McCarthy Lite

by digby

The Democrats in the House docilely laid down for another round of GOPukkake today and voted to condemn MoveOn. I hope they all enjoyed the ritual humiliation.

For some reason, the many Democrats have a major problem understanding the concept of principle:

Wisconsin Rep. David Obey, a veteran Democrat, recounted how he left the Republican Party during the era of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., and said that lawmakers have an obligation to criticize their allies as well as their enemies when they go too far.

‘I have got an obligation to be equally upset when that kind of juvenile debate emanates from the left,’ Obey said.

Now, Obey is a confused sort who apparently thinks that because a civilian group criticized a general in a newspaper ad they are the equivalent of McCarthy using the coercive constitutional power of the US Senate to smear the Army as being riddled with communists. That’s ridiculous, of course. The principle right minded Americans hold against McCarthyism is the use of government power to suppress dissent.

McCarthy would have been thrilled to have a vote like this today. Over the moon. There was nothing he liked more than forcing the Democrats to repudiate their allies and bow down like supplicants to someone they knew was completely full of shit. It set the stage for everything that has come since.

February 4th, 1954, Senator McCarthy spoke of one party’s treason. This was at Charleston, West Virginia where there were no cameras running. It was recorded on tape:

The issue between the Republicans and Democrats is clearly drawn. It has been deliberately drawn by those who have been in charge of twenty years of treason. The hard fact is — the hard fact is that those who wear the label, those who wear the label Democrat wear it with the stain of a historic betrayal.

That’s what Democrats like Obey are afraid of. And that’s why they acquiesced to the phony GOP hysteria on Move-On. They’ve been kow-towing in one way or another on this stuff since the first HUAC standing committee hearing back in 1948.

I suppose we should be grateful that Duncan Hunter and Mitch McConnell didn’t hold up pieces of paper purporting to have the names of more than 500 Move-On members who are in the government today, but give it time. A Global War on Terror is the perfect vehicle for such tactics — it’s one of the reasons they insist on designating it as such.

During the height of the cold war, both parties in congress, and even President Eisenhower, were scared to death of McCarthy, allowing him to run roughshod over the entire US government with thuggish, hysterical accusations of treason against everyone from librarians to Army generals.

MoveOn, an independent political group, bought an advertisement in a newspaper expressing an opinion. And the entire right wing political machinery immediately lurched into high gear to shrilly condemn it as unpatriotic and unacceptable, leading both the Senate and the House of Representatives to pass official, government censures of the group.

Surely, any sentient being can see where the real equivalence with Joseph McCarthy lies.

Edward R. Murrow famously called out McCarthy on his national TV show See it Now with a memorable broadcast that gathered together clips of all the accusations of communism and anti-American, unpatriotic behavior he’d hurled at his fellow Americans over the years. People were shocked to see it all in one place.

Murrow made his most famous comment that night, which ended like this:

His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

The last few years of suppression of dissent and fear mongering have not reached the level of the McCarthy era, obviously. But the echoes are still there and the tactics are still being used, in symbolic form, to get the Democratic Party to submit to right wing paranoia. They just did it again today. And why not? It’s been working for decades.

Update: Jamison Foser made a similar point when discussing Richard Cohen’s similarly twisted McCarthy analogy last week.

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