The False Equivalency of "Outing" Lindsey Graham and the "Lavender Scare"

A piece in Politico tries, in my view, to falsely equate those who are insinuate or flat out state that Senator Lindsey Graham is a closeted gay - I've called him the Palmetto Queen myself - with those who hunted down and "outed" and fired gays back during the so-called "Lavender Scare" of the 1950's.  Society of today is far different than six decades ago, not the least because thanks to Lawrence v. Texas handed down in 2003, same sex relationships no longer carry the potential of a felony conviction.  Then of course, there is the legality of same sex marriage - something the far right wants to reverse despite public support - spousal benefits for same sex couples, the ability to file joint tax returns, and even full adoption rights for same sex couples in some states.  In short, outside of Christofascist circles and GOP politicians who prostitute themselves to them, the social stigma (or lack thereof) and legal jeopardy of being gay nowadays is in no way comparable to the 1950's and 1960's.  Thus, saying those speculating on which team Graham plays for are no better than J. Edgar Hoover - himself a closeted gay - is simply is simply not true.  That said, the piece does look at the ugly history of government persecution of gays.  Here are article highlights:

In March 1953, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover prepared a secret report for Sherman Adams, President Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff. The document concerned Charles “Chip” Bohlen, whom Eisenhower had nominated to succeed George F. Kennan as ambassador to the Soviet Union. A career diplomat, Bohlen had served as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s interpreter at the 1945 Yalta Conference, where the Allied powers ceded control of postwar Eastern Europe to Soviet Premier Josef Stalin. Bohlen’s involvement at Yalta made him suspect in the eyes of some Republicans, led by Senator Joe McCarthy, who tried to paint him as not only soft on the Soviets but also gay.

Washington at the time was in the grips not only of the Red Scare, but a more destructive (and less-remembered) “Lavender Scare.” In the popular imagination, communist disloyalty was intertwined with sexual immorality; communists were more likely to be “sexual deviants” and vice-versa. “I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual,” Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry had warned in 1950. “But a man of low morality is a menace in the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together.”

Bohlen, (who was, in fact, straight) was eventually confirmed as ambassador to the Soviet Union, and went on to have a long and distinguished Foreign Service career. He was later immortalized as one of the postwar “Wise Men” of American diplomacy.

Moral disgust was not the only consideration that made being gay a disqualifying trait for government service at the time; gays, it was widely believed, were also uniquely vulnerable to blackmail. So reprehensible was being gay, the thinking went, that a gay person would rather betray his country than risk exposure of his shameful secret.

Fast-forward over six decades to the present, and the same smear tactics are being employed, again in service of a dubious narrative involving supposed corruption of presumed gay people by a hostile foreign power. Except this time, the inquisitionists are not reactionary Republicans, but supposedly enlightened progressives.

Jon Cooper, chairman of a Democratic Super PAC which purports to be “the nation’s largest grassroots Resistance organization,” tweeted that “a Republican” had told him “he doubts [Graham] is kowtowing to Trump (and indirectly Putin) because he’s being blackmailed over his sexual orientation (an open secret) or even financial corruption. Rather, he thinks it probably involves some pretty serious sexual kink.” And that same day, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle speculated, “It could be that Donald Trump or somebody knows something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham.”

Last January, after Graham had positive words for Trump following a meeting with senators at the White House, comedian Chelsea Handler tweeted the following missive to her 8.3 million followers: “Hey, @LindseyGrahamSC what kind of #$%&-sucking video do they have on you for you 2 be acting like this? Wouldn’t coming out be more honorable?” She followed that up in October with, “If you’re wondering why Republicans took a sick day today, it’s probably because it’s #NationalComingOutDay. . . . And this week, the Washington Blade, the capital’s LGBT newspaper, put Graham’s smiling mug on the cover of its “50 Most Eligible Bachelors” issue.

[O]f all the Americans who did betray their country by committing espionage for a foreign power, there is not a single example of a gay person blackmailed into doing so. A 1991 study found that in the 117 spy cases discovered since World War II, only six involved gays, and in none of these was sexual orientation a deciding factor. That same year, asked about the impending outing of his spokesman, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney referred to the blackmail rationale as “an old chestnut” used to bar gay people unfairly from serving in sensitive government positions. To claim today, baselessly, that a closeted gay person is being blackmailed into working against his country, retroactively validates the Cold War persecution of gays, who could be denied security clearances until a 1995 Executive Order by Bill Clinton reversed Eisenhower’s mandate.

The sad irony is that the only informing some gay men and women did during this time was under duress from their own government, which pressured them into identifying fellow gay people so that they, too, could be purged.

