Fantasy Faction Food Fight

One of the fantasies peddled by the right-wing Rage Machine collided rather violently with itself this week and sent to the canvas the Republican plan to "repeal and replace" Obamacare, perhaps for the count. "President" Trump has tried to blame Democrats for the problems the plan has faced. The truth is that it has gone down in flames as a consequence of a fight within the GOP, as one wing of the Fantasy Faction battled it out with the other.

Turning to the Wall Street Journal, one sees a manifestation of this fight, an editorial crowing about how the awful GOP healthcare "reform" bill is actually great and pouring derision upon the other denizens of the Faction for not embracing it. With no sense of self-awareness, the pro- segment of the Fantasists are here dubbing the anti- segment "the Freedom-From-Reality Caucus." Entertaining, sure, but another painful indication of how badly political discourse on the right has entirely collapsed.

An outline of the basic problem: Republican hostility to Obamacare isn't based on any sort of realistic evaluation of that law or its effects. It's born, instead, of the persistent demonization of the law by the right-wing Rage Machine. Fox News and co. rage against it and blame it for every problem in American healthcare, though most of those problems long predated Obamacare. As a political matter, it's quite easy for Sean Hannity to rant and rave against Obamacare day after day. It's a lot more difficult for legislators to replace it. Over the course of eight years during which they've cast dozens of empty votes to repeal the law in full or in part, Republican legislators have made no serious effort to develop any real alternative to it. Obamacare was the Republican alternative. That was its origin. Every Republican fled from it after Obama adopted it solely because Obama adopted it and they feared any cooperation in further shaping it would be presented to their constituents by Rush Limbaugh as collaboration with the enemy. Now, having achieved domination of all three branches of government, they've finally been put in a position to deliver and they don't have anything to deliver. They have no plan. They've made no effort to develop any constituency for any alternative. The portion of their voters who listen to Lou Dobbs want them to repeal it. But that's all.

So the new congress came into session in January and the Republicans who lead it had to come up with something. Simply repealing the law and returning to the pre-Obamacare status quo, initially favored by many, wasn't a politically viable option; that would leave consumers entirely at the mercy of the insurance giants and pour fuel on all the ever-escalating problems that led to Obamacare in the first place. Republican legislators rushed to cobble together some sort of "reform" plan.[1] The result was an abysmal, half-assed effort that, thrown together in a matter of weeks, takes the already-awful Obamacare and makes it even worse. That "worse" is born out by every means of measuring such a thing. More to the point, the provisions of the bill have no substantial public support. The bill exists solely so Republican legislators can tell the audience for the Rage Machine that they repealed the awful thing that black guy did. That wouldn't help pols when they had to face their angry constituents, the people who would be entirely screwed over by the changes. The bill was a fantasy crafted by one wing of the Fantasy Faction ("President" Trump threw his weight behind it).

But while that wing was hoping to garner the approval of the Rage Machine via the bill, the other immediately recognized the practical political problem it represented. While Repub legislators may play the political game of blaming on Obamacare rising premiums, high deductibles, etc., the smarter ones realize these are problems rooted in the basic for-profit health insurance model. They have no interest in embracing single-payer healthcare, the one serious alternative that would do away with that model and its problems, nor would the Rage Machine allow them to do so even if they wanted, but if they vote for anything at all, they realized they'd then be held responsible by voters for the state of healthcare after that, including all of its problems. Every abuse by the rapacious industry would be come to rest at their doorstep. This wing of the Fantasy Faction, the "Freedom Caucus" Republicans who have been more responsible than any other elected officials for demonizing Obamacare and creating this situation, have now bailed on the "reform" plan, calling it "Obamacare Lite." For the reasons just outlined, they're probably not going to be getting behind any other reform effort either. Why should they? The ire directed at Obamacare by the Rage Machine--and by these legislators through the Machine--has proven a remarkably effective means of organizing their supporters. They want to keep Obamacare around as their whipping-boy.

Here's what lurks behind all of this: American healthcare is on an unsustainable course. It can't go on like this.

Here's a truism: It's impossible to effectively govern anything based on fantasy.

