Peter King McCarthy
Ten years ago, shortly after 9/11, I would have been surprised at the furor over Rep. Peter King’s daring to suggest a House hearing on homegrown terrorism that focuses mostly on Islamicist terrorist groups in this country. But not any more.
Here’s a sampler of the way it goes:
This committee cannot live in denial,” King said, accusing critics of trying to “dilute” the focus by turning attention to groups other than Al Qaeda.
“Only Al Qaeda and its Islamist affiliates in this country are part of an international threat to our nation,” King said.
He said the hearings “must go forward, and they will.” He said backing down would amount to a “craven surrender to political correctness.”
But Ellison warned that they could unfairly increase suspicion of Muslim Americans by lumping them together with violent extremists.
“When you assign their violent action to the entire community, you assign collective blame to a whole group,” Ellison said. “This is the very heart of stereotyping and scapegoating.”
But from the time of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, nearly everyone has bent over backwards to make sure the Muslim community as a whole is not targeted. Even the evil George Bush hardly ever used the word “Muslim” or “Islamic” when he spoke of the terrorists, in hopes of holding off the PC crowd, although he had fat chance of ever doing that.
But that hasn’t stopped the allegations from liberals and the left. Just Google “Peter King McCarthy” and you’ll get tons of links making that comparison.
Lost in the fray, of course, is the fact that the abrasive McCarthy was often correct: there were a great many Communists in the government who were seeking to undermine this country, and almost all of McCarthy’s accusations turned out to be true when the Soviet files were opened and confirmed them. His name has become a synonym for “witch hunt,” but witches of the Salem sort are imaginary (pace, Wiccans) and Communists are most assuredly not (see this).
Speaking of those Communists and the nefarious Joe McCarthy, one of the first articles that comes up in a “Peter King McCarthy” search is this piece by Joanna Molloy, which appeared in the NY Daily News back in December of 2010, when the King hearings were already being discussed. Its headline, not atypical of the genre, is “Pete King’s plan to grill Muslims is flashback to Joe McCarthy’s Hollywood witch hunt for Communists.”
Okay, what’s wrong with this picture? I’ll give you a bit more of the article:
Rep. Pete King’s proposal to hold hearings on the “radicalization” of American Muslims is something straight out of the Bad Ideas Department.
Make that the Worst Ideas Department.
Just substitute the word “movie” for “Muslim” and you’ve got McCarthyism. As in Sen. Joe, who called in actors from Lucille Ball to Judy Holliday simply because they had had naughty liberal thoughts.
McCarthy found nothing on Holliday, but ruined her life and scores of others in Hollywood.
Molloy may write for the Daily News and I may be just a lowly blogger, but even I know that Molloy (and, presumably, the entire editorial staff of the Daily News, which not only did not catch her error but highlighted it in the headline) is confusing McCarthy’s investigations with the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee, with which McCarthy was completely uninvolved.
It’s a common misconception among the uninformed, and a common assertion among the propagandists on the left who would make use of their ignorance. What’s more, to be a little bit nitpicky here, was Judy Holliday’s life actually “ruined” afterward? As a child of the 50s, I seem to recall her being in a ton of shows and movies afterward. And in fact that’s correct:
In 1950, Holliday was the subject of an FBI investigation looking into allegations that she was a Communist. The investigation “did not reveal positive evidence of membership in the Communist Party” and was concluded after three months. Unlike many others tainted by the Communist scandal, she was not blacklisted from movies, but she was blacklisted from performing on radio and television for almost three years.
In 1952, she was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to “explain” why her name had been linked to Communist front organizations…
In November 1956 she returned to Broadway starring in the musical Bells Are Ringing with book and lyrics by her Revuers friends, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and directed by Jerome Robbins, for which she won the 1957 Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. In 1960 she starred in the film version of Bells Are Ringing…
Holliday went on to a few more movie and Broadway roles before she unfortunately died of breast cancer in 1965, at the age of 43. No doubt Joe McCarthy was responsible for that, as well.
This is a great day when someone tells the truth about McCarthy.Thank you ,Neo.
There are several myths which arise every so often with liberals and they need to be directly confronted each and every time:
1) Joe McCarthy witchhunts; as neo points out, McCarthy was by and large correct;
2) “Joe’s” House Unamerican Activities Committee, should immediately cause one to doubt the credibility of the complainant;
3) The 3/5s rule in the Constitution, which by now, everyone should know was an attempt to disempower the slaveholding states; and
4) Nazis were right-wing reactionaries. In fact Nazis (Nazional Sozialismus) were leftist socialists.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, it’s not that the left doesn’t know anything, it’s that most of what they DO know is wrong!