In one of the few cases where the Soviets did try to blackmail a closeted gay man, their plans backfired. When the virulently anti-communist newspaper columnist Joe Alsop visited Moscow on a reporting trip in 1957, the KGB lured him into a honey trap with an attractive young agent and took photographs of the ensuing sexual encounter. Confronting Alsop with the dirty pictures, the KGB men demanded that he work on their behalf back in Washington. Yet rather than cower and do the Soviets’ bidding, Alsop archly asked for copies of the photos depicting him in flagrante delicto, hurried straight to the U.S. Embassy and revealed everything that had happened, including his history of gay experiences. Over the rest of his long career, despite knowing that the Soviets could have exposed him at any moment (and they tried), Alsop not only never softened his strident anti-communist views, he became even more assertive in espousing them.

It seems never to have entered the fevered imaginations of Graham’s antagonists that the reason he has changed his tune about Trump is not to protect the secret of his scandalous peccadilloes, but because of something even grubbier: politics. Graham is, after all, a Republican from a deep red state where Trump is popular with the people Graham needs to win re-election. But such quotidian explanations do not suit our increasingly conspiratorial times. . . . By stooping to gay baiting, the McCarthyism of the “Resistance” has come full circle.

Conservatism's and Today's GOP's Ugly History

As noted in a post over the weekend, Donald Trump may not have created the ugliness that now is the mainstream of today's Republican Party and conservatism in general, but he surely has tapped into aspects of America's history that represent the worse parts of human nature and society.  Worse yet, he has driven many in the Republican Party who once stood against what I view as a growing embrace of ignorance and extremism away from the party.  So-call Rockefeller Republicans now count themselves as independents, if not Democrats, and the GOP has become a veritable coven of know nothings, religious extremists and white supremacists behind a thin veneer that purports to want small government and lower taxes. A lengthy column in the New York Times that I bookmarked last week looks at some of this history and the ugly forces now in control of the Republican Party.  Here are excerpts:

Until Nov. 8, 2016, historians of American politics shared a rough consensus about the rise of modern American conservatism. It told a respectable tale. By the end of World War II, the story goes, conservatives had become a scattered and obscure remnant, vanquished by the New Deal and the apparent reality that, as the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, liberalism was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”

Year Zero was 1955, when William F. Buckley Jr. started National Review, the small-circulation magazine whose aim, Buckley explained, was to “articulate a position on world affairs which a conservative candidate can adhere to without fear of intellectual embarrassment or political surrealism.” Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society, anti-Semites and supporters of the hyperindividualist Ayn Rand, and his cohort fused the diverse schools of conservative thinking — traditionalist philosophers, militant anti-Communists, libertarian economists — into a coherent ideology, one that eventually came to dominate American politics.

I was one of the historians who helped forge this narrative. . . . Goldwater’s loss, far from dooming the American right, inspired a new generation of conservative activists to redouble their efforts, paving the way for the Reagan revolution. Educated whites in the prosperous metropolises of the New South sublimated the frenetic, violent anxieties that once marked race relations in their region into more palatable policy concerns about “stable housing values” and “quality local education,” backfooting liberals and transforming conservatives into mainstream champions of a set of positions with enormous appeal to the white American middle class.

Then the nation’s pre-eminent birther ran for president. Trump’s campaign was surreal and an intellectual embarrassment, and political experts of all stripes told us he could never become president. That wasn’t how the story was supposed to end. National Review devoted an issue to writing Trump out of the conservative movement; an editor there, Jonah Goldberg, even became a leader of the “Never Trump” crusade. But Trump won — and some conservative intellectuals embraced a man who exploited the same brutish energies that Buckley had supposedly banished.

The professional guardians of America’s past, in short, had made a mistake. We advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like Trump. . . . . Which poses a question: If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians have been telling that story wrong?

In the 1994 issue of The American Historical Review that featured Alan Brinkley’s “The Problem of American Conservatism,” Ribuffo wrote a response contesting Brinkley’s contention, now commonplace, that Trilling was right about American conservatism’s shallow roots. Ribuffo argued that America’s anti-liberal traditions were far more deeply rooted in the past, and far angrier, than most historians would acknowledge, citing a long list of examples from “regional suspicions of various metropolitan centers and the snobs who lived there” to “white racism institutionalized in slavery and segregation.”

[W]e can now see a history that is indeed unsettling — but also unsettlingly familiar. Consider, for example, an essay published in 1926 by Hiram Evans, the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in the exceedingly mainstream North American Review. His subject was the decline of “Americanism.” Evans claimed to speak for an abused white majority, “the so-called Nordic race,” which, “with all its faults, has given the world almost the whole of modern civilization.” Evans, a former dentist, proposed that his was “a movement of plain people,” and acknowledged that this “lays us open to the charge of being hicks and ‘rubes’ and ‘drivers of secondhand Fords.’ ” But over the course of the last generation, he wrote, these good people “have found themselves increasingly uncomfortable, and finally deeply distressed,” watching a “moral breakdown” that was destroying a once-great nation.