The Rage Machine, which is made up of nearly ever major rightist outlet in the U.S., grew out of--among other things--the fact that there exists so little public support for right-wing policies. The American rightist elite use it, in light of this, to drain most of the actual substance from politics, presenting political discourse as a simplistic, good-vs.-evil struggle of personalities, with, of course, themselves as the heroes. In their telling, a fact, as the concept has always been understood, doesn't exist. The "truth" is whatever the Machine says it is. Their followers are told to stop thinking and get behind the heroes of the tale. This has created the Fantasy Faction, those who have convinced themselves that the largely fictional political narratives they get from Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage are reality and those who exploit this state of affairs for their own ends. It's one of this writer's most persistent themes over the years (in his political writing, at least).

When it comes to government, the Machine amounts to an unelected, unaccountable rightist elite that never have to deliver anything more substantial than wind but that are allowed to wag the dog. In this just-concluded healthcare drama, we've just had a "reform" effort be invented in order to play to a fantasy then be killed because continuing to play to the same fantasy was judged by some to be more important. Any concern for the public interest is just as entirely M.I.A. as reality itself.

--j.

---

[1] The rush was dictated in part by certain political realities--Republicans know they'll probably lose big in the 2018 midterms--and in part by the desire to translate the spoils from eviscerating Obamacare into a massive tax cut, which could, as a consequence of congressional rules, be presented as revenue-neutral and passed with a simple majority, rather than having to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

Democratic Party "Unity" & Its Discontents

Written for Writer Beat:

 Mario da Cruz, one of the new kids on the Writer Beat block, has just written an article about "unity" within the Democratic party. It's a pretty good one and gives a brief history of the present internal party conflict between liberals and "neoliberals," whom he calls "Establishment Democrats." I was writing a response to it, it ran a bit long and decided to make it an article in itself.

Up front, it must be said there's one standout flaw in Mario's analysis. In context, it's really only a side-issue but it is worthy of note. In discussing whether liberals should break away from the Democrats and form a third party, he writes:

"It’s easier and more effective to take over one of the two mainstream parties, as the Tea Party has been doing over the last six years, culminating in the election of President Donald Trump."

The "Tea Party" never took over the GOP. The "Tea Party" was never anything more than an astroturf project and, in effect, hasn't even existed as a thing for years now. It, in fact, never really existed in the way it was portrayed. The point of astroturf is to project the phantom of a grassroots movement where there isn't really one. The biggest success of the "Tea Party" was in getting journalists and commentators to use the label as a shorthand for disaffected reactionaries. The ascent of Trump has to do with a number of other factors having to do with the degradation of a large segment of the American right, under the lash of the right-wing Rage Machine, into a form of protofascism. As a consequence, conservatism is virtually without a public voice in the U.S. now. The teabaggers were just a manifestation of this decadence; they were never driving it.

Disaffected reactionaries have now made the Republican party apparatus and its elected officials so extreme, they're now well to the right of even most of the party's own voters. They hold grossly disproportionate power, which is an effect of things like gaming the system--the House is held by Repubs solely because of extensive gerrymandering in several blue states--and the two-party system itself--when it comes to expressing dissatisfaction with the party in the White House, they're the only game in town.

The crisis presently faced by the Democrats--the central focus of Mario's article--is entirely different. Their problem is that the party apparatus and its top elected officials don't represent the party itself, the people who actually vote Democratic. The "neoliberals" combine socially liberal policies, favored by both Democrats and, in general, the overwhelming majority of Americans, with rightist pro-business policies, adopted to attract Big Money donors. Typically, they also hold rightist war-hawk views on foreign policy, which is often an extension of that same pro-business alignment. There's no real public support for these rightist policies and the real constituency of the "neoliberals" is that Big Money donor class. The progressives are currently attempting to break the "neoliberals'" hold on power and bring the Democratic party in line with its own voters.

The Clintonite "neoliberals" are fighting back. So far, they've managed to hold on to their leadership positions in the party. In congress, the Democratic leadership is the same tired old faces, the retiring Harry Reid yielding to Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi continuing to run the House Demos. When it looked like the liberal-backed Keith Ellison would ascend to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, the "neos" recruited former Labor Secretary Tom Perez for no other reason than to prevent that from happening. After they dumped on the press a pile of scurrilous opposition research against Ellison, Perez was elected absent any real platform and the triumphant "neos" voted not to reinstate the Obama-era ban on corporate PAC donations to the party, which had been lifted during the 2016 cycle at the insistence of the Clintonites.

