, they can't be called that; because that would be "McCarthyism." People who do not believe in free speech cannot be criticized because that would be "attacking," what, free speech?!
Along the way, we learn from Noonan that Margaret Chase Smith "supported Social Security and Medicare." This is, of course, the ultimate problem. Post-War Republicans made their peace with the New Deal, despite its destruction of Constitutional Government. In those terms, they are all RINO's, and there really is no true Opposition Party to the Democrats. But some, as we see, are more RINO than others. Noonan has become one of the worst ones. Her lipservice protests against the Ruling Class are meaningless when all her actions and rhetoric, for years now, have enabled those intent on destroying America. And she continues to promote what we might see as a kind of RINO "Original Sin," among several, of accepting the Democrat narrative about Joseph McCarthy, which they use to conceal their own commitments and intentions. Democrats don't want free speech, first because they don't honestly take advantage of it, concealing their beliefs with lies and evasions, second because they want to silence opposition and dissent -- like good Stalinists do. And Noonan, like her Democrat and RINO friends, says that Donald Trump is the one to "damage democracy itself"? It is a very terrible joke.
The Wall Street Journal of July 20, 2021 [A17] featured a column, "The Hedgehogs of Critical Race Theory," by Lance Morrow, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Unlike some discussions of Critical Race Theory, Morrow addresses the Marxist roots of "Theory" and Critical Race Theory. I just read a piece at Fox News that didn't bother to do that, so Morrow gets some minor kudos. However, my only concern here is that Morrow, apparently following the style guide of The Wall Street Journal, throws in a standard dismissive reference to Joe McCarthy:
Of course, as we have seen, McCarthy wasn't looking under "every bed." From 1950 until the Republicans assumed control of Congress in 1953, McCarthy's targets, and the public controversies, almost exclusively involved the people in the State Department who had worked to sabotage Nationalist China and thus helped the Communists come to power in China. We are still living with the terrible consequences of that business, and most of the people responsible, like John Steward Service (d.1999), got away with it, in part because of the successful destruction of McCarthy, betrayed by his own Republican President.
While Reagan was finally able to defeat the Soviet Union, the Left had nevertheless mostly succeeded in discrediting all anti-Communism as "McCarthyism." In polite company or public discourse, no one can even call Angela Davis a "Communist," even though she had been the Vice-Presidental Candidate of the actual Communist Party USA. If you in fact openly belong to the Communsit Party, I think it is reasonable to assume that you are a Communist, and equally reasonable to call you one.
When Reagan said that the Soviet Union was the "Evil Empire," the ruling class never got over giggling about it, or exhibiting all their indignation and self-righteousness -- until, that is, the Soviet Union collapsed. Then they were quiet for a few years, preparing, of course, for a new era of attacks on America and capitalism -- about which Lance Morrow writes pretty well, if only he were better informed about the time when Communists and Soviet agents had infiltrated the United States Government.
The Wall Street Journal of Septemer 6, 2022 [A17] featured a column, "The Left Gets Fascism Backward," by Lance Morrow, who we have just seen above.
In a generally good column, which appropriately reverses the common accusations of "Fascism" by the Left onto the Left itself, Morrow nevertheless could not resist trotting out the Leftist narrative about Joseph McCarthy, again:
McCarthy, of course, did not "implode." He was sabotaged -- by President Eisenhower. Nor was he "loose in the land." All of his investigations were narrow and focused, however often he needed to reply to other critics, like Edward R. Morrow.
What did him in, as we have seen, were his questions why the security risks at Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey, which had been removed by the commanding officer there, were quietly replaced, without explanation, by someone at the Pentagon. McCarthy simply wanted to know who was doing that, and why.
We now know, of course, that Ft. Monmouth, with its military research facilities, was a particular target of Soviet espionage. Because Eisenhower turned against him, and because of the bogus charges voted on for a Censure by the Senate, McCarthy never found out who was reinstating those security risks. Sixty-eight years later, we still do not know. It remains one of the principal secrets and mysteries of Cold War history, and we must face the fact that President Eisenhower himself apparently did not want the answer known, ever.
Thanks to the mythology now still perpetuated by Lance Morrow, and so many others, that key question still never even gets asked. If Ft. Monmouth even comes up in public discourse, the whole problem is dismissed as involving just one Communist dentist -- and McCarthy's whole investigation mischaracterised as "an attack on the Army" -- all the better to turn Americans against him. The Russians could not have planned it better. Perhaps they did.
The February 10, 2023, New York Post, featured a column, "Twitter Censorship is the Modern-Day Red Scare," by Jonathan Turley.
It begins with this:
The Red Scare is back and it is going blue. If the Democrats were using all their powers to conceal and protect communists in the United States government, as they were, then one might reasonably say that they were "the bedfellow of international communism." Why they were doing that would be something else, whether it was just ass-covering, or something more sinister. Why the Eisenhower Administration protected security risks at Ft. Monmouth would be another question. If President Eisenhower's anti-communist bona fides are above reproach, it would still be nice to know, decades later, who in the Pentagon was protecting those risks, and why that was tolerated -- let alone why we still do not know.
Otherwise, the rest of Turley's statement includes more than one serious distortion of the historical record. First of all, the "Red Scare" usually means events after World War I, not after World War II -- although I see that the former can be called the "First Red Scare," and anti-communism later the "Second." I think this is an innovation, perhaps to try and discredit any concern about radicals.
There wasn't much organized communism in the United States in 1919, but there were radicals and anarchists whose many bombings, usually sent by mail, did alarm the nation. One bombing led to the prominence of J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) and then to the creation of the FBI, whose recent misconduct is actually the topic of Turley's article.
Rather than the actual, original "Red Scare," Turley wants to invoke "McCarthyism," which he defines as "the use of blacklists and personal attacks to silence critics." The problem there is that the infamous Hollywood "blacklist" had nothing to do with Joseph McCarthy, or even with anyone in government. It was the Hollywood Producers Association condemning people who had refused to cooperate in Congressional investigations into communism, many of whom were found guilty of Contempt of Congress. They were thus, strictly speaking, criminals. At the same time, none of this was very effective in any effort to "silence critics." Critics of the House Committee on Un-American Activities had been at it for years; and as soon as Joseph McCarthy, in 1950, began to complain about security risks in the State Department, Democrats unloaded on him and kept at it constantly from then on. So I'm wondering exactly who was "silenced" by "McCarthyism"? Actually, in the end, it was McCarthy who was silenced.
Communists, of course, usually silenced themselves, since much of the problem was their failure to frankly admit their own loyalties, commitments, and goals.
From McCarthy's original prominence in 1950, most Congressional investigations in the matter, right down to the "Army-McCarthy hearings" (April–June 1954), were invesigations of McCarthy, not by McCarthy, trying to discredit him. None of this did; but the Senate censured him anyway, just, indeed, to silence him.
In recent years, we discover that the FBI, and other federal agencies, have been engaged in censorship of Republicans, conservatives, and others by instructing tech companies, like Twitter, Google, and Facebook, to remove people from their services, or in other ways hamper their ability to communicate through the services ("shadow banning," etc.). This was illegal, since government agencies cannot contract out to private agents actions that would violate civil rights if done by the government directly. Censorship violates the First Amendment. For some reason, the courts have been slow to sanction these practices, despite very clear case law and evidence in the matter. The bias of many judges, in supporting Democrats, is obvious. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and began releasing e-mail communications between Twitter and the government agencies, the extent of the problem became obvious. FBI whistle-blowers will also be testifying to Congress about it.
