I am making a number of August resolutions this year, those are resolutions that you want to try out before January comes round, I make them a number of times a year on the theory that if you do it often enough, something might stick.
Mine is to give up some of the online time wasting that I am sure I won't have time to indulge in. Including playing on my alternative blog, mocking and baiting my long time obsessive libeler and slanderer, a recently resumed bad habit.
We have had a number of brawls there, one that led to him finally going too far and giving me total justification in cutting him off completely when he mocked my father who was was a permanently disabled WWII veteran, wounded in battle and decorated - I have his Purple Heart in my desk drawer as I type into my computer. That was something that went past the point of my endurance. So I cut off all possibility of communication concerning him and his lies, which will continue but without my knowledge of them.
The brawl started when I was sent a dubious claim that he had watched his parents trembling in fear while watching the Army McCarthy hearings, which he more than just implied were a manifestation of antisemitism - he calls everything antisemitism, including someone wishing there were more Jewish citizens in the United States.
I knew that was total and complete bullshit because I knew why McCarthy started his feud with the Army, it was all over the drafting of his Chief Counsel's close associate and, many believe, boyfriend, G. David Schine and the Army's refusal to provide the rich Harvard boy with privileges that would have pleased Cohn and McCarthy. The irony is that what was claimed to be a terrible manifestation of McCarthy's antisemitism was started, by him, over the refusal of the Army to give into Cohn's badgering them to get Schine special treatment. I think you really have to stretch that fraying, overstretched word to past the breaking point to call that "antisemitism." Most ironic of all was that McCarthy putting his neck out for Cohn and Schine is what led to his downfall. Here is an accurate but brief description of what happened:
This case of overkill is one of the things that brought McCarthy to his Waterloo, the Army-McCarthy hearings, held in the spring of 1954 and followed, Tye estimates, by eighty million Americans, half the population. The hearings had nothing to do with Communism. Their purpose was to determine whether the chief counsel on McCarthy’s subcommittee, Roy Cohn, had put improper pressure on the Army to give special treatment to another member of McCarthy’s staff, a wealthy nonentity named David Schine, after Schine was drafted. As he always did when attacked, McCarthy punched right back, countercharging that the Army had been holding Private Schine hostage—putting him on K.P. duty, threatening to send him overseas—in order to get McCarthy’s subcommittee to drop its investigations into the Communist infiltration of the armed services.
It was obvious that Cohn had made threats in an effort to get Schine excused from the ordinary duties of life as an Army private. On the behind-the-scenes advice of President Dwight Eisenhower, who loathed McCarthy, the Army had compiled a detailed chronology of Cohn’s many phone calls to and meetings with Army officials, and a list of his demands. There was no way McCarthy was going to win that argument.
And yet McCarthy didn’t do what almost anyone else would have done. He didn’t throw Schine and Cohn under the bus. McCarthy knew that Schine was worthless, but he also knew that Cohn was deeply attached to him, and McCarthy valued Cohn as a man who was as free of scruples as he was. McCarthy put his career at risk for Schine and Cohn, and he lost. It may have been honor among scoundrels, but it was honor, of a sort.
The most interesting thing about the hearings, looking back, is the story behind the celebrated dénouement, an exchange between McCarthy and the Army’s hired counsel Joseph Welch, seen by millions on television, and by many people afterward in Emile de Antonio’s documentary “Point of Order!” It began when McCarthy, incensed by what he regarded as Welch’s overly aggressive examination of Cohn, revealed that a young lawyer named Fred Fisher, at Hale & Dorr, where Welch practiced, had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, an organization accused of being a Communist front.
Welch was a crafty courtroom performer of the “I’m just a simple country lawyer” variety, and he put on his best basset-hound face. “Until this moment, Senator,” he said, “I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” McCarthy spoke up again, repeating things he had just said about Fisher. Welch tried to stop him. “Senator, may we not drop this?” he asked. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Again, McCarthy refused to change the subject. Welch let him talk. “Mr. McCarthy,” he said finally, when McCarthy was done, “I will not discuss this further with you. . . . If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good.” The room erupted in applause. Even reporters applauded. It was June 9, 1954, the thirtieth day of the Army-McCarthy hearings. The dragon had been slain.