The big problem with "unity," to return to Mario's argument, is that the "neos'" notion of it has always been for the progressives to simply sit down, shut up and fall in behind whatever corporate shill they cough up. That approach just led to a disastrous defeat at the hands of the most despised presidential candidate in the history of polling, a loss that, in a sane world, would have entirely discredited the "neos" for the foreseeable future. A strong sentiment among the progressives is that the "neos" had their chance and blew it, and given the present state of the party under their stewardship--the number of party officeholders at perhaps an historic low--it's just about impossible to make any case to the contrary. There really isn't any public support for the items that set the "neos" apart.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the progressives' most prominent voice in the capitol, was given a purely ceremonial position in the Senate leadership in an effort to coopt him and is treated  poorly by the "neoliberals" but he's the most popular politician in the U.S. and his major policy proposals are supported by huge majorities of the party and of the general public, including, in many instances, even majorities of Republicans. In last year's Democratic presidential primary, he captured the youth vote by overwhelming numbers. They're the future of the party, which can either embrace them or be swept aside by them. That shouldn't be read as making it sound easy. The "neos," if they want, can put up a hell of a fight. While the liberals have the numbers, they have massive money resources and the corporate press on their side. Any "victory" in such a war would be purely pyrrhic though. The most likely course for the "neos" is the one upon which they've already embarked--trying to coopt the left.

How this plays out will be one of the most interesting political stories of the next few years.

--j.

Rush Limbaugh: Political Analyst

Series Introduction:

Once upon a time, more than 20 years ago, I wrote a book about Rush Limbaugh. I'd followed his career as he'd as he'd risen from relative obscurity to the biggest thing, literally and figuratively, on the radio and the de facto voice of the Republican right. For many years the Boss of the Republican party, as Keith Olbermann used to call him. The rise of right-wing media in general has meant he has much less influence these days but he has remained the top-rated commercial radio talk-show all these years.

My book, which was titled simply "Anti-Rush", was written in the mid-'90s, when he'd been at the height of his power and influence. It was never published and, in fact, never finished but I spent a few years on it and it was a pretty big one. Unfortunately, I lost most of it (and a lot of other things) in a computer crash. I still have part of it, material that survived on some old quarter-inch floppies. They're gone now too, along with some of their content, which was lost in subsequent years. I posted some material from my Limbaugh project on my News Reviews blog on what must have been a slow day back in 2015 and over the years, I've posted bits and pieces of it, including what I'm about to put up here, in other places around the internet. Eventually, I'll probably put up everything from the book that survives in any sort of readable form. Why not, right?

Some general notes: In the text, "TWTOTB" refers to Limbaugh's ghost-writer's first book, "The Way Things Ought To Be" and "SITYS" to his second, "See, I Told You So." When this was written, Limbaugh had moved into late-night television, a show that ran for four years and probably ended right around the same time as work on my own book (I don't exactly remember). In some instances, I've straightened out some bad sentence structure--left unattended, it calls to me in the night--but I've mostly resisted the urge to clean up the text, which is the unfinished work of a much younger writer. There are, unfortunately, no footnotes--the cleaned-up, completed version is lost forever--but at least most of the time-and-place data for the Limbaugh comments, which would have ended up in the footnotes, are cited in the text. I apologize in advance for the way this can bog down the text with multiple "on his radio show", "on his television show", etc.:


Observers who are unaware of him could be forgiven if, upon being exposed to Rush Limbaugh for the first time, they mistook him for a Marxist caricature of a conservative capitalist, a satire. To draw an audience, he adopts a sort of populist pose but because his populist stylings are just an empty pose, there's no consistency in it. Limbaugh's views are class-based, in a way any commie would eat for breakfast and seeing the GOP as the best vehicle for enacting policy based on them, he's a die-hard Republican party man.

In Limbaugh's universe, "Republicans vs. Democrats" is treated as good vs. bad. The only time Republicans are less than good is when, in his view, they're not conservative enough. The only time Democrats are any better than bad is when they're conservative. This structure--this fairy-tale--is his standard narrative and when engaged in political analysis, he molds the details to fit it, rather than offering a narrative shaped by those details. In order to maintain his overarching narrative in the face of changing circumstances, he freely abandons his own prior analysis for new ones that are often the exact opposite and then switches back again. His political analysis is a study in contradiction.