Turley is a professor at George Washington University Law School, and he has appeared before Congress:
The files show dozens of FBI and government employees actively seeking the censorship of citizens and others for their viewpoints. In my testimony, I warned that this was reminiscent of the McCarthy period where the FBI played a role in the establishment of blacklists for socialist, communists, and others. I encouraged Congress not to repeat its failures from the 1950s by turning a blind eye to such abuse. Since the FBI had been investigating communists for years, well before anyone had heard of Joseph McCarthy, Turley's reference to "the McCarthy period" would seem to apply to all sorts of things, and all sorts of times, that had nothing to do with Joseph McCarthy. Was McCarthy instructing the FBI to compile "blacklists"? No, he wasn't. And he didn't have the authority to do so anyway. Did the FBI compile "blacklists," or, more to the point, the Hollywood blacklist? No it didn't. Does Turley mean to say that the "failures from the 1950s" include the failure of the FBI to identify about half of the Soviet agents who we now know were working in the United States? It doesn't sound like it. Instead, he relies on the canard that it was a "witch-hunt" victimizing honest liberals.
The Department of Justice of the United States, under Democrat Administrations, did release lists of Communist Front Organizations. One of those was the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), which still exists and is still as radical and, essentially, pro-communist as it ever was. Indeed, on March 5, 2023, 23 rioters, with Antifa associations, were arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, while attacking a police and fire training center, which was under construction. The rioters used firebombs, fireworks, bricks, etc. to attack police and set equipment on fire. They were arrested and charged as "domestic terrorists." One of them was a fellow named Tom Jurgens, who was a lawyer for the radical Southern Poverty Law Center and also, of all things, for the National Lawyers Guild. These worthies claimed that the terrorist rioters were just "demonstrators" and that Jurgens was no more than an "observer" trying to protect their "rights" as they violently attacked police and vandalized the facility.
Now we know that NLG "observers" are actually spotters for Antifa, reporting to them on the movements of police or the presence of under-cover officers, who might be filming the riots. This, of course, would result in attacks on the officers. Antifa doesn't like being filmed, since they don't want people to know about their real behavior. This is why they've brutally attacked Andy Ngo more than once -- calling for his death -- since he reports on them.
The rioters, in line with Antifa tactics, had arrived as ostensive participants in a nearby music festival and then broke away to make their attack. Leftists groups, consequently, charged that the police were indiscriminately arresting attendees at the music festival. Only two of the 23 arrested were even residents of Georgia, and two were even aliens. This was also consistent with Antifa tactics of drawing soldiers from all over the country, usually white, privileged, college graduates, which indeed looked to be the background of the arrestees.
As we have seen, on June 9, 1954, when Democrat lawyer Joseph Welch challenged McCarthy to name someone associated with Communists, McCarthy named one of Welsh's own lawyers, Fred Fisher, who had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild. Welch famously rebuked McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency?" Yet Welch knew about Fisher's background; and he had already told the New York Times that this was why Fisher was not going to Washington with him. He was tainted.
So Welch knew that McCarthy was right, and he simply put on an act for the televison cameras, knowing that it was a fraud: A very effective fraud, since it is still "common knowledge" that this rebuke discredited and destroyed McCarthy.
So Jonathan Turley is still deceived by the fraud perpetrated by a totally dishonest Joseph Welch, even as we see the muddle and confusion he perpetuates about the whole "McCarthy period." He is still promoting the mythology of Joseph McCarthy cultivated by the Democratic Party since 1950. In many ways, it is worse that it has ever been. Democrats, many of whom have openly praised and supported the Cuban dictatorship for years, must smile to see their distortions and propaganda repeated by Republicans and "conservatives." Doesn't anyone, indeed, have a sense of decency about this?
The March 18-19, 2023, Wall Street Journal, contained a review of the book Crooked, by Nathan Masters, "How Teapot Dome Boiled Over" [p.C9]. This was about the corrupt Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, and the attendant Teapot Dome Scandal. The review was written by Lindsay M. Chervinsky, identified as a "presidental historian."
Much of the review is about Senator Burton Kendall Wheeler (1882-1975), whose attacks from the Senate helped drive the investigation into Teapot Dome and into the corruption of Harry Daugherty. But Chervinsky decides that not all of this was necessarily for the best:
Where above we have seen Shepard Smith say that McCarthy had "ruined the lives of hundreds of people," Chervinsky has now upped the ante to "thousands of innocent people." And again, for the brief period when McCarthy had any real power (1953-1954), we must ask, "Can you name one?" And, of course, Chervinsky, practicing the "McCarthyism" she is ostensively condemning, doesn't name anyone.
Since Chervinsky can assume that "everyone knows" what McCarthy did, this continues to help conceal what he actually did do, and what was done against him. The "congressional hearings" of the actual McCarthy era were mostly against him, not by him. His own investigations, as into the security risks reinstated at Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey, by anonymous actors in the Pentagon, are now safely forgotten, or misrepresented; and we still do not know who was overriding the Commanding Officer of Ft. Monmouth, whose own career was "ruined," not by McCarthy, but by the same anonymous Pentagon actors. And we still do not know who moved Communist Party member Annie Lee Moss "from the lunch room to the code room," as McCarthy asked in a flim clip that is actually often shown.
So, with Lindsay M. Chervinsky, as with so many others here, we are left to wonder if she is simply clueless, or if she knows that she is continuing a cover-up of bad actors who even now remain anonymous. One might wonder if this was indeed some sort of "sweeping communist plot."
The July 8-9, 2023, Wall Street Journal, contained a review of the book Under the Eye of Power, by Colin Dickey, "All the Secret Histories" [p.C9], which is a book about conspiracy theories. The review was written by Alex Beam, who we have already seen in these pages writing about the architect Mies van der Rohe.
Of course, that idea that there weren't Communists or Soviet spies in the United States government was not the denial of a "conspiracy theory." It was Communist propaganda. And, at the same time, the pursuit of Communists long antedated Joseph McCarthy, which is why people confuse him with the House Un-Amerian Activities Committee; and it would continue down to the person of President John F. Kennedy. Mr. Beam and Mr. Dickey both seem to rely on the surviving lies of pro-Communist propaganda, which is a living problem in American politics.
Further in the review we get:
This seems to invoke the canard that McCarthy did not have a list of security risks in the State Department. This is what I heard from my High School teacher, who said that McCarthy waved a blank piece of paper. As I have noted, McCarthy actually had two lists, which weren't even his, although his staff added to them. So this means that Mr. Beam and Mr. Dickey have no idea what they are talking about. They are relying on no more than hearsay, relying on ignorance and bias, from sources friendly to the Democratic Party of the time, or to Communists.
So this is the quality of the Cold War history that we often get. People who don't know what they are talking about but repeat the "spin" of apologists for Communism. Joseph McCarthy is just collateral damage. He was too much of a threat.
The Essential Anti-Communist Bibliography
The infamous rant of Elizabeth Warren (ἀνάξιος ) Warren's basic implication, examining what she actually says, is that businesses are parasites. They contribute no good to us or to society, and we therefore allow them to exist and prosper just out of the condescending goodness of our hearts. They can keep a "big hunk" of their profits as along as we take our "hunk," since we are doing a bunch of stuff for them, like roads and police, which evidently we aren't already doing for ourselves and to which they make no contribution. Since this "hunk" is mostly going to be extracted from small businesses with people who are never going to get rich, Warren's antipathy, in Marxist terms, is directed at the "petty bourgeoisie" rather than proper capitalists. It all can be summed up in one demand: "Hey, creeps, you owe us a lot of money."
There is no sense in any of this that businesses provide any goods to the public. The only services mentioned by Warren are those provided by government, i.e. roads, schools, and police. Does Warren even know that people obtain necessary and desirable goods and services from businesses (like pancakes), and that this is usually
No one seems as certain that they know what the Republicans need to do to win presidential elections as those Republicans who have lost presidential elections, such as Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Bob Dole. Moreover, people take them seriously, and seem not to notice that what the losers advocate is the opposite of what won Ronald Reagan two landslide election victories.