This “Second Klan” (the first was formed during Reconstruction) scrambles our pre-Trump sense of what right-wing ideology does and does not comprise. (Its doctrines, for example, included support for public education, to weaken Catholic parochial schools.) The Klan also put the predations of the international banking class at the center of its rhetoric. Its worldview resembles, in fact, the right-wing politics of contemporary Europe — a tradition, heretofore judged foreign to American politics, called “herrenvolk republicanism,” that reserved social democracy solely for the white majority. By reaching back to the reactionary traditions of the 1920s, we might better understand the alliance between the “alt-right” figures that emerged as fervent Trump supporters during last year’s election and the ascendant far-right nativist political parties in Europe.

The general belief among historians, however, was that the Klan’s national influence faded in the years after 1925, when Indiana’s grand dragon, D.C. Stephenson, who served as the de facto political boss for the entire state, was convicted of murdering a young woman.

But the Klan remained relevant far beyond the South. In 1936 a group called the Black Legion, active in the industrial Midwest, burst into public consciousness after members assassinated a Works Progress Administration official in Detroit. The group, which considered itself a Klan enforcement arm, dominated the news that year. The F.B.I. estimated its membership at 135,000, including a large number of public officials, possibly including Detroit’s police chief. The Associated Press reported in 1936 that the group was suspected of assassinating as many as 50 people.

Stephen H. Norwood, one of the few historians who did study the Black Legion, also mined another rich seam of neglected history in which far-right vigilantism and outright fascism routinely infiltrated the mainstream of American life. The story begins with Father Charles Coughlin, the Detroit-based “radio priest” who at his peak reached as many as 30 million weekly listeners. In 1938, Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, began reprinting “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a forged tract about a global Jewish conspiracy first popularized in the United States by Henry Ford. After presenting this fictitious threat, Coughlin’s paper called for action, in the form of a “crusade against the anti-Christian forces of the red revolution” — a call that was answered, in New York and Boston, by a new organization, the Christian Front. Its members were among the most enthusiastic participants in a 1939 pro-Hitler rally that packed Madison Square Garden, where the leader of the German-American Bund spoke in front of an enormous portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. . . . . Young Irish-Catholic men inspired by the Christian Front desecrated nearly every synagogue in Washington Heights. The New York Catholic hierarchy, the mayor of Boston and the governor of Massachusetts largely looked the other way.

Anti-Semitism in America declined after World War II. But as Leo Ribuffo points out, the underlying narrative — of a diabolical transnational cabal of aliens plotting to undermine the very foundations of Christian civilization — survived in the anti-Communist diatribes of Joseph McCarthy. The alien narrative continues today in the work of National Review writers like Andrew McCarthy (“How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda”) and Lisa Schiffren (who argued that Obama’s parents could be secret Communists because “for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or ’60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics”). And it found its most potent expression in Donald Trump’s stubborn insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Trump’s connection to this alternate right-wing genealogy is not just rhetorical. In 1927, 1,000 hooded Klansmen fought police in Queens in what The Times reported as a “free for all.” One of those arrested at the scene was the president’s father, Fred Trump. (Trump’s role in the melee is unclear; the charge — “refusing to disperse” — was later dropped.) In the 1950s, Woody Guthrie, at the time a resident of the Beach Haven housing complex the elder Trump built near Coney Island, wrote a song about “Old Man Trump” and the “Racial hate/He stirred up/In the bloodpot of human hearts/When he drawed/That color line” in one of his housing developments. In 1973, when Donald Trump was working at Fred’s side, both father and son were named in a federal housing-discrimination suit.

The 1960s and ’70s New York in which Donald Trump came of age, as much as Klan-ridden Indiana in the 1920s or Barry Goldwater’s Arizona in the 1950s, was at conservatism’s cutting edge, setting the emotional tone for a politics of rage.

In 1965, Congress once more allowed large-scale immigration to the United States — and it is no accident that this date coincides with the increasing conservative backlash against liberalism itself, now that its spoils would be more widely distributed among nonwhites.

The liberalization of immigration law is an obsession of the alt-right. Trump has echoed their rage. “We’ve admitted 59 million immigrants to the United States between 1965 and 2015,” he noted last summer, with rare specificity.

A puzzle remains. If Donald Trump was elected as a Marine Le Pen-style — or Hiram Evans-style — herrenvolk republican, what are we to make of the fact that he placed so many bankers and billionaires in his cabinet, and has relentlessly pursued so many 1-percent-friendly policies? More to the point, what are we to the make of the fact that his supporters don’t seem to mind?

Here, however, Trump is far from unique. The history of bait-and-switch between conservative electioneering and conservative governance is another rich seam that calls out for fresh scholarly excavation: not of how conservative voters see their leaders, but of the neglected history of how conservative leaders see their voters.

It is a short leap from advertising and reality TV to darker forms of manipulation. Consider the parallels since the 1970s between conservative activism and the traditional techniques of con men. . . . . The dubious grifting of Donald Trump, in short, is a part of the structure of conservative history.

