Wednesday, November 12, 2008

They Have a List: What McCarthy would do if he were gay

That sound you hear may be goosestepping from the Tolerance Police. Now someone has posted a "blacklist" of individuals and businesses that contributed to the effort to pass Proposition 8. If a conservative did this, they would be skewered.

That silence you hear is the media completely ignoring this.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

McCarthy? Before my time, but wasn't he an important influential Senator whose disapproval could get you sent to prison? Is Mr Cothran seriously suggesting that gays are that powerful a group?

Did Sen. McCarthy get physically assaulted (with resulting exultation) in his heyday? http://spartanspectator.blogspot.com/2008/11/anti-prop-8-protester-gets-socked-in.html

jah

Lee said...

I don't think you could go to prison for just running afoul of Sen. McCarthy. It might help, however, if you had perjured yourself in questioning about where your loyalties might lie. There certainly was an awful lot of quibling about what a liar McCarthy was for claiming, say, Owen Lattimore belonged to 21 communist front organizations, when it's hard to see how he could have belonged to more than 19.

In fact, you could get into a lot of trouble for having worked for Sen. McCarthy. Roy Cohn, McCarthy's aide, was prosecuted three times by the Kennedy Administration for various high crimes, and never convicted of anything. But there may have been something else going on. Bobby Kennedy was the Attorney-General in those days, and he despised Cohn. Might have been a case of jealousy: Bobby had worked for McCarthy, too.

Yes, the great liberal Bobby Kennedy was Sen. McCarthy's aide. He lucked out, didn't he? Or at least his image did. I don't remember any verse from Dion's famous song that asked, "Has anybody here seen my old friend, Roy?"

Martin Cothran said...

Jah,

Who was sent to prison for eliciting McCarthy's disapproval?

Anonymous said...

These people were sent to prison because they incurred McCarthyism

The Hollywood 10 http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAhollywood10.htm

On another note, wasn't Joseph McCarthy gay along with his friend, Roy Cohn? Certainy Andrew Scheim was gy

Martin Cothran said...

Are you saying the Hollywood 10 were sent to prison for disagreeing with Joseph McCarthy?

Lee said...

The term "The Hollwood Ten" refers to an investigation of Hollywood, not by Sen. McCarthy, but the House Committee on Un-American Activities, conducted in the late 1940s.

That was the House of Representatives. McCarthy was a Senator. McCarthy had yet to make his first speech about communism, which happened in Wheeling, WV, in 1951, when he was looking for an issue to get re-elected on.

Facts never were a big deal for McCarthy, and as we have witnessed here, never a big deal for his critics either.

Try again?

Martin Cothran said...

Right. 1947 to be precise, the year McCarthy was elected to the Senate. I don't think we'll be hearing any more from them on this Lee.

Lee said...

Just one more thing, Martin. One of the more hilarious aspects of this whole thing is that, during McCarthy's heyday, liberals did try to smear Cohn as being a homosexual. There were rumors about him and another aide of McCarthy's, G. David Schine.

Well, Cohn vehemently denied being a homosexual his entire life. Turns out, he was a homosexual, at least by most people's definition. I think William Buckley once speculated than Cohn did not see himself as a homosexual, he just liked having sex with men.

I just think it's interesting that liberals then were willing to go there.

Of course, they did the same thing with Whittaker Chambers. And, what do you know, they were right again. Chambers had engaged in numerous anonymous trysts with strange men, by his own admission. It's the one thing he seems to have left out in his otherwise comprehensive memoir, "Witness". But he did admit as much to the FBI in 1942 when they first investigated Chambers' communist connections.

Liberals seem to get an awful lot of fun out of that sort of thing. That is, when they're not lecturing us about having that kind of fun. When was the last time you heard a conservative poke fun at J. Edgar Hoover's wardrobe?

Anyhow, Cohn was a very interesting figure. By all accounts, a crackerjack lawyer -- earned millions for his NY law firm. By all accounts, one of the most abrasive people on the planet, but also very loyal to his friends, and likewise. And he had some very prominent friends. For example, Buckley. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor. I really enjoyed his book, "How to Stand Up For Your Rights and Win."

Anonymous said...

I do apologize - HUAC and McCarthy do become one if one doesn't examine closely. But is it your position no one was imprisoned for contempt of congress by the HUAC chaired by McCarthy?

Anonymous said...

See? I did it again - McCarthy wasn't on the HUAC, he headed a Senate Investigations Committee. But I don't feel so bad.

"Since the time of McCarthy, the word "McCarthyism" has entered American speech as a general term for a variety of distasteful practices: aggressively questioning a person's patriotism, making poorly supported accusations, using accusations of disloyalty to pressure a person to adhere to conformist politics or to discredit an opponent, subverting civil rights in the name of national security and the use of demagoguery are all often referred to as McCarthyism."

And there you have the anti-gay movement that is not pro-anything ... 'subverting civil rights ... and the use of demagoguery...'

Lee said...

> I do apologize - HUAC and McCarthy do become one if one doesn't examine closely. But is it your position no one was imprisoned for contempt of congress by the HUAC chaired by McCarthy?

Fine, but just so we're clear, since there still seems to exist some confustion: McCarthy was a senator, not a rep. He did not chair HUAC. He wasn't even on HUAC. He had precisely nothing to do with HUAC.

Gotta keep your liberal bogeymen straight: that was Nixon.

We were asking you, who got sent to prison? Gotta understand, McCarthy was a Senator, not a judge, not a jury, not a prosecutor. As a Senator, all he could do was investigate. If his investigation unearthed something that was indictable, or if the witness had committed perjury in testifying, then it would be a matter of handing over the evidence to the Justice Department.

And then, you'd have to show how the charges were bogus or the process somehow unjust, to make it McCarthy's fault.

My take on the whole thing is that FDR had been not just lax, but extremely lax, in letting communists overrun the government. When the FBI, for example, took the results of their investigation of Whittaker Chambers to FDR himself, showing his allegations that FDR's aide, Alger Hiss, was a communist, FDR chuckled and dismissed the charges as ridiculous. Another of those communists, Harry Dexter White, made policy at a very high level designed to assist the Soviet Union in the post-war era.

So, the Republicans had a legitimate issue, and, typically, overplayed their hand. And the Democrats, typically, fought back tooth and nail, knowing they were in the wrong but also knowing they had to fight back to preserve their image. McCarthy was a bloviator, not a clear thinker, not a strategist, just basically a grand-stander.

Lee said...

> "Since the time of McCarthy, the word "McCarthyism" has entered American speech as a general term for a variety of distasteful practices: aggressively questioning a person's patriotism, making poorly supported accusations..."

Is there a word to describe aggressively questioning a person's humanity? E.g., calling someone you disagree with a bigot, or a Nazi, or a homophobe, or a racist? Probably not, because we wouldn't want to bell the liberal cat on that one, would we?

> "using accusations of disloyalty to pressure a person to adhere to conformist politics or to discredit an opponent"

When universities do this, they call it "multiculturalism" or "sensitivity training." When conservatives do it, it's McCarthyism. Aren't characterizations grand?

> "subverting civil rights in the name of national security"

Or a peaceful environment on campus or the classroom.

> "and the use of demagoguery"

If every politician who commits demagoguery is a McCarthyite, then we have about 100 McCarthyites in the Senate, and a couple of those are getting ready to move on up.

Basically, a McCarthyite is anyone who does any one of those things, whom liberals also happen to dislike.