The Republicans
They ["New York Intellectuals"] all condemned the viciousness of Senator Joseph McCarthy's hunt for domestic communists through the House Un-American Activities Committee[!], but they did not use his excess to excuse the communists who kept perjuring themselves in service to their Soviet controllers.
"McCarthyism" Practiced Against Joe McCarthy
With recall elections in the works (as against Anthony Adams), the support of the Party may not have been enough. Meanwhile, the betrayals by Schwarzenegger and the Party to the Democrat big government conspiracy led to a special election in May 2009, where the Governor and Legislature tried to get voters to agree on several bogus "reform" measures that would lock in tax increases. Voters slammed them down hard, resulting in whining editorials from liberal newspapers about how California voters did't know what was good for them. The whole experience, however, left the Republicans discredited and in disarray as a genuine Opposition to the Democrats. This may have helped lead to Republicans being purged from public office in California. The Democrats gained 2/3 majorities in both Houses of the Legislature, and California since has been a One Party State, with disastrous results on many fronts. In the 2020 census, California for the first time lost population, as sensible persons and businesses fled the State.
Since the Democrat then won the seat (for the first time in a century, even while Republicans won the governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia), Scozzafava perhaps can hope for some kind of Red Star commendation from the Democrats for her disloyalty.
Republican Developments in 2010
Tea Party, defeated Republican insider Rick Lazio. When Paladino said that he would take, not a broom, but a baseball bat to the job of cleaning things up in Albany, Democrat nominee Andrew Cuomo complained that this insulted the dignity of State government! So we certainly know where loyalties lie in the New York Governor's race. Cuomo is the son of former Democrat New York Governor (and Grand Old Democrat) Mario Cuomo and is married to Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy. This is the Democrat Establishment in spades. Nevertheless, the polls in New York make it look like Cuomo will win -- like the dinosaur Jerry Brown in California -- which simply means that Democrat voters are more brain dead than even I would have given them credit for.
I don't know if the Tea Party favorites will get elected, and I'm not happy with the social conservatism of some of them; but the criticism that the Tea Party candidates are "unelectable" rebounds on the Republican Establishment in the sense that the Establishment is responsible for supporting candidates like Scozzafava, Castle, etc., who are largely indistinguishable from the Democrats. Republican voters are sick of it. A faithless Republican Congress, with its spending and "earmarks" (i.e. pork barrel corruption), is just what set things up for the Democrat victories in 2006 and 2008. The Democrats, of course, have proven themselves worse, but the behavior of the Republicans put them in the wrong. So if the Republican Party wants "electable" candidates, they better stop with the RINO's.
Republican Developments in 2012
Tea Party not only failed to materialize but was itself damaged by the adherence or infiltration of social conservatives whose clumsiness and idiocy played into the hands both of the Democrats and of the Republican Establishment. Although the Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives, certainly as a result of continued Tea Party momentum, Speaker John Boehner kicked some Tea Party Congressmen out of their House positions and denied that there was a (significant?) Tea Party Caucus in the House.
Tea Party groups (with no national organization, leadership, or unity for the movement), was for things like (1) fiscal responsibility, (2) Constitutional government, and (3) the free market. If the Republican Establishment was not reliable or enthusiastic on such issues, there was another Republican constituency that felt equally disrespected by the Establishment, namely social conservatives. Consquently, many social conservatives decided to hop on the Tea Party bandwagon. The most conspicuous person in that respect was Sarah Palin, someone who had shown herself to have some real political aptitude and promise, but who had also embarrassed herself with demonstrations of shallow knowledge on national issues and some of the sort of amateurism evident in O'Donnell and Angle. Even so, this might not have been too damaging, if some even more amateurish social conservatives had not managed to insert themselves into key elections.
I believe that life begins at conception. The only exception I have to have an abortion is in that case of the life of the mother. I just struggled with it myself for a long time but I came to realize life is that gift from God that I think even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.
Republican Developments, 2016-2019, The Treason of the RINO's
Neither Democrats nor the RINO's wanted this. Spending bills kept arriving on Trump's desk without anything for a border wall. Where spending bills originate, in the House, Speaker Ryan never sent a bill to the Senate with a wall in it. Trump finally said he was not going to sign another spending bill without a wall in it. So, days before the Democrats would take over the House in 2019, Ryan did sent a bill to the Senate with a wall. The Democrats could stop that, and did; and the Republican leadership in the Senate, with Mitch McConnell (also identified by many as a RINO), passed on the kind of parliamentary tricks that the Democrats had used to pass ObamaCare and other things. So the chance expired, and the Democrats in the new House, salted with communists and anti-Semities, vowed never ever to fund a border wall. Trump allowed federal agencies, the ones not previously funded, to lose their funding, thus "shutting down the government," as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had previously done when they didn't think the Republican Congresses were spending enough money.
Speaker Paul Ryan,
the adult Eddie Munster
as they have begun regularly doing in California.
, on Kathleen Willey, since the testimony was that he had held her down and covered her mouth, which would count as an assault, but I missed the part with any sexual contact. His drunken friend fell on top of him, he rolled off her, and she ran away. And said nothing about it for thirty years -- until it came out in therapy, as what may well have been an imaginary "recovered memory."
Most egregiously, he cooked up a sophistry, with the Liberal justices, to find a pretext to wave through ObamaCare as Constitutional. He has been good in other cases, but he definitely has a weakness -- a disease of RINO's. Thus, Democrat appointed Federal Judges have issued several rulings, completely ignoring the actual law, to prevent Donald Trump from protecting the United States from terrorists and from faithfully executing the laws of the United States, as he is Constitutionally charged with doing. Roberts has both refused to expedite the review of these cases, which need to be reversed quickly, and has rebuked Trump for complaining about it. Roberts said that there are not "Democrat judges" or "Republican judges," but just "judges." This is nonsense, and he knows it. The political bias of many Federal judges is obvious, as is their habit of ruling according to their preferences and ideology, regardless of the Constitution, the laws, or even Supreme Court decisions. When Trump pointed this out, Roberts fell silent.
Ἵνα τί ἐφρύαξαν ἔθνη, καὶ λαοὶ ἐμελέτησαν κενά;
Quare fremuerunt gentes, et populi meditati sunt inania?
Why do the heathen [gôyim] rage, and peoples imagine vain things?
The RINO Hall of Shame
The RINO Hall of Shame, 2022, 2023
...overhaul existing programs that track tips earned by service sector workers. The new Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program will "take advantage of advancements in point-of-sale, time and attendance systems, and electronic payment settlement methods to improve tip reporting compliance," according to the IRS.
Copyright (c) 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!.."
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
[29] And Jacob sod pottage: and Esau came from the field, and he was faint:
[30] And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint: therefore was his name called Edom.
[31] And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright.
[32] And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?
[33] And Jacob said, Swear to me this day; and he sware unto him: and he sold his birthright unto Jacob.
[34] Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.
The Democrats, a.k.a. the Decepticons
Thus, after the collapse of the mortgage and housing bubble, Congressman Barney Frank, confronted with videotape of he himself saying earlier that Federal mortgage lenders Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac were financially sound, and that only enemies of poor people and minorities were calling their financial health into question, nevertheless simply denied, in a bald-faced lie, that he had ever said any such thing. Bill O'Reilly, after showing Frank's earlier statements and receiving a similar stone-walled denial, called the Congressman a liar to his face. In terms of the response of his supporters and the public, it looks like Frank can get away with such absurd denials -- in 2010 he just won reelection again from the zombie voters in his Massachusetts district. But his defensiveness is obvious: at a public meeting, where a student simply asked Frank if he accepted any responsibility at all for the mortgage collapse, Frank, rather than just answering "yes" (the truth) or "no" (the lie), immediately began verbally attacking the student -- as though the poor fellow were an paid agent of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (and Fox News). Nevertheless, we immediately know the Democrats for what they are when they use one of the code-words that signal their orthodoxy to the faithful. Democrats don't need to say "socialism" when they can say "social justice" (or, even better, "economic justice" or "economic democracy"), and the insiders know what that means.
