"Rise of the New McCarthyism" - How the RW Tries to Paralyze Government Through Smears and Lies

[TomCADem]

How long before Sean Hannity, Michelle Bachman, Glenn Beck and company start claiming to have a list of communist/fascist/socialist sympathizers that they will expose during daily press conferences? Oh wait, we're already at that point.

http://site.pfaw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=rww_in_focus_new_mccarthyism

Rise of the New McCarthyism:
How Right Wing Extremists Try to Paralyze Government Through Ideological Smears and Baseless Attacks

On December 2, 1954, the U.S. Senate voted to censure Sen. Joseph McCarthy, bringing to an end four years of political intimidation and character assassination so ferocious that McCarthy’s name is still synonymous with a particularly destructive form of demagoguery.

McCarthy’s campaign against supposedly widespread communist infiltration of the U.S. government brought down sitting Senators and intimidated even President Eisenhower (who loathed McCarthy) and his advisors. McCarthy’s campaign was boosted by conservative think tanks, media figures, and clergy, and abetted for years by the unwillingness of most of his colleagues to stand up against his false charges and clear abuses of power.

McCarthy launched his campaign with a speech on February 9, 1950, in West Virginia, claiming to have a list of 205 people in the State Department known to be members of the Communist Party. He made similar claims, with shifting numbers, many times. McCarthy’s charges were inflammatory and false, and often sufficiently vague to resist any fact-checking. But his bluster and manipulation of the era’s fear of global communism allowed him to build power while destroying lives and careers.

McCarthy was eventually undone by his overreaching attacks on the U.S. Army; the televised Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 finally exposed him to a wide audience as a malicious and irresponsible bully. A crucial moment in his reversal of fortune took place when the Army’s chief counsel Joseph Welch, responding to attacks on a young lawyer, put McCarthy in his place, saying, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Today, Joseph McCarthy’s ideological heirs in the Republican Party and right-wing media are using the language and tactics of McCarthy to stir fears that the nation is being destroyed by enemies from within. Republican Members of Congress and other GOP officials have not shown Welch’s concern for decency; instead they frequently act as an “amen chorus” to the far right’s demagogues or stay silent, hoping to reap political gain from the attacks on President Obama, administration officials and nominees, congressional democrats, and even military leaders.

[Ozymanithrax]

1. They've already exposed them, having called Obama and all Democrats socialists.

Of course, it isn't true, and the RW wouldn't know a real socialist one bit them on the ass.

[Gman2]

2. They high five each other, when their feces sticks, when they throw it against the wall.