Future historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous constitutionalist principles of Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan. They’ll need instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage. It will not be a pleasant story. But if those historians are to construct new arguments to make sense of Trump, the first step may be to risk being impolite.

The GOP's Joe McCarthy Moment

I generally disagree with most of what New York Times columnist David Brooks has to say be it his history of being an apologist for conservative misogyny to his deference to religious extremist.  But on rare occasion he gets things at least partly right.  A case in point is his column yesterday where he argues that the GOP is facing a Joe McCarthy moment.  While he casts about for solutions to the problem, he unfortunately fails to recognize that much of what has brought the country to its current status is the failed GOP policies that he has all too often supported and the GOP obstructionism that has prevented President Obama to take more decisive action to address the nations ills. More efforts at furthering the interests of the obscenely wealthy, vulture capitalists and Christian extremists is not going to achieve the aims Brooks claims to support.  Here are highlights:

Donald Trump now looks set to be the Republican presidential nominee. So for those of us appalled by this prospect — what are we supposed to do?

Well, not what the leaders of the Republican Party are doing. They’re going down meekly and hoping for a quiet convention. They seem blithely unaware that this is a Joe McCarthy moment. People will be judged by where they stood at this time. Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after for the degradation of standards and the general election slaughter.

The better course for all of us — Republican, Democrat and independent — is to step back and take the long view, and to begin building for that. This election — not only the Trump phenomenon but the rise of Bernie Sanders, also — has reminded us how much pain there is in this country. According to a Pew Research poll, 75 percent of Trump voters say that life has gotten worse for people like them over the last half century.

This declinism intertwines with other horrible social statistics. The suicide rate has surged to a 30-year high — a sure sign of rampant social isolation. A record number of Americans believe the American dream is out of reach. And for millennials, social trust is at historic lows.

Trump’s success grew out of that pain, but he is not the right response to it. The job for the rest of us is to figure out the right response.

I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own. It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable.

Up until now, America’s story has been some version of the rags-to-riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through pluck and work. But that story isn’t working for people anymore, especially for people who think the system is rigged. I don’t know what the new national story will be, but maybe it will be less individualistic and more redemptive. 

We’ll probably need a new definition of masculinity, too. There are many groups in society who have lost an empire but not yet found a role. Men are the largest of those groups. The traditional masculine ideal isn’t working anymore. It leads to high dropout rates, high incarceration rates, low labor force participation rates.  This is an economy that rewards emotional connection and verbal expressiveness. Everywhere you see men imprisoned by the old reticent, stoical ideal.

We’ll also need to rebuild the sense that we’re all in this together.

I would add that we need a new empathy for others who don't look just like us or think just like us - something that is anathema to the Christofascists and white supremacists and vulture capitalists within the Republican Party. As for redefining masculinity, perhaps Brooks ought to spend more time around gays.

Ted Cruz's Frightening "Donnie Jr." Strategy

The Republican presidential primary contest continues to be a train wreck in slow motion.  As Donald Trump seems to be trying to channel Adolph Hitler or Hermann Goering, the even more frightening (in my view) Ted Cruz is moving up in the polls.  Cruz is downright terrifying for several reasons, not the least that he seems to want to reprise the reign of the late Joseph McCarthy.   He is a more sinister version of Trump and likewise is playing to the ugliest elements in American society, especially the Christofascists - something that ought to terrify LGBT Americans.  No one ever thought Hitler would come to power in the early years, yet through fear mongering, playing to persecution complexes, and nationalism, he ultimately took Germany to ruin.  Cruz wants to emulate Hitler's rise to power and is just as insane, although he tries to hide this dangerous streak.  The question is what the GOP establishment will do to stop Cruz whom they despise.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at Cruz's apparent strategy to win the GOP nomination and the dilemma that faces the party establishment which helped create the Frankenstein monster that is now the party base.  Here are excerpts:

Cue the scary-minor-key power chord: Ted Cruz is within the margin of error of Donald Trump in Iowa. It’s Trump 25, and Cruz 23, but as we will see further down, other numbers from the poll suggest that Cruz is well positioned to win what might now be a two-man race in the Hawkeye State.

One can now begin to see how this may all be shaping up. I tweeted it last Friday. Trump becomes the crazy, not-really-electable, neo-fascist candidate—the choice of a good chunk of the base, but one the establishment can’t live with. Marco Rubio, the guy the establishment is most comfortable with, becomes the establishment candidate—but by definition that will make him unacceptable to a sizable chunk of the base. And so emerges Cruz—the “compromise” candidate! (That the scenario of Cruz as compromise candidate is not at all implausible is one stark measure of what Trump’s presence has done to the GOP.)

Cruz is now running—and smartly, it must be said—what you might call the “Donnie Jr.” strategy. Be like Donald, but not as... Not as out there. Not as openly racist. Not as extreme. Differentiate where principle absolutely demands, as Cruz did on the question of religious ID cards for Muslim Americans, which Cruz ruled out as Trump did not. But basically, be the acceptable Trump.  It’s working, at least as far as Iowa is concerned.