Limbaugh spent a great deal of time in TWTOTB writing about the nature of politics and elections. For example, he asserted:

"The real debate about where this country should be headed takes place every four years when we vote for president."

On congress:

"Congress isn't supposed to set day-to-day policy in our system of government... It is supposed to write laws that have broad applications and that set down the parameters within which the President can carry out his policies"

Of the Democratic-controlled congress:

"They have ignored the people's will on countless occasions and dismissed the fact that the voters have endorsed conservative policies in three presidential elections. People are not fools when it comes to electing a President. People know that election is a defining one. They study the candidates and they care about their decisions. They don't do that very often with elections for Congress."

Events subsequent to the publication of TWTOTB led Limbaugh to consign the whole of this analysis to a Memory Hole and to advance a new one that contradicted the previous one in almost every particular. The first of these events was the election of Democrat Bill Clinton as president. Suddenly the idea of the president as the embodiment of where voters wish to send the country didn't sound so appealing. The second was the Republican seizure of both houses of congress in 1994. Suddenly, Limbaugh decided this was one of those occasions when the decision about what direction the government should take was made in a congressional election and that it was the duty of congress to “set day-to-day policy," to the extent that he repeatedly declared the President had been made "irrelevant" by congress.

Clinton was, of course, elected by a significantly larger number of Americans than later elected the Republican majority in congress but for two years of the Clinton administration, Limbaugh began each episode of his show by describing the state of affairs under that presidency as "America Held Hostage." When, in 1994, Republicans gained control of congress in a sparsely attended off-year election, he dubbed the campaign "Operation Restore Democracy" and proclaimed it a success. Then, as the subsequent "Republican Revolution" got underway, he began to open his program with "America: The Way It Ought To Be."

Limbaugh couldn't quite decide why Republicans won in 1994. At first, he was clear on what had happened. On his television show the day after the elections, Limbaugh said of the results, "It was a total repudiation of one man--Bill Clinton--a total repudiation of his policies and where he wants to take this country... The Clinton agenda is dead. The people didn't want it." The notion that the vote was essentially a negative reaction against a much-demonized Clinton administration was close to the truth. Republicans then had to govern though, and this required Limbaugh, their mouthpiece whom congressional Republicans eventually made an honorary member of the Republican "class" of 1994, to change his analysis. Soon, he was saying the public hadn't voted negatively after all. Indeed, he maintained, it had given Republicans that most mythical of all political beasts: a Mandate For Change. On his TV show (1-17-95), he said: "Go back to the campaign. The Republicans campaigned expressly and exclusively on substantive issues, the Contract with America." He added that Republicans could have gone negative but didn't: "[They] took the high road and stuck straight to issues." On his radio show in May 1995, Limbaugh said of the Republican candidates:

"They had plenty of negatives on Clinton, and they could've just run against the President but they didn't do that. They came up with an agenda of things that they said defined them. 'This is who we are. This is what we believe. This is what we're for. This is what we're going to do.' It's called the Contract with America. It gave people a reason to vote in the affirmative and I firmly believe people want to vote for ideas, for people, not against."

This portrait of principled conservative Republicans boldly eschewing readily available sleaze in favor of real issues bore, of course, little resemblance to the actual 1994 congressional campaigns, wherein the most popular RNC canned ad used by Republican candidates all over the country was one in which the face of their Democratic opponent morphed into that of Bill Clinton. Nor, more importantly, is it a fact that voters cast their ballots in any significant number in response to the Contract With America, either pro or con. Exit polling showed that fewer than 12% of voters from either side had ever even heard of the Contract. A Time/CNN poll taken immediately after the election asked "Which is most responsible for the Republican victories in Congress?" Half the respondents chose "voter disapproval of Clinton's job as President." Only 12% cited "voter support for Republican programs." As a caller on Limbaugh's own show noted (in March 1995), even as late as five months after the election, a plurality of the public, 47%, were still telling a USA Today poll they'd never heard of the Contract.