[financial analyst Maria] Bartiromo did not just accept whatever Barney Frank said. She said: "With all due respect, congressman, I saw videotapes of you saying in the past: 'Oh, let's open up the lending. The housing market is fine.'" His reply? "No, you didn't see any such tapes."
For a laugh-out-loud moment on all of this, we recommend yesterday's performance by New York Senator Chuck Schumer on NBC's "Meet the Press." Mr. Schumer declared that "Barack Obama and we Democrats -- this is counterintuitive but true -- are really trying to get a handle on balancing the budget and we're making real efforts to do it." Counterintuitive? He said this four days after Senate Democrats lost a vote to add $250 billion to the deficit for doctor payments without any compensating spending cuts. ["The Spending Rolls On," 10/26/2009]
Banks and mortgage lenders, left pretty much to their own devices after decades of deregulation, came to misbehave in a spectacular manner. They handed out mortgages to anyone. [Thomas Frank, December 2009, p.112]
This was backed up with tendentious statistical studies intended to show discrimination against minority borrowers. Lenders were thus coerced into making loans they would not have done otherwise. They would be accused of racial discrimination if the statistics did not show the right "diversity" balance in their lending, with all the evils of legal prosecution and bad publicity falling on them. There was a remedy for this, which was for lenders to pass on the risky mortgages, often packaging them with other securities to conceal or balance the liability. These became "toxic assets," which could be passed around like hot potatoes (with the danger that knowledge of their problems could later be used to accuse them of fraud). Insurance companies also tried to step in to protect the asset holders in case of default. However, the risk was badly calculated, and when the bubble finally burst, banks, brokers, and insurance companies all took the hit. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Federally chartered corporations that had been encouraging the lending, while soaking up many of the assets, under the protection of Democrat politicians (like Barney Frank and Maxine Waters), simply collapsed and now have been directly taken over by the government. Unfortunately, the policies that got them in trouble in the first place, risky loans, have deliberately been continued, because all the (Democrat) political pressure has been to do so. In January 2010, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been given a virtual blank check to go into unlimited debt. We are therefore going to see a new credit bubble forming. Meanwhile, the Democrats simply practice the Bart Simpson defense: I didn't do it.
...the recession is virtually solely a result of the federal government which, through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Bank, the threatened criminal penalties of the Community Reinvestment Act, and other efforts to deny the market, have so distorted the marketplace that literally trillions of dollars have been malinvested... When Chris Dodd and Barney Frank aren't self- righteously berating the private sector for the mistakes those two gentlemen inflicted on them, the chief cheerleader is none other than our increasingly classless president, Barack Obama.
But in Governments, where the Legislative is in one lasting Assembly always in being, or in one Man, as in Absolute Monarchies, there is danger still, that they will think themselves to have a distinct interest, from the rest of the Community; and so will be apt to increase their own Riches and Power, by taking, what they think fit, from the People. ["The Second Treatise, of Civil Government," in Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett, Cambridge University Press, 1960, 1988, §138, boldface added]
In turn, the common theme of trendy humor and opinion is how stupid Republicans are, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. After the Democrats took Congress in 2006, however, the American public has had a good chance to see a lot of Democrat politicians in action. What seems obvious about the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, or Barney Frank, then, is that they are just idiots. They make George W. Bush look like Albert Einstein. They will say anything just because they want it to be true, however absurd or incoherent it may be.
Something of the sort had actually been an Obama campaign promise. At a press conference, in the act of refusing to broadcast the negotiations, Nancy Pelosi said that "There has never been a more open process for any legislation." For a "process" that involved committee votes on bills that had not even been printed or offered yet, 2000 and 2700 page bills that were published only a couple of days before floor votes were scheduled, obviously with the intention of making it difficult for people to discover what was in the bills before the votes (and there were some remarkable bits of tyranny and corruption included), and with back room deals to buy votes with special exemptions from taxes (especially for Louisiana and Nebraska), it took remarkable gall for Pelosi to call the business an "open process." But the Democrats have at hand unlimited gall. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "If once they ['our people'] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves." But the Democrats often count on the public being "inattentive to the public affairs." It is impossible that Pelosi could expect people to believe her statement without relying on them to not know what had been going on [note].
My first political memory is of my aunt telling my mother that someone had vandalized her "I Like Ike" bumper sticker while she was parked at the beach. That must have been in 1956. Unfortunately, this sort of thing has turned out to be all too characteristic of the shameless conduct of Democrats and the Left.
Mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power which they possess, or may assume. The public money and public liberty, intended to have been deposited with three branches of magistracy, but found inadvertently to be in the hands of one only [as in administrative law], will soon be discovered to be sources of wealth and dominion to those who hold them; distinguished, too, by this tempting circumstance, that they are the instrument, as well as the object of acquisition. With money we will get men, said Caesar, and with men we will get money. Nor should our assembly be deluded by the integrity of their own purposes, and conclude that these unlimited powers will never be abused, because themselves are not disposed to abuse them. They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and claws after he shall have entered. [Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1784, boldface added].
It is all their project. The worst that can be said about the Republicans is that they have largely gone along with it and (since Reagan) have grossly failed to articulate the danger. The worst that can be said about the Libertarians is that they are off in a utopian Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, muttering about gold and the Confederacy, while Democrats and most Republicans urinate on the Constitution every day.
It was just mentioned to me by our esteemed speaker, "Did anyone say anything about
the Cuban health system?"
lemme tell ya, before you say "Oh, it’s a commu-," you need to go down there and see what Fidel Castro put in place. And I want you to know, now, you can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met.
Democrat Developments in 2012; the Pinocchio
Scale
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz [ἀνάξιος] was the Chair of the Democratic National Committee. At a "training session at the Democratic National Convention to instruct Jewish Democrats" in 2012, she said that she had been told by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren that "what the Republicans are doing is dangerous for Israel" and very troubling to the Israeli government.
Even the generally liberal Washington Post awarded the DNC Chair "four Pinocchios," The Pinocchio Scale a Lie, Psychobabble a Damn Lie, Mendacity, Bureaucratese Statistics, Sophistry, Edubabble, Network News Legalese, Pure Sophistry, Political Rhetoric, Supreme Court Decisions Marxism, deconstruction, "Critical Theory," other "post-modern" "scholarship" , for lying.
Stranger, in a way, are the lies of Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid [ἀνάξιος] , since Reid is supposed to be a Mormon, elected from a heavily Mormon State, Nevada. But, during the 2012 election, Reid said, from the floor of the Senate, that, according to his sources, Mitt Romney (who is himself a Mormon), the Republican Presidential candidate, had not paid any taxes for some years. This turned out to be untrue, and it was noted that Reid only made the accusation in the Senate, where whatever he said could not be the basis of a libel lawsuit. So he probably knew that the accusation was untrue. After announcing his forthcoming retirement, in April 2015, Reid was asked about this accusation in an interview. He refused to "back down" from the accusation, despite its fraudulent nature, refused to apologize, and justified the claim by saying, "Romney didn’t win, did he?" Simililarly, he said, "I have no repentance, because the issue was important." In other words, this man is claiming that lies are fine if the issue is "important" and if the lie is politically effective in defeating an opponent. This is now the stuff of our political culture, not just that politicians lie, but that they unrepentantly boast of their lies and celebrate their effectiveness. Who taught this creep his morality? Is this acceptable behavior for Mormons? It has not been at all unusual for Reid to say vicious or absurd things in the Senate, but this really takes the cake. Even Debbie Wasserman Schulz never actually said it was acceptable to lie just in order to defeat Republicans, however much she has done it.
