Mythmakers + Joe McCarthy
In an age in which a not-insignificant percentage of the public can be led to believe George Bush Jr. was really behind the attack on the World Trade Center, Vincent Foster was murdered by Hillary Clinton, and Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was allied with al Qaida, the occasional efforts of some less-than-useful writers to rehabilitate the reputation of the late commie-combating Senator Joseph McCarthy could, unfortunately, be viewed as par for the course. The last few years have seen a mini-genre of that flavor emerge. The pseudo-scholarly efforts of Arthur Herman appeared, just as quickly to fall by the wayside, having collapsed under even cursory examination. Ann Coulter, the most prominent of the nut right's assorted brainless bimbos, dipped her poisonous pen into this well and offered a worshipful screed of McCarthy-as-martyred-hero--it succeeded only in making her an even bigger laughingstock than she was before. Now, along comes M. Stanton Evans with yet another revisionist history. Like the rest, he's here to tell us the late Wisconsin Senator who became an -ism really was right after all, and that those people who criticized him sure were mean.
With "Blacklisted by History", Evans pulls a fast one before we even get past the cover. The subtitle of this, his latest dreary tome, is "The Untold Story of Senator Joseph McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies." The promise of an "untold story" is a common one in revisionist literature, and it at least has the benefit of alerting the serious student of the subject to start reaching for his wallet. Still, it seems a particularly egregious fiction when it comes to something written about so shopworn a subject as Joe McCarthy. McCarthy's time in the spotlight lasted only about four years, yet we've had over 50 years of books, movies, and other assorted commentary about it. Every piece of his story, no matter how minute, has been told and retold endlessly. Ann Coulter assured us that, in spite of this saturation coverage, everything we know about "Tailgunner Joe" was an "hegemonic lie," but Ann Coulter is mad as a hatter, and only those similarly afflicted find analytical value in the ravings of lunatics. What she offered, and what Evans is offering now, isn't anything "new" or, as Evans would have it, "untold"--it's just a re-re-retread of already-well-trod ground, a politically-motivated rewrite of McCarthy's story that begins with the premise that McCarthy was something between a well-intentioned fellow with a legitimate beef and an outright hero worthy of high praise and martyrdom, and works backward to try to "prove" the preconceived conclusion, indulging in whatever intellectual dishonesty, omission, and falsification of whatever details are required to achieve the desired result. And it takes quite a bit of all of that. This is why the revisionists' work has been consistently rejected across the political spectrum--even in this insanely conservative age, they represent an extreme fringe, and even the conservative scholars of the Cold War (the serious ones, that is) dismiss them out of hand. Histories' verdict of McCarthy is correct.
The rest of the article is here:
http://claslib2.tripod.com/lh/mccarthy.html
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"The Dig"
http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/