At this point, a further word about the 1994 elections seems appropriate. One of the longstanding trends in American politics is that the party in the White House always loses seats in the midterm congressional elections. In the Republican takeover of congress, fully 92% of incumbents were reelected--hardly the "revolution" Limbaugh and various other commentators described. Turnout was low and exit polling showed that nearly half of those voting Republican were simply voting against the incumbent. As often happens in off-year elections, a small but well-organized, heavily financed and active minority was, due to low voter turnout, able to exert a sufficiently disproportionate influence to swing the overall outcome. As Limbaugh pointed out on his radio program only weeks before the "revolution," (Sept. 26, 1994), "Out-year elections, the party in power always loses."

Limbaugh knew this before the election. After, he embraced the fantasy that those elections represented a public mandate for the reactionary policies of the newly-minted Republican majority. He quickly began using this as a bludgeon against opponents of those policies, portraying any dissent as an attack on the public and on the notion of democracy itself. On his radio show (March 2, 1995), he said "That's what the election last year was all about; the people having a say in what happens to them." Responding to Democratic criticism that the Republican agenda in congress was extremist, Limbaugh said (radio show, Feb. 1995):

"...these people are telling the American people--they're not just talking about Republicans in Washington in Congress--when they talk about those Republicans in Washington in Congress, they're talking about the people that the American people voted for and elected, so Algore, whether he knows it or not, is insulting everybody when he says these people [Republicans in Congress] are extremists. And most people are not extremists and they don't take kindly to being called extremists."

On his radio show (September 25, 1995), Limbaugh was still stating that liberal congressmen, by opposing Republican policies in the 104th Congress, "are also insulting the people who voted for them, which is far more people than voted for the Democrats the last time around. They are engaging in a very risky strategy here by insulting the very people who made all this happen--the voters--which is what liberals have always done. They've just gotten away with it up until now." This concern for democracy was, of course, nowhere in evidence during the previous Democratic-controlled congresses, which, though they were elected by larger (and usually significantly larger) margins than the 104th Congress, were nevertheless subjected to unrelenting criticism on his program. It certainly wasn't there when Limbaugh characterized the rule of the president and congress elected two years earlier as "America Held Hostage."

Speaking of which, Limbaugh can't get Clinton straight twice running. He has repeatedly expressed his outrage with Clinton for governing against the popular will. On his radio show (Feb. 1, 1995), he said:

"To say he [Clinton] went against the tide is nothing new. He's always done that, from his first initiative--gays in the military--to that massive health care plan. He's always been at odds with the American people. Don't forget. I was one of the first to point out to you that I have never seen an administration which is attempting to govern against the will of the people as much as this one has. In my lifetime, I've never seen an administration which is so hell-bent on going against the will of the American people, but this one is."

Later that same year, public discontent with the policies of the congressional Republicans quickly grew into a festering hatred. Polling information from all the major news outlets was pouring in showing that huge majorities were opposed to every major Republican policy initiative. An ABC News/Washington Post poll less than three months after Republicans assumed control of congress asked, "Are Republicans doing what you want?" Only 35% said yes, while an overwhelming 62% said no. The same poll showed similar majorities, from 57%-77%, in opposition to what Republicans were putting forward on tax policy and welfare reform. Nowhere, though, was public opposition to these policies stronger than in the area of environmental protection. A Harris poll from August is typical of public reaction. Only tiny minorities favored less strict regulation of toxic waste disposal (2%), water pollution (4%), air pollution (7%), and wetlands (15%). Republicans had tried to weaken protection in each of these areas but between 52% and 80% of respondents said they actually favored stricter regulation in regard to each. And 60% said they opposed the efforts of the Republicans to limit the powers of the EPA. At this point, Limbaugh's outrage against those attempting to govern against the will of the public not only disappeared, he did a complete back-flip on the subject and began urging Republicans to ignore the public. In October, he advised "It's time to stay bold. It's time to ignore the polls."

And when it comes to this sort of thing, Clinton just can't win. On his radio show (164), Limbaugh commented on a news item about what he considered an excessive amount of money spent by the Clinton administration on polling:

"You, me, most of us... have principles, and it is their principles that guide their beliefs and it is those beliefs that guide their desires. Those beliefs and desires guide the way people go about achieving what they want, and when a person is firmly rooted in principle, it's easy to spot. They're consistent. You know exactly what they stand for. You know exactly what their objectives are--they tell you. Rudolph Giuliani is a name who comes to mind, a recent politician... You can see that Rudolph Giuliani is a man firmly rooted to his principles. You could say that about Reagan. Now, you might disagree with them, as I know some people did, but you knew what Reagan stood for... You may disagree with it all day long but you knew what he stood for."