Also worth noting is the grim finding that Cruz, Trump, and Carson combined for 66 percent. That shows how out there this particular electorate is. . . . Numbers like these really put the squeeze on Rubio. He’s not going to win Iowa. He can win New Hampshire if Trump totally collapses, but he keeps not collapsing and getting stronger. Rubio won’t win South Carolina. 

Can the establishment big boys keep him afloat that long if he’s not winning primaries? . . . I don’t know but I have a feeling they might have to find a way to, because there’s just no way they’re going to let it come down to Trump vs. Cruz. They despise them both. One’s first reflex is to think, well, they’ll just have to find a way to make their peace with Cruz, because Trump is so obviously out of the question.

But on the other hand... remember how much congressional Republicans loathe Cruz. Almost all of his GOP Senate colleagues think he’s a grandstanding demagogue. Most members of the House do, too, except the small cadre that has named him its leader, the group that meets at that Tex-Mex restaurant on Capitol Hill. But except for them, the R’s do not like Ted.

They somehow might end up preferring Trump. Which would be really funny, him being an open racist and all. But you know what? Psssst: They’d actually prefer Hillary. Now no one’s ever going to say that publicly of course. But half a lifetime of covering these people has taught me a few things about how they think. And one of those things is this: Intra-party personal hatred is much more visceral than inter-party personal hatred. The prospect of someone they hate in their own party having more power than they have is like the bitterest, foulest bowl of hemlock these people can drink. Trust me on that.

So I can guarantee you, I mean guarantee you, that whatever he says publicly, Mitch McConnell would think something like this privately: “Well, OK, I hate seeing Hillary get to make all those Supreme Court appointments. We’ll have to come up with a strategy on that one. But the rest? On foreign policy, she won’t be as bad as the current guy, and it’s far better for us politically to have the Iran deal in place, as it gives us a target. And on the domestic stuff, we’ll bottle her up, she won’t do much damage. I’d much rather that than have to call Ted Fucking Cruz ‘Mr. President’ for eight years!”

We on the other side aren’t supposed to gloat. . . . .You just never know what can happen. But come on, it’s really, really hard to see Cruz getting more than about 180 electoral votes. So I say keep it seemly, tuck it back in when necessary, but, for the time being—gloat away!

As I have noted countless times, the GOP establishment has really created a nightmare for itself by welcoming the Christofascists and their equally insane and reality denying Tea Party first cousins into the party and then allowing them to hijack the party grass roots. How do you guide a successful political party when your base rules its life by fairy tale beliefs and rejects objective reality?

Ted Cruz's Hypocrisy on Christian Extremism

There's much to dislike - perhaps even hate - about most of the would be 2016 Republican presidential nominees.  But in many ways the most frightening is Ted Cruz. The man is not stupid, but then again, neither has Adolph Hitler.  Both are, in my view, equally mentally disturbed int their own way.  And both are only too willing to lie and play on prejudices to further their own egomaniacal ambitions.  With Hitler, the target of his hypocrisy and cynicism was the Jews.  With Cruz, it is gays and immigrants.   Perhaps Cruz's biggest lie of late (and there are so many) is that there’s “no meaningful risk of Christians committing terrorist attacks."   This after Cruz attended a gathering of hate filled extremists who want to execute gays.  Here are highlights from the Washington Blade:

Just days after attending an Iowa conference hosted by an evangelical media personality who called for the death penalty for gays, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz now says there’s “no meaningful risk” of Christians committing terrorist attacks.

“There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror,” Cruz is quoted as saying in the Washington Post. “If there were a group of radical Christians pledging to murder anyone who had a different religious view than they, we would have a different national security situation.”

The U.S. senator from Texas made the remarks Sunday in the early primary state of South Carolina in the context of explaining his view that Muslim refugees from Syria should be barred from the United States, but borders should be open to displaced Christians.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also said Sunday assistance for Middle East refugees should be focused on Christians.

“We should focus our efforts as it relates to refugees on the Christians that are being slaughtered,” Bush said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Cruz’s comments ignore the call made at the recent National Religious Liberty Conference by Iowa evangelical leader Kevin Swanson, who delivered a fiery tirade in favor of the government rounding up gay people and executing them in the name of Christianity.

Cruz appeared on the same stage as Swanson at the event along with fellow GOP presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal. Each of these candidates has remained silent on the views expressed by Swanson and their campaigns haven’t responded to a request for comment from the Washington Blade on whether they’d repudiate the remarks.

The Cruz campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment on why the candidate thinks there’s no “meaningful risk” of Christians committing terrorism in the aftermath of Swanson’s remarks.