The article is worth reading for what follows on there because it says that McCarthy going after Fisher wasn't a result of McCarthy and Cohn and Schine outting a former commie, they found out about that through a carefully and skillfully laid out trap laid by Joseph Welch. But I'll let you read that.
Notice while you're reading this fact:
McCarthy was a bomb-thrower—and, in a sense, that is all he was. He would make an outrageous charge, almost always with little or no evidentiary basis, and then he would surf the aftershocks. When these subsided, he threw another bomb. He knew that every time he did it reporters had two options. They could present what he said neutrally, or they could contest its veracity. He cared little which they did, nor did he care that, in his entire career as a Communist-hunter, he never sent a single “subversive” to jail. What mattered was that he was controlling the conversation.
McCarthy would never have gotten anywhere if it hadn't been for the "free press" naming, among others two of the most influential scumbags in journalism of the time, the odious Westbrook Pegler and the gossip smear artist Walter Winchell (I believe I was the one who informed my attacker that Winchell was one of a number of Jewish supporters of Joe McCarthy). And, contrary to claims made during the course of the brawl, McCarthy never prosecuted anyone, including the foolish Mariam Moskowitz who he claimed was one of McCarthy's victims. She was prosecuted by the Southern District Federal Attorney Irving Saypol in a trial heard by the judge most infamous for his convicting and sentencing of the atomic spys Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Irving Kaufman. During the trial Roy Cohn, Harry Gold and the odious and ever present Elizabeth Bentley testified against Mariam Moskowitz and the boyfriend she stupidly lied to the FBI for - she said later that she was too embarrassed to admit having an adulterous affair with a married man. I pointed out that the only persons she had to blame for her trouble were herself and her boyfriend. I knew it wouldn't go over well - it's so opposed to the tedious show-biz formula of the unfairly embattled victim of the commie hunters - but in her case she did the crime, she did the time and she had no right to be exonerated, especially as she admitted to it. From what my troll said, I doubt he ever met her, he certainly didn't get the story right.
More generally, the question is why we seem to have the need to attribute every bad thing to a piece of garbage like Joe McCarthy? I mean, I was brought up to despise him and I certainly do - in no small part for bringing the name into such disrepute but he was hardly the most odious villain of that disgusting era. Cohn and Saypol and Kaufman did do what the idiot troll accused McCarthy of, prosecuting people - getting two of them fried in the electric chair. Cohn of course did a lot more than that. But McCarthy was horrible enough for getting on with without accusing him of conducting an anti-Jewish witch hunt - which he didn't - and other sins which a look at the record doesn't support.
And while we're at it, a lot of those who were prosecuted and convicted were actually guilty of things which were crimes, some of them as serious as the spying for Stalin which may or may not have helped him obtain the bomb earlier than he would without it. But other crimes were committed during the course of that, often lying to law enforcement, a crime which, when it's a Scooter Libby or a Mike Flynn we would have no problem seeing as a serious crime. The mythology that all of those prosecuted during the red scares were hapless victims is a huge lie, a number of them were guilty of serious crimes. A lot of the ones who were persecuted were actually pretty terrible people who supported one of the world's all time worst mass murders, guilty of Nazi level genocide and terror murders to keep in power. Some of them were unjustly accused of things and some of them were persecuted and injured though they did nothing. Doesn't it diminish the wrong done to the innocent to excuse the crimes of the guilty as much as it diminishes the guilt of the guilty by insisting that someone like McCarthy had to not only be held accountable for what he did wrong but for things he didn't do?
That disgusting era was disgusting on both sides, that's a fact. You don't have to choose one side to be less disgusting, you can reject both. And I do.
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