He recalled that during the 1992 campaign, he implored Clinton's supporters to call and "name one thing for me that this man has stated that you want him in the White House to do. They couldn't. Nobody could... All this time, nobody could specify what Bill Clinton stood for. To this day, you can't really specify what Bill Clinton stands for." He continued:

"This has bugged me. It's bugged me that so few people cared, so few people seemed to notice that there were no guiding principles here. Well, this story explains why: there are no guiding principles. There are only focus groups."

This analysis, which Limbaugh has offered repeatedly, flatly contradicts most of his other commentary about Clinton, wherein he portrays the president as, instead, a committed ideologue. On hundreds of occasions, he's described Clinton with phrases like "hard-nosed ultra-liberal" and even "socialist" and has spent hour upon hour detailing why he thinks they're appropriate. This version of Clinton, the one spun by Limbaugh virtually every day, has shown a fierce, unwavering dedication to his alleged liberal principles over all other things. The reality of Bill Clinton, essentially a conservative opportunist, is nowhere to be found in Limbaugh's commentary.

Limbaugh condemns Clinton for ruling against the will of the people while also condemning him for allegedly ruling by polls, in accordance with the will of the public. He praises congressional Republicans who come to power during the off-year elections he'd earlier dismissed for ruling in accordance with the will of the people and goes so far as to say criticizing them amounts to an attack on the people who elected them, then, as the public clearly opposes their agenda, urges those same Republicans to be "bold" by ignoring the will of the public. He says the public makes the real decision about where it wants the country to go during presidential elections, then when the public chooses Clinton, treats it as "America Held Hostage." Clinton stands condemned both for being solid in his convictions and for not having any convictions.

This is what passes for political analysis in Limbaugh-World, a place where the sky must be a very different color indeed.

--j.


Other pieces of the Limbaugh book:
Rush Limbaugh: Plagiarist
Rush Limbaugh: An Economic Interpretation

Rush Limbaugh: An Economic Interpretation

Series Introduction:

Once upon a time, more than 20 years ago, I wrote a book about Rush Limbaugh. I'd followed his career as he'd as he'd risen from relative obscurity to the biggest thing, literally and figuratively, on the radio and the de facto voice of the Republican right. For many years the Boss of the Republican party, as Keith Olbermann used to call him. The rise of right-wing media in general has meant he has much less influence these days but he has remained the top-rated commercial radio talk-show all these years.

My book, which was titled simply "Anti-Rush", was written in the mid-'90s, when he'd been at the height of his power and influence. It was never published and, in fact, never finished but I spent a few years on it and it was a pretty big one. Unfortunately, I lost most of it (and a lot of other things) in a computer crash. I still have part of it, material that survived on some old quarter-inch floppies. They're gone now too, along with some of their content, which was lost in subsequent years. I posted some material from my Limbaugh project on my News Reviews blog on what must have been a slow day back in 2015 and over the years, I've posted bits and pieces of it, including what I'm about to put up here, in other places around the internet. Eventually, I'll probably put up everything from the book that survives in any sort of readable form. Why not, right?

Some general notes: In the text, "TWTOTB" refers to Limbaugh's ghost-writer's first book, "The Way Things Ought To Be" and "SITYS" to his second, "See, I Told You So." When this was written, Limbaugh had moved into late-night television, a show that ran for four years and probably ended right around the same time as work on my own book (I don't exactly remember). In some instances, I've straightened out some bad sentence structure--left unattended, it calls to me in the night--but I've mostly resisted the urge to clean up the text, which is the unfinished work of a much younger writer. There are, unfortunately, few footnotes--the cleaned-up, completed version is lost forever--but at least most of the time-and-place data for the Limbaugh comments, which would have ended up in the footnotes, are cited in the text. I apologize in advance for the way this can bog down the text with multiple "on his radio show", "on his television show", etc.:


