Joe McCarthy, or The Weatherman
Apr. 15th, 2016 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chris_gerribJohn C. Wright, he of many words, has a lengthy post up about Communists stealing his manly essence under his bed. I frankly can't be arsed to read the whole thing with any care. I can be arsed to note that he repeats the claim that "Joe McCarthy was right." For those a bit hazy on history, McCarthy was the Senator who ran around waving a list of names of known Communists in US government. So, was McCarthy right?
Well, yes, in a narrow sense. Let me unpack that. If you announce that you are a meteorologist and every day issue a prediction that it will rain tomorrow, you will be correct some percentage of the time (at least here in Illinois). If you further point out that sometimes rain comes with damaging winds, again here in Illinois you'll be occasionally right. However, I suspect the general public will find that your "predictions" are of little use.
Thus unto McCarthy. There were Communists trying to infiltrate the US government, and some of them had, although by the time McCarthy started to wave his list around many of them were being shown the door. In short, if you call everybody a Communist, you will occasionally land on one.
What McCarthy actually did was help Communists. His wild and baseless accusations allowed people to claim that they were being falsely accused. It discredited the whole process, much like the weatherman who always predicts rain.
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Well, yes, in a narrow sense. Let me unpack that. If you announce that you are a meteorologist and every day issue a prediction that it will rain tomorrow, you will be correct some percentage of the time (at least here in Illinois). If you further point out that sometimes rain comes with damaging winds, again here in Illinois you'll be occasionally right. However, I suspect the general public will find that your "predictions" are of little use.
Thus unto McCarthy. There were Communists trying to infiltrate the US government, and some of them had, although by the time McCarthy started to wave his list around many of them were being shown the door. In short, if you call everybody a Communist, you will occasionally land on one.
What McCarthy actually did was help Communists. His wild and baseless accusations allowed people to claim that they were being falsely accused. It discredited the whole process, much like the weatherman who always predicts rain.
Source 1
Source 2
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Date: 2016-04-15 05:51 pm (UTC)That last is a very good point. True, they were pretty well dug in, having been there and in Hollywood since the 1930s (not idly is it called “the Left Coast”) but had Taft Republicans regained control after Dear Leader died and dismantled the “Me Too” doings of the Federal Socialist American Worker's Party, these Soviet agents (http://baron-waste.livejournal.com/2255968.html) would have become useless.
[Stuart Chase, author of both the term and the eponymous book “The New Deal,” believed as many did that Soviet Socialism was The Way to Go - away with tiresome democracy and liberty unguided by the Best and the Brightest for the Greater Good! “Why,” he asked, “should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?”]
Unfortunately Americans are a basically law-abiding folk, and were lured by the siren song of “free” “help” from that Best and Brightest, and so the Republic was lost - tho' the process is still underway; even so, Thos Jefferson would throw up and Teddy Roosevelt would seek out the highest-ranking member of the Democratic Party he could find and punch his lights out.
Even so, intelligence agencies, belatedly aware of the danger, could have quietly started tracking these people down as was done with Nazis during WWII (with, again, methods best not questioned; as we know, they do that) except that this dough head allowed the Fifth Columnists to be spun up into martyrs, and that only made things worse. After Western universities were targeted for subversion and destruction in the 1960s, cleaning out the rot became simply impossible.