“I have here in my hand a list of 250 [State Department employees] who were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department,” Joe McCarthy said in Wheeling, West Virginia in January, 1950. This setoff five years of public hysteria that paralyzed much of the national government, ruined careers, reputations, and hundreds of lives, frightened certified war heroes like Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy into at least public silence.
McCarthy created a world in which a mere allegation, unsupported by any whisper of evidence, could upend and destroy public lives.
Joseph McCarthy has been dead now for 70 years, but his legacy hovers: In place of fake lists of traitorous bureaucrats, raised in the effort to cause a commotion, we have fake allegations of teenage debauchery, raised with malice aforethought by liberal zealots to take down a judge they don’t like.
McCarthy, said his biographer, Richard H. Rovere, (the Washington reporter for the New Yorker,) had no principles to compromise, while McCarthy’s successors today have so many and hold them so fiercely they are ready to stoop to any levels required to keep them safe from the hands of conservative judges. And the New Yorker, in the ‘50s the soul of the liberal spirit, is ready to stoop to the lowest of standards to libel an innocent man.
In the Democrats’ eyes, Hillary Clinton had no right to lose, Anthony Kennedy had no right to retire, and leave his seat open, and Donald Trump had no right whatsoever to be able to name not one, but two, Supreme Court justices in the space of just two years in office. So something extreme should be done. So Dianne Feinstein kept secret the decades-old allegations against Kavanaugh for over a month, releasing the letter containing them only when it was certain to cause a major upheaval, after the issue was assumed to be closed.
The accuser tried to keep her identity secret, while doing her best to destroy the Kavanaugh family. But all of the four people Mrs. Ford had put forth as witnesses who had been at the party in Maryland in 1982 or thereabouts at which she claimed Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her said they could remember neither the party nor Kavanaugh’s presence.
And so they came up with a story that was still more grotesque: that at Yale, he pushed his groin in the face of a girl who passed out at a party. This as published in the New Yorker, by Jane Mayer, the haiographer of the Anita Hill saga; the ultimate story of feminist stress. The problems with this were that the woman involved was had not been all that certain the something had happened. The New York Times, which had spent over a week trying to track down the story, couldn’t find any corroboration that anything had happened at all. “The Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week and could find no one with first hand knowledge,” the paper had said.
And so the best of the best of the modern day culture isn’t that far from the worst of the 50’s, with the difference that in the real 1950’s the New Yorker had been on the side of the light, holding the line against right-wing hysterics. Now, it’s the home of left-wing hysterics, which is not an improvement. The spirit of Tailgunner Joe lives on in the New Yorker — yes, the New Yorker!