Rush Limbaugh is an enthusiast for war. Loves it. Promotes it. Hates anyone who opposes it, even makes them out to be traitors. There's one sort of war to which he's very opposed though, or so he says. When it comes to "class warfare," the Rotund One professes to be a strict peacenik. He, in fact, denies there even is any such "war," which is another example of his rhetoric falling woefully short of his own reality. His show is, in fact, a daily, relentless pursuit of class warfare. The basic axioms that guide him:

1) The rich = good, and
2) The less-than-rich = bad (or, at least, less than good)

These are, of course, entirely self-serving--Rush Limbaugh is a very wealthy man from a well-off background. Possessed of a strong authoritarian streak, he holds that a public needs a strong government to herd it around, keep it in line, be its "moral teacher." When he employs "anti-government" rhetoric[1], it's almost always aimed at government "interference" by progressive reform efforts with the prerogatives of the wealthy and the powerful, who apparently don’t need that strong authoritarian hand.

This brand of naked elitism isn't the sort of thing that generally draws a great deal of admiration from most people, much less a mass audience for a media personality, so Limbaugh adopts a populist pose to woo listeners. Being a mere pose though, it has no substance. He's just making it up as he goes and because his populist-style rhetoric doesn't emerge from any genuine conviction, it becomes very inconsistent, often hilariously so. He can't keep his made-up story straight. Monitoring his program for any extended period reveals a commentator who is forever becoming entangled in positions he's taken that are a complete contradiction to those he'd taken earlier. Usually, he just plows right on ahead anyway, and if many of his listeners seem to notice, they certainly aren't allowed to point it out on his tightly controlled show.

That isn't to say he's entirely lacking in consistency. He gets snagged by contradiction whenever he's trying to play the populist. He is, however, rigorously consistent when it comes to those guiding axioms. When he armors up to wage class warfare, he's unyielding. That's when he's speaking from the heart. That's the story he can keep straight.[2]

Limbaugh perpetually sings the praises of the wealthy and the powerful, referring to them as the "successful," the "achievers," the "producers," those who work harder than anyone. He'll have no part of any suggestion that these individuals are anything less than the most virtuous citizens in the country, representing the best in society, those who should be studied, emulated, all-but-worshiped. America should be "holding up successful people as role models..." (SITYS). At the same time, there is, in his commentary, an ugly undercurrent of the inverse--that the poor, the unemployed, the minority, the powerless are lazy, shiftless, amoral parasites on the successful, the personification of all that is bad.

In TWTOTB, he can write that he would be "just as opposed to rich people getting subsidies from the government as poor people." It was an easy, populist-appealing thing to write at the time; no one was making much noise in opposition to government subsidies for the wealthy. But in Nov. 1994, when Clinton's Labor Secretary Robert Reich suggested cutting back on corporate welfare, Limbaugh, who has been quite enthusiastic about any opportunity to cut off aid to the needy, became absolutely enraged--ranted about it for three days. On his tv show he said "Secretary Reich, how dare you, sir" equate giveaways to corporations "to having welfare moms having to now play by the rules" and compare corporate welfare to "a free lunch." On his radio program, he was positively indignant that Reich would dare "equate giveaway payments to people who are not productive," which he called "real welfare payments" (emphasis his) with corporate welfare. "To call that welfare is, I think, real arrogance and condescension and ought to show you exactly what these people think."

In fact, Limbaugh has actually insisted that the wealthy should receive more government services than those less well-off. On his radio program (April 4, 1995), Limbaugh said "the people paying a greater percentage of what they earn, if they earn a lot, then they ought to have more access to services... Now, I know that's going to aggravate a lot of you people but deal with it, because it's true." On his radio show (April 3, 1995), he decided the ideal tax "would be where each citizen pays the same amount. Pick a number, everybody pays the same number is the fairest of all. The fairest of all is the same dollar amount." Such a scheme would find a significant number of Americans at the lower end of the scale owing their entire annual income to the government--a telling remark about his notion of "fairness." Three years earlier, in April 1992, he'd offered a long monologue with this as its theme:

"It's time to get serious about raising taxes on the poor... Tax them. Let's balance the budget on the backs of the poor."

He wasn't serious, of course, but he wasn't entirely kidding either. Referring to that particular show in TWTOTB, Limbaugh said this was merely an example of his "demonstrating absurdity by being absurd" but that "I meant everything I said, save for the bit about actually taxing the poor. Other than that, I was dead serious and honest." With this in mind, some of the other things he said in that monologue are illuminating. A few examples:

"The poor and the lower classes of this country have gotten a free ride since the Great Depression when it became noble to be poor."