Democrat Developments in 2016
In 2016, Hillary Clinton [ἀνάξιος] ran for President. She couldn't lose, but did. It was a strange race. Clinton was matched in unpopularity only by Donald Trump, who nevertheless beat her. She did win the popular vote (as Al Gore did in 2000), by some millions, but the popular vote margin was concentrated in leftist States like California, New York, and Massachusetts, while Trump carried Florida, which George W. Bush almost lost in 2000, and Ohio, which seemed close for him in 2014, but then also Pennsylania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, which tipped the balance. These States have been trending Republican lately, with the State governments in Wisconsin and Michigan now dominated by Republicans. Thus, while Democrats do well, very well, on the East or the West Coasts, and in Illinois, Republicans have steadily taken over elsewhere, in the South, Midwest, and interior West. It is not hard to find out why. Illinois is a fiscal and economic basket case. The dominant Democrats simply want to raise taxes without end, and drive all business out of the State. People are leaving, as they are leaving New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, etc. Meanwhile, there have been recent years when half of all the jobs created in the country have been in Texas. People notice; and the message for a lot of the Democrat dominated country seems to have been what Davey Crockett told Congress when he left, "You can go to hell; I'm going to Texas."
And then there was her health. The fall she suffered was not unique; and she kept falling, including one that was photographed as she was hurried away from a 9/11 Memorial service (9/11/2016). And she kept coughing. It seemed to go away for a while, and then came back. And she sometimes seemed confused during speeches. She had trouble maintaining a vigorous campaign schedule, and for much of the period took the weekends off. States she lost, like Wisconsin, never got a campaign appearance. She didn't like answering questions from the press. Since the press hated Trump and decided they were a wing of the Democratic Party, they didn't push it; but it did mean that Clinton appeared in few interviews, while Trump was out there constantly. The obvious favoritism from the press didn't help her, since much of the country no longer believes or trusts the press.
Cuba and the Soviet Union. In his language, "democratic" may mean the same thing that it did in East Germany and as it does in North Korea. This is indicative of the trend in politics, sadly, in Vermont, which recently was on the verge of a complete "single payer" socialized medical system, before the Governor realized that the State would not be able to afford it. Of course, that doesn't always stop the Democrats, but Vermont evidently would not be able to borrow its way to Utopia.
This concerned the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, when the United States Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed. The official Obama Adminstration explanation was that this was the result of a spontaneous riot protesting a video critical of Islam that an American Copt had posted on line. There had been such a riot in Cairo on the same day, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, went on five different Sunday news shows to explain about the video; and when the bodies of the victims arrived back in Washington, families reported that Hillary Clinton herself, Secretary of State at the time, assured them that the person who made the video would be punished. She later denied she had said such a thing. However, from various sources, including Clinton's own contemporary e-mails, it turned out that everyone in the Administration knew in real time that it was an organized Terrorist attack, not a spontaneous riot. So everyone speaking for the Administration had been officially lying about the whole affair, including Hillary Clinton.
Instead, the Democrats like the idea that the e-mail were obtained by Russian hacking. This is possible. And a great deal of confidential or classifed information has been obtained by the Russians and by the Chinese through hacking, about which the Obama Administration seemed curiously complacent and inactive. Now, however, the Democrats came up with the idea that Donald Trump had plotted with Vladimir Putin to steal the Presidential election. Trump made himself vulnerable to such a charge by saying foolishly tolerant things about Putin, continuing in that vein even after the election, saying that, although Putin apparently has been murdering his political enemies, the United States isn't so different. This sounded like the kind of anti-American and moral-equivalent discourse favored by the Left that many Americans had voted for Trump to get rid of. As President, Trump seems to have sobered up a bit, but as a candidate he had even publicly asked the Russians, perhaps jokingly, to get Hillary's missing e-mails. Perhaps they did.
In an interview, Clinton had said that when she and Bill left the White House, they were so broke that they didn't know how they would make the payments on their "homes." People noticed the plural there. But the Clintons soon bought another "home" in New York State, so Hillary could run for the Senate there, and they soon were both worth millions of dollars. People just gave them money, out of the goodness of their hearts. Except that a lot of money came from foreign governments and businesses, including Russia, where Bill was paid five million dollars just for giving a speech. Hillary's own speeches to corporate sponsors of her Foundation have mostly been kept secret to this day.
How you can "steal" an election with the truth is a proposition that takes a bit of thought. But the real purpose of Democrat charges, left purposefully vague, is to convey the impression that the Russians somehow hacked the voting or the vote counting and thus stole the election the good old fashioned way, like the Democrats do. Although never actually charging, or offering the slightest evidence of, vote tampering, the Democrats, with a willing press, nevertheless intend, by insinuation, to undermine the legitimacy of the Trump Administration, and trust in it.
or physically attacked, shows what is really behind the Democrat smears. And people notice. When the Trump campaign slogan was, "Make America Great Again," and it was matched by banners saying, "America Was Never Great," people get the anti-American message.
Democrat Developments in 2020
Libertarians: Ideological crackpots, tilting at windmills, who nevertheless are the most sensible people, and the only true Jeffersonians, around -- an appalling circumstance.
Tea Party could change this, but their promise has been at least blunted by the folly of social conservative infiltrators. The Establishment Republicans were heartened by this, despite their record of running two compromising "moderates" in a row, McCain and Romney, who went down to decisive defeat. This is an indication that the Establishment will continue in its old ways. Indeed, when Rand Paul filibustered to clarify Administration policy on using drones to kill American citizens in the United States, McCain rose to complain that this could make Americans fear their government. News flash, John, a lot of Americans, like me, already fear our government. It is already an active system of tyranny.Copyright (c) 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021, 2023 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
Satan is a Democrat, or
It is the Blue States that are Red, Note 1;
"McCarthyism" Practiced against Joe McCarthyWhen Joseph McCarthy engaged in comparable bullying, oppression and slander from his powerful position in the Senate, he was censured by his colleagues and died in disgrace. "McCarthyism," defined by Webster's as the "use of unfair investigative and accusatory methods to suppress opposition," will forever be synonymous with un-Americanism. Army counsel Joseph Welsh's "Have you no sense of decency?" are words that evoke the McCarthy era and diminish the reputations of his colleagues who did nothing to stand up to him.
Domestically, his [Lee's] case helped pave the way for McCarthyism and HUAC's witch hunts. As Mr. Bradley nicely puts it: "The existence of real spies in the 1940s had created life-like mirages of them by the early 1950s."
The violence committed against Charles Murray and others at Middlebury College is a significant event in the annals of free speech.
Joseph Stalin (1950-1953). These ideas were openly defended by some, like I.F. Stone, who wrote a book in 1952, The Hidden History of the Korean War, defending the Communist invasion of South Korea. I am not aware that anyone ever silenced Mr. Stone, although we now know he had dealings, apparently short of actual espionage, with the Russian KGB.
In the 1950s, Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy turned his name into a word of generalized disrepute by using the threat of communism, which was real, to ruin innocent individuals’ careers and reputations.
Today, polite liberals -- in politics, academia and the media arts -- watch in silent assent as McCarythyist radicals hound, repress and attack conservatives like Charles Murray for what they think, write and say.
Three years later, in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower gave a famous commencement speech at Dartmouth College. "Don’t join the book burners," Ike told the students. Even if others "think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America."
Today, the smear is common for conservative speakers and thinkers. Prior to Mr. Murray’s scheduled talk at Middlebury, a student petition, signed by hundreds of faculty and alumni, sought to rescind the invitation because "we believe that Murray’s ideas have no place in rigorous scholarly conversation." Such "disinvitations" have become routine.
So let us plainly ask: Why hasn’t one Democrat stood in the well of the Senate or House to denounce, or even criticize, what the Middlebury mob did to Charles Murray and the faculty who asked him to speak? Have any of them ever come out against the silencing of speech they don’t like?