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Well, I caught a little of Ellison’s “performance” (its performance characteristics and over the top theatricality reminding me of James’ Brown’s “Cape Routine” http://lisawallerrogers.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/james-brown-the-cape-routine/) and I must say, “we are not impressed.”
In the old days before he captured a Congressional seat ol’ Keith spent some ten years involved withand doing various things to support the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, and he was known then as Keith E. Hakim, Keith X. Ellison, and sometimes Keith Ellison Muhammad.
Keith, you might remember, finessed the issue of him demanding to swear his oath of office on the Qur’an by doing so on Thomas Jefferson’s personal copy of the Qur’an, that was lent for his use by the Library of Congress.
Of course, no one in the MSM had the bad taste to raise the issue of what Thomas Jefferson–who spent 20 years creating our Navy and Marine Corps so that they could sail over to North Africa and wipe out the Muslim Barbary Pirates headquartered there, who had been draining our new country’s Treasury dry for 20 years, as Congress paid out annual protection moneyi.e. Jizya to the pirates so that they would refrain from seizing/destroying our merchantmen, stealing their cargoes, and selling their crews and passengers in to slavery destroying our absolutely essential sea trade. Nor, did the MSM inform us about all the very uncomplimentary things that the other Founding Fathers had to say about the natures, world-views, and philosophies of Islam, the Qur”an, and Muhammad.
Finally, the MSM and members of Congress were most profoundly uninterested in pointing out, as well, that that Qur’an and Islam stood for the proposition that all the “man-made” nations, boundaries, governments, and laws of us “unbelievers” were “illegitimate” (since not ordained and set up by the only one, true God, Allah) and were an affront to Allah, and must be overthrown and destroyed, so that the complete domination and control of the entire Earth and all its nations and peoples and the universal imposition of Shari’a law that Allah commanded could take place.
What, then, did newly minted Congressman Ellison swear to “protect and defend from all enemies foreign and domestic.”
Bring a bag lunch. And an appetite for hysterics.
Sorry, it should have been …the issue of what Thomas Jefferson…might have said about the Qur’an and Islam.
But that hasn’t stopped the allegations from liberals and the left.
Fine, you lefties. Just show me all the non-Muslim home-grown terrorists who’ve raised hell since 2001. Aryan Nations? the anti-abortion crowd? the Klan? the Tea Party?
Don’t worry, I wait…oh, and I seem to recall that when that late term abortionist got shot and killed the left was all over the guilt-by-association smear brush.
Yes, I know: silly me, wanting the left to be consistent…
John Adams wasn’t exactly a fan of Islam, either.
Oh, yes, Islam is “the religion of peace.” In Judaism and Christianity there is at least an ideal of peace…the lion and the lamb, every man under his fig tree, etc. Of course the ideal is not always…in fact, perhaps seldom…embodied in actual practice but those are at least the ideals.
From what little I know (and I readily confess it’s not much) Islam doesn’t even have the trope, the figure of speech, the ideal. I await correction from those who know more.
If we’re going to have dueling tears, I suppose we could get some family members of those killed at Ft. Hood, or some of the wounded in their wheelchairs. Or some of the survivors of the shooting at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle. Or the family of the soldier killed in Arkansas, shot at a recruiting office. Or the guys killed recently in Germany. Or the survivors of the Trolley Square Mall shooting….
Here is John Quincy Adams:
“In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, […..] Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST.- TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE…. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant … While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.”
Yes, the capitals were in the original, and the bold face added for the purposes of this post.
Adams Quote from Robert Spencer’s “Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades” p. 83.
I was in a pizza place for lunch yesterday. They had CNN on the TV, although I couldn’t hear the sound.
They showed King, the caption said something about his hearing, and then they showed old footage of a McCarthy hearing. I just rolled my eyes. They’re so predictable.
Mr Bently >>
The Christian symbolism of the lion and the lamb dates to medieval Christendom. And the mistake amongst many is to look only at the lamb, with its docility and peacefulness, as being the only Christian ideal. But the ferocity of the lion is equally appropriate. Then, it ws likely necessary at times for the Creed to survive. And on cannot go to a military graveyard with all the crosses to realize the symbol of the lion still holds. GK Chesterton developed that very theme in one of his essays… either in Orthodoxy or on the paradoxes of Christianity…
Thomas Carlyle on reading the koran: “. . . I must say, it [the Koran] is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; – insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran . . .”
Yet he went on to romanticize mohammed, and declare him a rough-hewn hero, rather like Rousseau admiring the “noble savage.”
