An Army of Joe McCarthys

Having tasted blood with the resignation of Van Jones, the Right is busily congratulating itself and looking for new victims.

The next target might be Ron Bloom, who will serve as senior counselor for manufacturing policy. Via Thers at Whiskey Fire, here is the dreadful truth about Bloom as unearthed by Jammie Wearing Fool:

Anyway, the name Ron Bloom is one that we need to start paying attention to. He has a long history of being the negotiating face of unions in a suit. He is a Harvard Business School graduate who has worked for the unions beginning with SEIU for decades. The most recent union he represented was the United Steel Workers (USW) before becoming a part of the automotive team that Obama put together.

Get that? He’s connected to unions. The sharks are zeroing in already.

Even to the casual observer it is impossible to miss the numerous connections between Barack Obama and the unions.

I’m not sure if the right music for this is Orff’s “O Fortuna” or Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

The Fool notes that the United Auto Workers (UAW) got a “sweetheart deal,” which I assume means when GM was put through bankruptcy UAW members were not completely stripped of all pension and health care benefits and busted back to minimum wage. Although everyone took a hit, the final deal did favor workers over investors, which I guess proves Obama is a socialist. [Update: For the benefit of my more thick-headed readers — that was sarcasm.]

But you see the conspiracy so immense, etc. The implied allegation is of a quid pro quo — unions donate money to and endorse Democrats; Democrats tend to favor policies that are good for unions. This must not stand. Maybe Democrats and Unions are collaborating out of mutual concern for the well-being of workers? Naw, can’t be.

However, if corporate interests give money to Republicans and get favors from them in return, that’s OK.

The Right for some time has seemed to me nothing but a mindless attack machine; something like a school of hungry piranha. But it’s probably more accurate to think of them as an army of Joe McCarthys. It’s as if some secret laboratory has been making clones of Tail Gunner Joe all these years, and now the clones have taken over the nation.

Really, the Van Jones episode has been right out of McCarthy’s playbook. Find a target who can be smeared with “guilt by association” to groups and causes considered radical, and there you are. He’s a Communist. No, really. Charles Krauthammer actually said:

I’m not even disturbed that this guy is a communist. It is not the first time we had a communist in the U.S. government. And anyway, with the death of communism, it is a kind of a pathetic intellectual anachronism to remain a communist.

To which Andy McCarthy responded:

The Jones incident, moreover, does not indicate that “we had a communist in the U.S. government.” To the contrary, as I argued last night, we have a U.S. government in which Van Jones was quite consciously selected because his views are representative of the president who made him the “green jobs czar.” Van Jones isn’t Alger Hiss. There’s nothing covert about him. He didn’t snooker Obama into bringing him aboard. He is who he is, and that’s why Obama wanted him. Having a Communist in that job was perfect since the “green jobs” initiative is an important part of the hard Left’s agenda to use environmentalism as an additional justification for usurping command of the economy.

In fact, the death of the Soviet Union has actually been a boon for neocommunists. Now, Obama and his fellow travelers like Jones, Ayers, Wright, Klonsky, and ACORN, can spout all the same totalitarian, anti-American, central-planning ideas the hard Left has always pushed, but in the abstract — under such mushy labels as “social justice” and “green jobs.” That is, they are liberated from having to defend the Soviet Empire, which, until 1991, was a living, breathing, concrete example of how horrific these ideas are when put in practice.

According to Wikipedia, Jones declared himself to be a communist in 1992. Yes, the words echo through the ages — are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?

Joe McCarthy presided over a genuine reign of terror that was as totalitarian in nature as the communist governments he railed against. For a time, just to be subpoenaed by McCarthy’s Senate committee was a career-killer. McCarthy ruined so many careers in the State Department it created a huge knowledge and experience vacuum that hurt U.S. foreign relations for years. It is said one of the reasons the U.S. blundered into Vietnam is that McCarthy had cleaned the State Department of anyone who knew anything about Asia, for example.

The important thing to remember is that not one target of a McCarthy investigation was ever found guilty of espionage. And, right-wing myth to the contrary, not one of McCarthy’s targets was shown to be a Communist spy by the Venona Papers. Yes, there had been Soviet espionage going on in government, but by the time McCarthy began his rampage, U.S. intelligence already had broken up their operations. McCarthy was just targeting people he could get away with smearing. I understand J. Edgar Hoover was feeding McCarthy names, but the names were of people Hoover didn’t like personally, not people who were threats to the nation.

But what the Right is doing now is exactly what McCarthy did then — using half-baked “evidence” and guilt by association tactics to smear good people. And the “even the President is one of them” theme is pure Joe McCarthy.