Let’s recognize that the failure to oppose McCarthyist creep from the left is also consuming liberal reputations.
A congressman with a modest profile, Mr. Schiff has been working hard ever since to become the public face -- not to say the Joe McCarthy -- of this witch hunt.
David Schine had been drafted in November 1953 and the thought of his golden boy peeling potatoes on KP inspired more fury in Cohn than any pinko with a security clearance. He repeatedly demanded that the secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens, and its legal counsel, John Adams, secure passes and privileges for Schine.
It so happened that, on the subject being by addressed by McCarthy, there was some very definite statute law, which had been on the books for decades, most recently reenacted, at the time of the Army hearings, in 1948. This was the Civil Service Act, a law whose terms were quite familiar to McCarthy. In relevant part this statute said: "The right of persons employed in the Civil Service of the United States, either individually or collectively, to petition Congress, or any member thereof, or to furnish information to either House of Congress, or to any committee or members thereof, shall not be denied or interfered with." (Emphasis added.) [Blacklisted by History, The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies, by M. Stanton Evans, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2007, p.579]
In the early 1950s, an Army dentist named Irving Peress refused to complete forms asking about his poliitcal background.
McCarthy then summoned the commanding officer at the base where Peress worked to explain why the dentist -- who McCarthy [actually, the FBI] believed was a communist -- had been promoted and discharged. Patiently and, presumably, very carefully, Brig. Gen. Ralph Zwicker explained that he had followed the recommendations of subordinates and Army protocol. McCarthy raged: "Any man who has been given the honor of being promoted to general and who says 'I will protect another general who protects Communists' is not fit to wear that uniform."
The Peress case led directly to the Army-McCarthy hearings and the senator's descent into oblivion.
We already know that some Bernie staffers -- not just supporters, staffers -- are looking forward to having concentration camps to "reducate" Americans, adding that Stalin's GULAG was kind and loving. But if Mr. Williamson actually called the "Bernie Bros" Communists or Stalinists, we know that that would be, well, "McCarthyism." So he doesn't -- just like Angela Davis, who more than once was the candidate for Vice-President of the United States for the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), is never called a "Communist." That would be "McCarthyism." Indeed, what we must take away from all this is that "McCarthyism" means to accurately accuse someone of being something that they actually are. While, of course, calling Donald Trump a racist, "white supremacist," or anti-Semitic, all smears, is just good politics.
[In his Feburary 9, 1950 Wheeling, West Virginia, speech McCarthy] announced... that he had a list of 206 communists working in the State Department, he pursued with indiscriminate mendacity the "subversives and spies" who had supposedly infilitrated America's institutions.
It is estimated that more than 10,000 Americans lost their jobs as a consequent of his witch hunt, some 200 spent time in jail, and, as Mr. Tye demonstrates, the experience of being pursued by McCarthy contributed to a number of suicides.
By the time he began his crusade, the Soviet spy networks, which had hitherto penetrated the Manhattan Project, the Treasury and the Office of Strategic Services, had been all but wiped out.
An added example of this outlook is the oft-stated view that the internal Communist problem had in essence been eliminated by 1948, when the Truman administration was conducting an alleged crackdown on Red agents via the President's loyality program and indictment of the leaders of the Communist Party. But, as seen in preceding chapters, this portrayal is far off the mark. The Amerasia cover-up, the manipulation of the subsequent grand jury that let the Elizabeth Bentley suspects walk, the routine dismissal of FBI reports about such matters, and the administration's effort to go after [Whittaker] Chambers all tell a different story. [Stalin's Secret Agents, The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government, by M. Staton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Threshold Editions, 2012, p.252]
McCarthy went after the Voice of America, the overseas library program, the U.S. Government Printing Office an the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth.
it is obvious what this adds up to: Communism. Sanders himself fell in the Democrat primaries when he made comments a little too flattering about Cuba. Since he has been a fan of Cuba and the Soviet Union his whole life, the pieces may have fallen into place.
McCarthyism was also an attack on the legacy of Roosevelt, on the Washington establishment, on the East Coast elite, on homosexuals, Jews and African-Americans.
) is a Jewish name. He certainly enjoys repeating charges that Cohn was a homosexual. Why would that still have traction now? Who cares about that anymore?
Whenever science has been corrupted by falling prey to ideology, scientific progress sufferings. This was the case of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union -- and in the U.S. in the 19th century when racist views dominated biology, and during the McCarthy era, when prominent scientists like Robert Oppenheimer were ostracized for their political views. [July 13, 2020, p.A19]
Dear Sirs:
If your McCarthy is saying a whole national election was rigged, an entire system corrupted, you'd recognize such baseless charges damage democracy itself.
In February he'd made his speech in Wheeling, W.Va., charging communists had infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels. He claimed to have 205 names of known communists; in later statements he put the number at 57 and 81.
She always listened closely when McCarthy spoke. Once he said he was holding in his hand "a photostatic copy" of the names of communists. She asked to see it. It proved nothing. Her misgivings increased.
The Constitution "speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation." Those "who shout the loudest about Americanism" are ignoring "some of the basic prinicples of Americanism," including the right to hold unpopular beliefs and to independent thought. Exercising those rights "should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to his livelihood, no should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us does not? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own."
It was said in the era of Joe McCarthy that he and his followers saw a communist under every bed.
Thus, those who "said" that McCarthy "saw a communist under every bed," were actually the communists, and those who made it their business to protect them. Morrow should know that. We also might wonder who Lance Morrow thinks "his followers" were. That would include, of course, subsequent anti-Communists, like John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. We have seen McCarthy's ties to the Kennedy family and Robert Kennedy's job working with McCarthy's Senate committee.
Mr. Trump, the canniest showman in the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt, introduced into 21st-century politics what seemed to be new idioms of hatred, a freestyle candor of the id. Doing so, he provoked his enemies -- and finally Mr. Biden -- to respond in kind: a big mistake. In the early 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy was loose in the land, and roughly half the country supported his anticommunist inquisition, President Eisenhower wisely decided, “I will not get into the gutter with this guy.” It took a while for McCarthy to implode.
“The Democratic Party [is] the bedfellow of international communism.” Those words from Sen. Joe McCarthy captured the gist of the Red Scare and the use of blacklists and personal attacks to silence critics. The Democrats this week appear to have taken up the same cudgel in labeling opponents and critics Russian sympathizers and fellow travelers in opposing government involvement in a massive censorship system.
I testified this week in Congress on the Twitter Files and how they suggest what I have called “censorship by surrogate” or proxy.
Wheeler’s crusade also helped change how American politics was practiced. On one hand, Wheeler’s bold approach was understandable: Eventually his investigations did uncover evidence of extensive wrongdoing. On the other hand, his tactics laid the groundwork for more unscrupulous characters to use the same methods for unsavory purposes in the future. A few decades later, Mr. Masters argues, another junior senator, this time from Wisconsin, “weaponized scandal and command congressional hearings in a way that distinctly recalled Wheeler’s performance three decades prior.” Unlike Wheeler, Sen. Joe McCarthy failed to find damning evidence, and his search for a sweeping communist plot infiltrating the highest branches of government destroyed the lives of thousands of innocent people.
"You have to be able to see American history as a series of panics," he writes highlighting the Salem witch trials and Sen. Joseph McCarthy's Cold War anti-Communist crusade. "These who events, held up as outliers and anomalies, were just two points on a straight line composed of a dozen similar points."
Even the phrase "I have a list" rings down through the ages. In 1799 Jedidiah Morse, attemtping to link Thomas Jefferson with the quasi-mythological Illuminati, claimed to possess "an official, authenticated list" of the society's officers and members. "Anticipating Joseph McCarthy by over 150 years."