And it’s a good example of this kind of hatred and bigotry that right wing zealots accused Roosevelt’s man who set up the UN, the United Nations, for crying out loud, as fine a man as Alger Hiss, who knew which spoon to use and never shot a caribou, of being a Communist.
What more do you need to know?
I want everyone to thank T for saving them the grief of me posting the same points but in several volumes… 🙂
if i cant fix it, might as well laugh at it…
So McCarthy was by and large correct? Honestly I don’t know much about those times, however I do seem to recall tailgunner Joe having a little trouble after he accused the Army of being Communist. I also seem to recall that strident anti-communists like Senator Scoop Jackson complained about him, indeed virtually the whole congress did. Also isn’t odd a congressman had better resources than the FBI when it came to finding communists.
Here is a quote
“William Bennett, former Reagan Administration Secretary of Education, opined in his 2007 book America: The Last Best Hope:
The cause of anti-communism, which united millions of Americans and which gained the support of Democrats, Republicans and independents, was undermined by Sen. Joe McCarthy … McCarthy addressed a real problem: disloyal elements within the U.S. government. But his approach to this real problem was to cause untold grief to the country he claimed to love … Worst of all, McCarthy besmirched the honorable cause of anti-communism. He discredited legitimate efforts to counter Soviet subversion of American institutions.”
There is something very wrong with very debatable opinions (to put it mildly) being presented as newly discovered facts as in T’s comments. Nonsense like the Nazis being leftist (which of course explains why they got on so well with the Soviet Union) are off the wall. As for the 3/5s rule, it seems to have empowered rather than dis-empowered the southern states, as their two-legged livestock would be counted almost as a regular human being for representation.
New facts and interpretations do come to light every now and then, but I agree with Will Durant; to paraphrase, most new ideas are utter hogwash.
We should all be glad the lefty press is trying to play Edward R. Morrow with King’s hearings. The ridiculousness of the attempt not only adds to their increasing irrelevance but should condition the public to conclude the opposite of what they are promoting. As next year they will be presenting Obama as an all wise savior it couldl lead to his replacement by someone more qualified, like a dead cat.
A few years ago, the Writers Guild magazine, _Written By_, devoted an issue to the Hollywood 10 – the writers who were purportedly blacklisted from Hollywood because they refused to testify as to whether they were members of the Communist Party. Almost all of them admitted in their interviews that they had been Party members. Some of them were underground members, that is, following Party orders without ever revealing, even to their friends, that they were in the CP. The worst admitted that they had joined in the ’50s, long after Stalin’s purges, the Doctors’ Plot, the Night of the Murdered Poets, etc., all were well known. (Artful, you need to get that issue for your files!)
And what was the reaction? Nothing,. Not a word. Not one comment, editorial, or letter, in that issue or afterward, saying, “Maybe we were wrong all these years and Elia Kazan was right.”
It worth to note that nobody was targeted by McCarthy or by House Commission for Communist beliefs as such. All investigations and questioning were focused on CPA membership. There were, probably, more Trotzky followers in USA than Stalinists, and they all were Communists by their creed, but this in no way made them targets. Most of so-called Neoconservatives were some day Trotzkites. Since this group has no organizational and financial connection to USSR, it was not considered as a threat to national security.
Why to single out Islam fundamentalism among other religious fundamentalisms? Isn’t this a scapegoating?
That is why:
Fundamentalist Jews want you to leave them alone.
Fundamentalist Christians want to convert you.
Fundamentalist Muslims want to murder you.
Feel the difference?
Joe McCarthy has an abrasive personality, he was alcoholic and not slightly paranoid. This made him a lot of enemies, but had nothing to do with the truth of his assertions. In this he was vindicated by history. CPU actually was a subversive organization, funded by Soviet secret services, with agents on its payroll in many USA governmental structures. And the number of Soviet spies in USA was formidable, almost all of them recruited trough CPU groups.
Sergey, I am not an expert on McCarthy, but those assertions you mentioned were widely known and accepted. He merely pretended to have discovered them for his personal gain. The net result of his performance was and is to give fodder to the enemies of democracy. That is his legacy, not a safer republic.
Bob from Virginia:
A few minutes found this information:
Case by case, Evans reveals the unimpeachable evidence that all of the so-called victims of McCarthy’s crusade against Communist subversion – every single one of them – really were Communists and agents of a hostile foreign power: the Soviet Union. Evan’s long decades of dogged research should at last put at rest the vicious slanders that plagued Joe McCarthy in his Senate career and followed him into the grave.