Hillary Slays Dragons, Loses 3 Opponents in One Week

Some on the right in particular thought that October would be a disastrous month for Hillary Clinton.  With only a week left, so far the month has turned out to be the complete opposite.  Yes, her campaign is still fraught with dangers, but she has seen three would be opponents end their campaigns and the Benghazi Committee failed to do her any damage despite the best efforts of the GOP members.  Pieces in Vanity Fair and Salon at Hillary's surprisingly positive month.  First are excerpts from Vanity Fair:

On Friday, former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee announced that he would drop his bid for the White House, making him the third Democrat to either drop out or forego joining the race against Hillary Clinton.

With his exit, Chafee shall be forever remembered in this cycle as the third Democratic Clinton rival to disappear in a single week: former senator Jim Webb exited the race on Tuesday, and shortly afterwards, Vice President Joe Biden, whom many saw as a potential challenger to Clinton, announced that he would not seek the bid. 

That, combined with her well-received performance at Thursday’s 11-hour-long hearing before the House’s Select Committee on Benghazi, has made this a pretty good week for Clinton.

Then there are these excerpts from Salon:

The end of the [Joe] McCarthy witch hunt did not end conservative hostility to the State Department. 

This suspicion of the State Department has continued even in Republican administrations. During the Reagan administration Secretary of State George Schultz was famously at odds with Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and there was little love lost between the Bush administration’s Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. When the Democrats have the executive branch it’s much, much worse. There is just something about the State Department that drives conservatives a little bit crazy.

Of course nothing on earth drives them as crazy as Bill and Hillary Clinton, their most hated enemies. The Republicans wasted tens of millions of dollars back in the 1990s trying to destroy them.
It should, therefore, come as no surprise that when the radical right’s decades-long mistrust of the State Department combined with their decades-long crusade against Hillary Clinton, the result would be an incoherent howl of suspicion, confusion and inchoate rage. Throughout that marathon hearing yesterday, if there was a theme, a theory or even a rough guess about what Clinton was supposed to have done, it was extremely hard to see what it was. Under the leadership of Trey Gowdy, a man reputed to be a crack prosecutor, the Republicans were disorganized and unprepared, lurching from one topic to another without connecting any dots or explaining to the nation just what in the world this torturous exercise was supposed to achieve. 

So it’s about spies in the State Department. As usual. Only this time it’s Hillary Clinton, their most hated nemesis, the one who simply won’t go down no matter how hard they hit her. The frustration was palpable.

Joe McCarthy was eventually brought low by his own hubris. A man named Joseph Welch put the final point on it when he said, “at long last sir, have you no decency?” It was Congressman Elijah Cummings who made the similarly powerful moral statement in the hearing yesterday when he said:

“I don’t know what we want from you. Do we want to badger you over and over again until you get tired, until we do get the gotcha moment he’s talking about?

“We’re better than that. We are so much better. We are a better country. And we are better than using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy a campaign. That’s not what America is all about.”

The good news is that if yesterday’s hearing is any example, today’s witch hunters are all ham-handed Kevin McCarthys instead of Tail-gunner Joes. Right wing conspiracy nuts aren’t what they used to be. Maybe we’re making progress after all. 

The Scary Specter of Ted Cruz

I generally view George W. Bush as a cretin who caused huge harm to America during his presidency.   But like Donald trump, once in a great while even George W. manages to be right.  In this case, it is his slamming of Ted Cruz during a fundraiser behind closed doors.  The entire GOP field of would be presidential candidates is frightening, but in Cruz we see someone who is truly frightening, if not evil.  He reminds me of another Ken Cuccinelli, man who suffers from delusions, in my opinion, and who spews hatred in order to pander to the increasingly insane Republican Party base.  Given the opportunity, I firmly believe that Cruz would become another Joe McCarthy.  What makes Cruz so dangerous is the fact that if and when Trump and the mentally disturbed Ben Carson exit from the GOP clown car, Cruz could become the fallback candidate for the ugliest elements of the GOP base.  A column in the New York Times looks at the prospect.  Here are highlights:

Since leaving the White House, George W. Bush has taken pains not to insert himself into the events of the day. Not to weigh in. Not to utter statements bound to become headlines.   When he breaks that habit, you perk up and wonder why.

He broke it in regard to Ted Cruz.

According to a report in Politico on Monday, Bush used his unscripted remarks at a fund-raiser for his brother Jeb over the weekend to make clear that among Jeb’s rivals for the Republican nomination, one in particular rubs him the wrong way.

He described Cruz as cynically opportunistic and self-serving. And this assessment was so starkly at odds with Bush’s anodyne, even warm, remarks about other Republican presidential candidates that listeners were stunned, wrote Politico’s Eli Stokols.

I think a great many Americans — including a majority of Cruz’s colleagues in Congress — know exactly how he feels.

But there’s no solace in his words. Quite the opposite. He wouldn’t have felt compelled to utter them if Cruz wasn’t a possible factor in the race — if he wasn’t a menacing, stalking, relentless force to watch for and run from, like the body-hopping spirit in this year’s most celebrated horror movie, “It Follows.”