Satan is a Democrat, or
It is the Blue States that are Red, Note 2:
Elizabeth Warren's Rant Against Business
against business merits some careful consideration. While the diatribe is sometimes said to be against the rich (which would include Warren herself), it is actually against all business, from Microsoft and Bill Gates all the way down to PJ's Pancake House in Princeton, NJ. And its bite seems most particularly directed at the most entrepreneurial. No one would think of a Harvard MBA who is hired to manage a corporation that they had built it. So the "you didn't build that" sentiment, as formulated by Barack Obama, only applies to people who start small and make something of their own business. Since Warren turns on those "who got rich," her sights are set on the successful, like Bill Gates himself, a college drop-out who started with nothing. The blast of her animus, and her big government avarice, is thus bound to catch all small businesses, which are struggling just to survive, with no more than a rare chance that the owners can get rich. This is less "class warfare" than it is simple envy and resentment.
| I hear all this, you know, "Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever." No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there -- good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea — God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
Elizabeth Warren (CP-MA), transcribed from video (available on YouTube), house party campaign appearance, Andover, MA, August, 2011 |
Apart from providing goods and services to the public, businesses also employ most of the labor force of the country. Indeed, listening to "progressive" politicians, one might often think that the principal purpose of business is to provide employment, even if the product of the business is worthless. When Margaret Thatcher planned to close coal mines that cost more to operate than their coal was worth, British coal miner unions rather openly contended that the worth of the mines was the jobs, not the coal. But any version of the value of business for employment seems to have escaped the notice of Elizabeth Warren; and it is inconceivable that she might appreciate the wisdom expressed by the late Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Paul Tsongas (d.1997) when he said, "You cannot be pro-jobs and anti-business." Warren seems to be anti-business, and the jobs be damned. Or, we might suspect, she simply wants everyone employed by the government, and private jobs are so worthless as to properly be beneath her notice -- although she herself is a millionaire off of her own private legal practice.
The strongest implication of the parasitism of business in Warren's rant is that the "rest of us" have paid for the roads, schools, and police that businesses use as "free-riders" to exploit the rest of us and make their ill gotten profits. That businesses are taypayers themselves, and have already paid along with the "rest of us," seems to have escaped her notice. Not only that, but over half the population of the United States doesn't even pay income taxes, while the profits of business are usually taxed twice, first by a corporate income tax, and then second by taxes on the income of the people to whom corporate profits make their way (with this usually duplicated at the State level). Since the federal corporate income tax is 35%, which is the highest in the industrialized world and is close to the top marginal rate even for individual incomes taxes, it is very hard to say that businesses are not paying their "fair share." Indeed, from what Warren says, one might guess that business doesn't pay taxes at all.
And it is not as though Warren wants to tax businesses more to pay for roads or police that they are not paying for already. Since they are, she clearly wants the tax money for something else. So her whole approach is dishonest. The notion that "infrastructure" needs more funding is itself a lie, since federal gasoline taxes, which are supposed to pay for roads and bridges, are diverted to other, politically conspicuous projects, like "light rail" or Jerry Brown's "high speed" train, which are projects that never pay for themselves and must be subsidized in perpetuity. Similarly, tolls from bridges to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are diverted from the upkeep of the bridges where the tolls are collected, which consequently can be seen covered with rust. Eventually, even President Obama admitted that the "stimulus package" of 2009, which was supposed to be for "shovel ready jobs," was almost entirely spent on other things (i.e. paying off government employee labor unions). No, Elizabeth Warren wants more money to buy votes and to fund the welfare state and other leftist projects of social engineering and government domination. In other words, she wants largess for the gravy train of the ruling class, of which she is herself a conspicuous part. She has no concern for the effect on the economy or for the welfare of most people with regular jobs.
The ultimate sentiment of someone like Warren is that the government owns all business, all property, and indeed all the citizens. As Hegel originally thought, we are slaves or minions of the state (the source of the "Freedom is Slavery" motto in George Orwell); and indeed we are metaphysically unreal apart from it. While usually not openly stated, this principle lurks behind almost all the policies and assertions of the Left -- where we should be aware that statements about "collective action" or "collective social action," as from Barack Obama, mean that political minorities, especially dissenting conservative or libertarian groups, are illegitimate, if not criminal. "Solidarity" requires unanimity, and those who reject the "collective" consensus are outside both the political and the moral pale.
Also, while we get public statements about things like "abortion rights" from the Left, the Left actually doesn't believe in individual rights. What we call "rights" are privileges temporarily granted by the state for its own, perhaps transient, purposes. Civil Rights law, which was originally supposed to limit government and protect citizens, now has become a way of the government telling people what to do, what to say, and even what to think. Thus, "Civil Rights" become the means to creating a government of absolute and totalitarian power.
This blast of hatred for business from Elizabeth Warren was soon echoed by the infamous statement of Barack Obama: "If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen" [13 July 2012, Roanoke, Virginia]. Among other things, this seems to confuse necessary and sufficient conditions, or material and efficient causes. While conditions might exist for Henry Ford to build the Model T, it was the man himself who "made that happen" (the efficient cause) and not anyone else from whom Ford may have drawn assistance or materials in doing it. People like Obama say things like this, not only because they want everyone to be helplessly dependent on government, but because they pursue policies that will bring about that condition. Thus, in the current economic regime [2015] of poor growth and poor employment, this is fine because it puts more people on food stamps and other government assistance, which actually makes it less necessary for them to find private jobs. Thus, in 2012, Obama said, "The private sector is doing fine," when in fact growth and job growth were dismal and people were leaving the labor force. His point was, as it always is, that governments need more money, because "weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government," which have experienced budget cuts.
Thus, both Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama think that economic prosperity is mainly a matter of government spending and ownership. This is why Warren doesn't notice that businesses provide goods and jobs for the public and why she apparently thinks that the rest of us are doing business a favor by allowing it to exist. I have little doubt that both Warren and Obama think that the provision of all services would be better if the government did it. Also, both Warren and Obama have adopted "income inequality" as their defining issue, even though inequality has increased because of Obama's policies and equality is actually greater in Texas, under the closest thing to laissez-faire capitalism that we've got, than in those fevered hotbeds of leftist politics, New York, Massachusetts, and California. The State with the least income inequality at the moment is conservative, Mormon dominated Utah. The facts, however, are unlikely to inhibit the Left from demonizing Texas, or perhaps even Utah, as safe havens for the callous and oppressive rich.
In 2014, Warren is now the darling of the Left and will probably run for President in 2016, with the support of Obama against others like Hillary Clinton or Vice-President Joe Biden. Since the pretty openly pro-Communist William de Blasio was elected Mayor of New York, I have no confidence that a vicious leftist like Warren is not automatically disqualified in public opinion. Yet Warren is a hostile and repellent person, whose animus towards the productive people and institutions of America has never been more openly on display than it was in this talk from 2011. Any vote for her is a stab in the heart of both freedom and prosperity.
On July 30, 2015, on "Hardball" with Chris Matthews, our favorite pathological liar, Democrat Party Chair, We might think that this was because Wasserman Schultz has never thought much about socialism and perhaps doesn't know what it means. If that was the case, anyone would expect her to read up or get briefed on the matter and be ready with an answer should the question come up again. Not quite. She was asked again, by Chuck Todd on "Meet The Press": "What is the difference," he asked, between the platform of the Democratic Party and socialism, "Can you explain the difference?" She still couldn't. This leaves the possibility that she didn't answer the questions because she is a socialist, and doesn't want to admit it, or because she knows that enough Democrats are socialists that she doesn't want to alienate them by making it sound like the Party is at odds with them.
This is the alarming degree to which corruption, ignorance, and folly have entered American life. The dishonesty and stupidity of Debbie Wasserman Schultz is now the paradigm of political action and is not troubling in the least to the elites and interest groups who support the agenda of the Democratic Party.