McCarthy was getting “bits and pieces” of information in real time from several investigations?by congressional committees, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the State Department itself. The State department cover-up allowed Communists to “resign” with no stigma, only to pop up later in other government positions.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, KGB archives have been opened which further vindicate McCarthy. As unfathomable as it may seem, Americans, many of whom were in important positions in the government back then, were in fact collaborating with the Soviets in such projects as the take-over of Eastern Europe, China, and elsewhere according to de-classified Soviet files. The publishing of the Venona decryptions, which were messages decoded by American experts and sent by the Soviets to American spies in the 1940’s, further vindicates McCarthy.
M. Stanton Evans told Beck of his research on McCarthy that “I found a lot of stuff missing, a lot of stuff had been censored, a lot of stuff that was in the records in one place but blacked out in another place. Mostly what I found was that the FBI files, which backed up what McCarthy was saying, had been withheld for 50 years. And we now have them, or many of them, and they show essentially that he was right in general. There was a massive penetration of the government, and that it was covered up, and that he threatened that cover-up. And that’s why he was isolated, demonized, and destroyed. That’s the technique.”
As John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr point out in Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, no less a liberal icon than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. denounced a book for characterizing Duggan as a KGB source, accusing the author of “blackening the name of a man whom many knew as an able public servant.”
But the collapse of the Soviet empire has meant the implosion of the liberal delusion that McCarthyism was a mean-spirited campaign of lies and smears based entirely on the ambition and alcohol-fueled paranoia of one flawed human being, whose name has become synonymous with witch-hunting. Schlesinger and his ideological confré¨res have had the rug pulled out from under them by the gradual release of the KGB’s files, and the coup de gré¢ce has been delivered by the publication of Spies, which cites definitive evidence from the Soviet archives that not only nails Duggan as a Soviet agent, but also closes the case of the most celebrated Soviet fifth columnist of all, Alger Hiss.
……..
Imagine what I would find if I actually cared enough to do some solid research.
McCarthy was told about known threats to the US gov’t that were left in place, so he did the only thing he really *could* do– told the public. Secrecy hadn’t worked before.
Too bad he didn’t expect that the followers’ followers’ would still be in power 50 years later. (Good heavens, I still have to argue against SOVIET RUSSIA being a great place to live….)
Argh, I missed two /a s.
Bob from Va,
You ask “So McCarthy was by and large correct?”
and you quote Bennett: “McCarthy addressed a real problem. . . . .” I repeat McCarthy was BY and LARGE (not absolutely) correct, and as Bennett points out, it was his approach to the problem that caused untold grief.
As for the 3/5s rule. The Southern states wanted slaves (who could not vote) to count as whole persons. This would have increased their representation in the House of Representatives. If that had been done, with their increased legislative influence, it’s highly unlikely that slavery would have ended completely in 1865 (probably much later). On the other hand, had the Northern states insisted on not counting slaves at all, the Southern states would have never ratified the Constitution. Where do you think THAT would leave us today? The 3/5s rule was a compromise that gave the Northern states a 2/5s legislative advantage which led to the abolition of slavery in 1865–it WAS a human rights issue, but in exactly the reverse that most people understand.
As for the Nazis, they didn’t get along with the Soviets not because their ideologies were different, but because they both competed for the same thing–the domination of Europe with their own group at the top of the pyramid . The Soviets wanted Europe (of which they acquired a significant part after the war) and the Nazis wanted to dominate Russia as they did Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc. (remember there’s this little insignificant factoid called the battle for Stalingrad and the Eastern front) Socialists can’t and won’t share, (see Wisconsin) so stable, long term alliances between them were/are virtually impossible. Believe this, If Cuba were an immediate neighbor to Venezuela, Castro and Chavez would not be so friendly.
Bob from VA:
You are entitled to your own errors, delusions even; but facts are facts.
Foxfier, T and Tom, I see strawmen, suspicious sources, evasions and what’s the point.
“Foxfier, T and Tom, I see strawmen, suspicious sources, evasions and what’s the point.”
Of course. It’s the time-honored defense attorney’s approach: Ignore the facts and question the sources that fail to fit the pre-constructed narrative.
Galilleo faced the same kind of adversaries a few years back.
Ooooo, I love it here. I used to buy used copies of Witness for a dollar, and give them to people. Chamber’s autobiography contains a forward that is absolutely priceless in understanding the Commie lure of his youth, and why he broke with them and denounced Hiss.
All things would be incomplete if we didn’t mention Armand Hammer, friend of the American Left, and Soviet agent for half a century. How quickly memories dull and fade.
Bob from V-
Er… right.
Nice to know we’ve got another guy who just won’t pay attention to anything that’s counter his views, AND won’t bother to even make a decent response.
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2011/03/10/of-sandmonkey-peter-king-mao-and-my-islamophobia/2/
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