In fact Bush’s remarks at the fund-raiser apparently included a heads-up about Cruz’s potency, especially in primaries across the South.

The slow torture of the Republican primary knows no limit. First Donald Trump turns it into a carnival, then Ben Carson comes along with his insanity about the Holocaust and guns. Between them they own nearly 50 percent of the Republican vote, according to recent national surveys.

Examine those polls closely and your stomach clenches tighter.

His [Cruz's] campaign has more cash on hand than that of any other Republican in the hunt. If you add “super PAC” money that’s been officially disclosed so far to the tally, he trails only Jeb and Hillary Clinton.

In a column earlier this month, I noted that alarmed Republican operatives were paying greater heed to Cruz, who seems to be positioning himself as the ultraconservative fallback — the rabble rouser in the bullpen — if angry voters rethink Trump or Carson and want an establishment-vilifying candidate with at least some government experience. Cruz is in his first term as a senator from Texas.

[H]e’s emblematic of the flamboyantly uncompromising comrades in the so-called Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives, who similarly confuse attention with accomplishment.

Cruz doesn’t propose remedies. He performs rants. He’s not interested in collaboration or teamwork. His main use for other politicians, even in his party, is as foils and targets. Paul Ryan got a taste of that over the weekend, when Cruz, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” was asked if Ryan was a true conservative and dodged the question, withholding his blessing.

And remember that when someone is as broadly and profoundly disliked as Cruz is, it’s usually not because he’s a principled truth teller.  It’s because he’s frightening.

Ted Cruz - Joe McCarthy Want to Be

Among the most disgusting and demagogic of the Congressional Republicans - and there are a lot of them - is Ted Cruz who seems to want to be the 21st Century reincarnation of Joe McCarthy who backed the Red Scare witch hunts in the 1950's.  Cruz is just as reckless and power mad and even bears somewhat of a physical resemblance to the foul Mr. McCarthy (see image above).  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Cruz's irresponsible demagoguery aimed to inflame the hate and extremism of the members of the GOP base who bear an unrelenting hatred towards Barack Obama, much of it racially inspired.  Lies and false accusations sadly have become the norm for today's Republican Party.  Here are column excerpts:

Sen. Ted Cruz, in a speech to fellow conservatives at the Federalist Society this week, provided detailed evidence of what the right calls the “lawlessness” of the Obama administration.

The Texas Republican, in his latest McCar­thyesque flourish, said he had a list of “76 instances of lawlessness and other abuses of power.”

To his credit, Cruz made his list public. But perhaps he shouldn’t have. An examination of the accusations reveals less about the lawlessness of the accused than about the recklessness of the accuser. 

Cruz was particularly agitated about President Obama’s use of signing statements, executive orders, recess appointments and unconfirmed “czars” — omitting the salient detail that this president has used four less than George W. Bush, for whom Cruz worked as a campaign adviser and administration official. 

Beyond such perennial check-and-balance disputes, Cruz’s list was a recitation of policy grievances (Cruz, if you haven’t heard, doesn’t like Obamacare very much, nor the president’s immigration policy). These were interspersed with some whoppers that the senator, a former Texas solicitor general, couldn’t have researched thoroughly.

Consider item No. 2 in the “Other Abuses of Power” section: “Backed release of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi.” This does sound bad — and strange, given that Obama had publicly said he was “angry” about the release, which was “a bad decision.”  The footnote on Cruz’s allegation points to an article in the Australian newspaper, a curious source. I looked up the article, which stated that “the U.S. wanted Megrahi to remain imprisoned in view of the nature of the crime.”

Cruz, in a preamble to his accusations, writes piously of “the president’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat.”

Cruz must have found some of his allegations too good to check — such as the charge that Obama “spent $205,075 in ‘stimulus’ funds to relocate a shrub that sells for $16.” Actually, the removal of the plant (which had been believed to be extinct in the wild) was part of a massive road project run by California, not the federal government. Like thousands of other projects, it got stimulus dollars — less than 10 percent of its total funding.

No item was too small to escape Cruz’s notice. Obama “shut down an Amish farm for selling fresh unpasteurized milk across state lines,” he alleges. Actually, the Food and Drug Administration was acting under the authority of a federal court order — not exactly lawlessness.

Cruz disagrees with Obama on just about everything. But this doesn’t make Obama a criminal. 

Cruz needs to be a one term Senator.  He needs to be shipped back to Texas where he can live in his own little fantasy world.

 

GOP's Darrell Issa - A Failed Would be Modern Day Joe McCarthy

Click image to enlarge

Not only do many in the Republican Party want to take the nation back to the Gilded Age with all of its abuses of the poor and working classes, but some Republicans in Congress also seem to want to return to the days of Joe McCarthy and the trampling on rights of citizens.  A case in point?  The always despicable Darrell Issa.  Thankfully, the effort seems to be failing. A column in the Washington Post looks at Issa's demagoguery.  Here are excerpts:

I have here in my hand a list of six people who think Darrell Issa is a fellow traveler of Joseph McCarthy. I compiled these names while watching Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, lead his panel’s proceedings Thursday to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress.