The code word for "socialist" in Democrat rhetoric is "liberal." This is part of the dissimulation and misdirection that is practiced in Democrat politics. In Europe, "liberal" still means support for individual rights, limited government, and the free market. Democrats, indeed, don't believe in any of these things. The proper meaning of the word begins to emerge when we travel further into Leftist discourse. There, "liberalism" or "neo-liberalism" means the revival of free market economics after Ronald Reagan. On the hard Left, mainstream Democrats are contemptuously called "liberals," very much as the word might be used by Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh, however, is aware that mainstream Democrats, as Fabian Socialists, only use the word to disguise their ultimate goals, which are not much different from those of the hard Left. The dissimulation of Democrats is so effective that it even fools Communists (people who otherwise only became "good liberals" when they were exposed and confronted with their treasonous allegiance and obedience to the Soviet Union).
"Fabian" refers to the tactics of Quintus Fabius Maximus, who dealt with Hannibal by avoiding open battle. He became know as Cunctator, the "Delayer." Fabian tactics, as adopted by Fabian Socialists, were thus to avoid open battle but achieve victory by small incremental advances. Medicare and Medicaid, although disappointing to those who wanted socialized medicine immediately, nevertheless were steps in that direction, inevitably leading to big pushes for full socialism, as in 2009. Since Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupt and have helped push up the costs of medicine, these outcomes can actually be used, ironically, to promote more socialism.
Americans who want to reclaim the proper use of "liberal," and help expose the Democrats as socialists, may use the term "Classical Liberal" for their views. Otherwise, "libertarian" is available, although this then does not contest the use of "liberal" and also implies the stranger and more radical libertarianism, as we have seen, of Rand and Rothbard. All these varieties of views are examined by way of the diamond quiz.
By 2013, we are hearing the term "progressive" more often, instead of "liberal." While the Progressives of the Era of Teddy Roosevelt continue to be remembered fondly by the Left, my association of the word "progressive" is with its use by members of the Communist Party USA whom I knew back in the 1970's. This gives me no confidence that people self-identified as "progressives" today do not actually share the goals and methods of the CP, as I think they do.
The pure vindictiveness of the Democrats and the Left is often astounding. The best example of this may be the case of "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher. In October 2008, Barack Obama walked through Joe's Ohio neighborhood as part of his political campaign. Joe was in his front yard and asked Obama about his tax plans. Joe wanted to have his own plumbing business and was concerned that the tax increases that Obama was talking about would hit his business just as it might get going. Obama admitted that his tax increase might affect Joe's plumbing business (raising rates from 36 to 39%). Explaining this, Obama finished by saying, "I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody."
Republicans and Democrats immediately saw this as a potentially embarrassing and damaging statement. It made Obama sound like a "redistributionist," who thinks that income in capitalism is "distributed" unfairly and that it is the job of the government to take from the rich (and from business) and give it to the poor. This is a popular idea among the Cargo Cult economic thinkers of the Left. Thus, we can't allow Joe's plumbing business to do too well, because obviously this can only come from exploitation of the workers. So part of the fruit of Joe's success would be better spent by the government. The idea that capital and private investment create wealth for all is a principle foreign to this ideology.
The reaction of the Democrats to this tells us so much about them. There is no doubt that they think this way, and Obama too. Their anger therefore was simply at being exposed as thinking what they actually believe. They always walk a fine line there. They want their core supporters to hear the radicalism of their ideology straight but then don't want that to get out to the public. The most damaging admissions are thus often statements to private groups that may get informally recorded on cell-phones and then released to the Press. Thus Obama, speaking to a private group in California in April 2008, said of Pennsylvania voters losing jobs in old industrial towns (because of Democrat anti-business policies, of course), "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." This was immediately seen as condescending and disparaging of people who believe in gun rights, religion, and only legal immigration -- and are probably racists (while the Obama Administration itself has policies that are increasingly protectionist and anti-trade). The Democrats, of course, see guns as Fascism (unless, ironically, in the hands of the police), religion as the "opium of the masses," illegal immigrants as Democrat voters, and job losses in the Rust Belt as due to greedy capitalists.
To Democrats, a "smear" against them is to honestly represent their views and policies, even with direct quotes (which can be denied, as we saw with Barney Frank). To Democrats, "suppressing free speech" directed at them means any speech that simply contradicts what they say, or actually believe. Violence against conservative speakers, which may literally prevent them from speaking, on the other hand, is "free speech." This is all the Orwellian Double-Think of the Marxist politics of Herbert Marcuse, now part of the Democrat playbook.
But nothing is more remarkable than what happened to Joe the Plumber. Eliciting an embarrassing statement from Obama made Joe an enemy. Democrats and the Left immediately went after Joe. So we learned that "Joe" wasn't his real name (he is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, obviously using his middle name for dishonest purposes). He wasn't a licensed plumber (he worked for one). He owed some back taxes (like several people nominated to be in the Obama Adminstration). Some Democrat Ohio bureaucrats even began (illegal) investigations, to try and find anything else to discredit him. The pointlessness and infantile vindictiveness of this is just astonishing. In fact, it doesn't matter if Joe the Plumber turned out to be Charles Manson. The issue is what Obama said, and what it said about him. Joe himself was irrelevant. Yet many Democrats figured that there was something suitable and useful about discrediting or smearing Joe. He had done something that could result in hurt or embarrassment to them, so it made him, however senselessly, a target. Even if there were nothing else about the attitudes or actions of the Democrats, this reveals them, or at least their public agents and representatives, as morally vile and despicable people.
Another good example of incoherent falsehoods, and not just from these individuals, is the Democrat slogan, "Bush lied; people died." The idea there is that because George Bush said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, or nuclear), and no such weapons were found after the invasion of Iraq, Bush therefore had lied. Since the ordinary meaning of a "lie" is to utter an intentional falsehood, one might wonder how the slogan chanters know that Bush was uttering an intentional falsehood. Oh, that's easy, we can leave out the "intentional" part. If there were no WMD's in Iraq, then Bush ipso facto lied. I kid you not. I actually saw Michael Moore argue in an interview with Bill O'Reilly that it was a lie simply because it was false. This is something worse than just sophistry. It is an infantile petulance. But we get a lot of it from the Democrats.
As it happens, before the Iraq war, I saw Tony Blair at a meeting of European leaders challenge them to deny that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He said, "You all know" that he has them, because their intelligence services all had the same information. Now, if "Bush lied," not only was Tony Blair lying also, but the leaders of France, Germany, etc., who never helped out in Iraq, must have been so deceived by all these lies that they didn't even have the gumption to stand up and call them lies to Tony Blair's face. Indeed, one of the other "lies" attributed to Bush, that Iraq had been seeking uranium from Chad, was information supplied by British intelligence. We went through a period of denials that Iraq had done this (the absurd and dishonest Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame controversy), but in the end it looks like the British were correct. Even if we don't need intentionality for lying, Bush would not have been lying. The Democrats, however, are never so honest as to remember Tony Blair or his challenge to Europe -- much less admit that Saddam Hussein was someone who deserved to be deposed, WMD's or not. See the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, the former President of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari, for his thoughts about Saddam's WMD's.
Meanwhile, the European Left likes the idea that Blair was "hoodwinked" by Bush into participating in the war. That doesn't square very well with the idea that the British supplied false intelligence to Bush.
Satan is a Democrat, or
It is the Blue States that are Red,
Note 3Debbie Wasserman Schultz [ἀνάξιος], was asked by Matthews, himself a leftist sympathizer, "What is the difference between a Democrat and a socialist?" Wasserman Schultz did not answered the question but evaded it by trying to talk about Republicans. Matthews pressed her, saying, "I used to think there is a big difference. What do you think it is?" He never got an answer.
Satan is a Democrat, or
It is the Blue States that are Red, Note 4;
Joe the PlumberSatan is a Democrat, or
It is the Blue States that are Red,
Note 5
