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| Home Front: Politix |
| MoveOn and McCarthy |
| 2007-09-13 |
| As a backdrop to the investigation being conducted by the joint committee there is being waged a strange war, an undeclared and unacknowledged war; a war such as never before has been seen on sea or land. It is a war into which we were launched on the impulse of a President in the name of the United Nations, which has been striving ever since to disavow its paternity ... *** That is one of the startling paragraphs a reader discovers when going back to read Senator McCarthy's infamous attack on General George C. Marshall. The screed, uttered on June 14, 1951, was made in the Senate during the Korean conflict. A long version, running 60,000 words, was entered into the Congressional Record. The New York Times ran out its story the next day under the headline "Marshall U.S. Foe, M'Carthy Charges" The subheadline was "Republican Asserts General Is Part of Conspiracy Seeking American Defeat by Russia." We were moved to plough through the red-baiter's remarks after reading the op-ed piece by Peter Feaver, a professor at Duke, that the Boston Globe ran out Monday under the headline "MoveOn's McCarthy Moment." Mr. Feaver took MoveOn.org to task for its advertisement in the New York Times that accused General Petraeus of, as Mr. Feaver characterized it, "activities befitting a traitor" — namely, lying about the war. William Kristol, the Wall Street Journal, and Powerlineblog.com, among others, have commented eloquently about MoveOn.org's attack on General Petraeus. Both McCarthy and MoveOn.org reacted to someone whose views they loathed by questioning a general's loyalty. MoveOn.org pointedly suggested General Petraeus would "betray" America in Iraq by "cooking the books for the White House." McCarthy accused General Marshall, then the secretary of defense, of conspiring with Secretary of State Acheson to weaken America so we could eventually be conquered by the Soviet empire. There are other similarities, such as the fact that MoveOn.org, and the left generally, have been upset by the way, in their view, President Bush has converted the universal sympathy America enjoyed after the attack of September 11, 2001, to what they claim is widespread hostility. McCarthy began his tirade with reference to "the question of why we fell from our position as the most powerful Nation on earth at the end of World War II to a position of declared weakness by our leadership." Both demagogues — MoveOn.org and McCarthy — were upset about a war going through a difficult patch. MoveOn.org describes the Petraeus formula for keeping tabs on violence as "bizarre." McCarthy complained not only of a "strange" war but characterized it as having a "a nightmare quality" in which General Bradley reckoned we were fighting the "wrong enemy" and where the joint chiefs had "succumbed to the general confusion." There emanated from McCarthy, as there does from MoveOn.org, not only the tendency to assassinate the character of decent people but the unmistakable whiff of panic. There are also differences. MoveOn.org wants to retreat from what it characterizes as "an unwinnable religious civil war." It frets that there is no "timetable for withdrawing all our troops." McCarthy, ontheotherhand, wasfighting against what he saw as retreat and compromise. "In everything that concerns the deadly and ruinous aspects of war — the casualty rolls, the immense cost in treasure, the domestic strains, the fears — we are at war," he said. "In everything that has to do with the constructive, hopeful aspect of war — for war has those aspects too — we are not at war." Like the left in the current conflict, McCarthy chastised the administration for trying to frighten Americans, quoting a spokesman as saying, "This very Capitol Building, this very Senate Chamber may be blown to smithereens next week or the week after." McCarthy saw that as not the heart of America speaking (and notoriously quipped that "I do not think we need fear too much about the communists dropping atomic bombs on Washington. They would kill too many of their friends that way"). Like the Democrats today, McCarthy was thumping for his colleagues to "reassert the constitutional prerogative of the Congress to declare the policy of the United States." This newspaper is not in the camp that seeks to rehabilitate McCarthy. It's not only that he had no sense of decency, as Joseph Welch marked, and was a demagogue but that he gave a generation of anti-Communism a bad name. Bad as McCarthy was, however, it would not surprise us if, when the historians are done with this period, MoveOn.org and its ilk come to be seen as worse. They have abandoned decency and bersmirched decent people not in pursuit of a more aggressive and broader fight against a vast evil but in pursuit of a capitulation. The one encouraging thing is that this is coming into focus as America is preparing to go into a national election, a process in which demagogues are often unmasked and the wisdom of the American people tends to assert itself. |
| Posted by:tu3031 |