[T]he Democrats are wrong. Darrell Issa is no Joe McCarthy.  It’s not for lack of trying. As I’ve noted, the California Republican, during his lamentable tenure running the committee, has been reckless, dishonest, vain and prone to making unsubstantiated accusations. 

But Issa’s McCarthyism is a faint echo of the real thing, for one very important reason. McCarthy was feared; Issa isn’t taken seriously. This is a rare bit of good news about modern politics: It’s a bad time to be a demagogue.

There may be some who fear Issa, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) or other practitioners of neo-McCarthyism. But at least as many are unafraid to call these men dangerous or buffoons. This is largely because there is no enemy that poses the sort of threat the Soviet Union did. But there is also a felicitous side effect of the polarization of the two parties: Because there is no longer ideological overlap, as there was in the 1950s, Democrats are unafraid to challenge the likes of Issa.

Strains of demagoguery run through both parties, of course.
On the right, Cruz has specialized in McCarthy-like allegations, suggesting, for example, that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel may have been on the payroll of Saudi Arabia or North Korea.
But in neither case is the opposition intimidated by the allegations.

Consider the efforts of Issa, who famously said the IRS targeting of conservative groups was “coordinated in all likelihood right out of Washington headquarters — and we’re getting to proving it.” Instead, he ended up fixing blame on Lerner, a career employee at the IRS who took the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions from Issa’s committee. Issa claimed she had waived her Fifth Amendment rights, and this week his committee voted to hold her in contempt.

The way to fight McCarthyism is to denounce its purveyors — ad hominem and ad infinitum.

Phyllis Schlafly: Bring Back McCarthyism, Limit Immigration

While the "godly folk" riot in Paris, back home in America conservatives who pat themselves on the back for their supposed piety and godliness want to bring back the bad old days of Joesph McCarthy and the reign of terror he conducted through the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  A case in point is the virulently anti-gay, anti-women's rights Phyllis Schlaf'ly who has added virulent anti-Muslim bigotry to her list of hate and horror.   In a column in Wing Nut Daily (my name for World Net Daily) she lets lose with a screed that makes it clear she wants to see Muslims deemed guilty of treason and would be violence until proven innocent.  Right Wing Watch looks at her batshitery.  Here are excerpts (note the double standard for Christofascists):

Eagle Forum founder and Joseph McCarthy admirer Phyllis Schlafly is using the Boston marathon bombings as an excuse to push for the reinstatement of the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities.

“It would be useful to reinstate the House Committee on Un-American Activities,” Schlafly wrote in a column yesterday, “so we can have a look at those in our midst who may be jihadists, dupes of violent Muslim indoctrination, or (in old Communist lingo) fellow travelers or useful idiots.”
In her column, which she titled, “Are You American 1st or Muslim 1st?,” Schlafly further argues that while it is okay to be a Christian first and American second, Muslims who put faith first should not be allowed in the country.

The Boston bombing crime shows that comprehensive immigration reform should not be only a southern border problem or even just a problem of illegal aliens. It’s also a problem of foreigners who are admitted legally but should never have been admitted, and of others admitted legally on a visa but are not tracked to make sure they depart when their visitor’s time expires, as U.S. law requires.

For starters, why would our government have admitted the Tsarnaev family whose son was named Tamerlan? That should have been a red alert because that is the name of one of the world’s notorious mass murderers, a 14th-century Central Asian warlord named Tamerlan, who killed about 17 million people.

 It would be useful to reinstate the House Committee on Un-American Activities so we can have a look at those in our midst who may be jihadists, dupes of violent Muslim indoctrination, or (in old Communist lingo) fellow travelers or useful idiots.

There is plenty of evidence that legal and illegal immigrants of various nationalities, in contravention of our citizenship pledge, retain their loyalty to the land they came from.

Schlafly’s argument is reminiscent of an incoherent answer that Pat Robertson gave last year to a 700 Club viewer who asked him why he criticized Muslims who put their faith ahead of their nationality when he does the same. Robertson claimed that Muslims are different from Christians because they are “under control of a foreign power.”

Based on Pat Robertson's comment, should Catholics be worried that they could be next on the hit list?  After all, the Vatican is treated as a sovereign nation - Muslims have no comparable nation state controlling them.   Let's get real.  Schlafly and those like her - Robertson, Bryan Fischer, Tony Perkins, members of the KKK, etc. - believe that America belongs to white conservative far right Christians. They'd be happiest if the rest of us simply ceased to exist or were expelled from the country.  I'm sorry, but with ancestors who were in this country since before 1825, I for one are more American than many of Ms. Schlafly's followers.