Representative Spencer Bachus (R- Alabama) is saving America. Bachus has been working on a secret(!) list of the socialists in the House of Representatives, and he has come up with 17 names! Hmmm...somehow this seems so familiar. Ah, yes, this is the second coming of the (crazy) right-winger Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the (in)famous House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA)! [note: McCarthy was in the Senate and thus was not involved with the HCUA.] Let's hope Bachus is a little less successful than McCarthy and the HCUA.
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Edward R. Murrow in the year 2009 = ? (Anderson Cooper...?)
ReplyDelete... Jon Stewart. Duh.
ReplyDeletewooord. I can't wait until the George Clooney-directed film, "And Now, Your Moment of Zen."
ReplyDeleteHa. Well played.
ReplyDeleteNote: All quotations are from Truman by David McCullough.
ReplyDeleteDoes the following account of McCarthy's rise remind anyone else of much of the hack media of today?
“All but friendless in the Senate, recently voted the worst member of the Senate in a poll of Washington correspondents, McCarthy appeared to be a hopeless failure. Over dinner on evening at the Colony Restaurant, a Catholic priest, Father Edmund A. Walsh of Georgetown University, suggested he might sound the alarm over Communist infiltration of the government, and McCarthy, who had already made some loud, if unnotable, charges about Communist subversion, seems to have realized at once that he had found what he needed. A month later, in a Lincoln’s Birthday speech in West Virginia, he waved a piece of paper, saying he had ‘here in my hand’ the names of 205 ‘known Communists’ in the State Department. The speech went largely unnoticed, but at Salt Lake City and Reno soon afterward he made essentially the same claim, except the number was now cut to fifty-seven, and they were referred to now as ‘card-carrying’ Communists. […] The charges were wild and unsupported. McCarthy had no names, he produced no new evidence. […] His Communist hunt was ‘a wretched burlesque of the serious and necessary business of loyalty check-ups.’ But he [McCarthy] was no more bothered by such criticism than by his own inconsistencies, and whatever he said the press printed, his most sensational allegations often getting the biggest headlines. […] By the end of March, in the six weeks since his initial outburst at Wheeling, McCarthy had not named a single Communist” (765-6).
It is almost as if FOX News looked to McCarthy's rise for tips on how to use techniques that were at best misleading, at worst lying, to achieve prominence. Bachus missed his everyone-is-terrified-of-Communism window by about fifty years, and probably should have just come out saying he had a list of terrorists in the administration.
I really love Truman's opinion on the whole matter: "McCarthy, he felt, was a temporary aberration, 'a ballyhoo artist who has to cover up his shortcomings by wild charges.' [...] 'I think,' he [Truman] said with a hard look, 'the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy'" (768).
Also, Truman's occasional wit was truly surprising to me: “[Robert] Taft [,son of William Howard Taft,] accused Truman of having libeled McCarthy. ‘Do you think that’s possible?’ Truman responded, when a reporter raised the question at the next press conference, back in Washington” (769).
Again I'd like to take this chance to promote David McCullough as a writer whose style and attention to detail truly make history readable, riveting, and relevant. (I didn't mean for that to be such alliteration, but sometimes these things happen.)
Bump.
ReplyDeleteSanders has called Bachus out.
I just realized 'Bump' may not be a term know to everyone reading my above comment. Wikipedia says, "To bump a thread on an Internet forum is to post a reply to it purely in order to raise the thread's profile. This will typically return it to the top of the list of active threads. Bump is usually an abbreviation for Bring Up My Post."
ReplyDeleteNow, unfortunately (in my opinion) BlogSpot does not allow the option of moving the most recently commented upon post to the top of the blog, so I didn't technically use 'bump' properly, but I think you get my point.
I knew it vie "the Colbert bump." I do wish that feature existed, though.
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