"The poor in this country are the biggest piglets at the mother pig and her nipples... They're the ones who get all the benefits in this country."

"...do the poor pay anything back? Do they pay any taxes? No. They don't pay a thing. They contribute nothing to this country. They do nothing but take from it."

Quite a contrast with his adoring comments about the wealthy.

Limbaugh hates the idea of a mandated basic wage for those employed at the bottom of the income scale. The minimum wage is one of his long-running targets and he has argued forcefully and at length for getting rid of it entirely ("I think it ought to be abolished." radio 1/24/96). When, however, congress was considering a proposal that would have limited to $1 million/year the amount corporations can write off as compensation for their executives, Limbaugh exploded: "They [the government] have no right to determine what's enough. It's none of their business what a company... pays an individual. They shouldn't set limits on it of any kind. It's none of their damn business what people earn, and we're headed down a dangerous road if we're going to let a bunch of people in Washington define 'enough'... That is unacceptable to me, totally unacceptable."[3]

Limbaugh despises the graduated income tax and forcefully rejects the notion of taxing proportionately more from those who are able to more easily absorb the burden in order to tax less from those who can't afford it. "Why punish achievement? Why punish people who work hard?" (Limbaugh on Donahue) On his radio show (April 1992), he decided "we can't continue to rob the rich. We have been punitive against the rich in this country."[4] The U.S. should, he's argued, "scrap the capital gains tax" (SITYS) but capital gains are already taxed at a much lower rate than wages and are the source of half the income of the wealthiest Americans. From whence is government revenue to come, then? When various regressive tax "reform" schemes--the "flat tax," the national sales tax, etc.--became all the rage among Republicans, Limbaugh became an enthusiast of them. The common element of these schemes is that they sought to shift the tax burden further away--and in a radical way--from those who can afford it and on to those who can't. Limbaugh became enamored of them all. When a caller pointed out to him that this would mean a big tax cut for the wealthy and a big tax hike for everyone else, he argued that such considerations are inappropriate, because it's no one's business what anyone else earns!

The punchline to all of this is that Limbaugh, while offering this running commentary dictated, root-and-branch, by elite class interests, poses as the staunchest opponent of "class warfare." On his radio program (1995), he offered up a typical rant against liberals, who, he said, are

"encouraging class hatred. They are encouraging class resentment. They are dividing a wedge between income groups in this country... It does not promote a nation of unity in spirit, togetherness--however you want to call it. It promotes a nation of resentment and class hatred. On purpose!" (emphasis his)

This is probably the single subject about which he speaks more than any other, how liberals and lefties divide up the nation by class, how they attempt to turn everyone against the rich, how this is such a damnable practice. "Liberals need to stop preaching class hatred," he tells us in SITYS. Nothing--and that "nothing" should be heavily stressed--nothing elicits more vituperative invective from Limbaugh than "redistributionists", "socialists," those who "engage in class warfare." While he wages class warfare every day. Rush Limbaugh is a very wealthy man. He rarely seems to have the best interests of his country in mind when he purports to speak for them. He looks out for his own interests quite well though.

---

[1] It isn't true "anti-government" rhetoric, as would come from an anarchist; it's rhetoric aimed at government by liberal democrats, and liberal Democrats.

[2] His close attachment to the Republican party is an extension of this and he's remarkably consistent in pimping for what he sees as the interests of it and of his pet candidates, those whom he feels will more closely approximate the policies he favors.

[3] By the proposal Limbaugh was discussing, companies could still pay their executives whatever they wanted--they just wouldn't have been able to write off over $1 million a year.

[4] The "punishment" meted out to the wealthy in the U.S. has resulted in income inequality and a concentration of wealth that are both approaching record levels.

--j.

Machialinsky: A Radical’s Observations On American Politics, Take 1

Medium Dept. - Submitted for your consideration, some observations--some general, some tied to the moment--of an American radical, one not tied to the partisan circus in the United States:

Most people aren’t ideologues. In political discourse, we speak of “conservatives” and “liberals” but for most, these are merely inclinations, tendencies that aren’t set in stone but, bred into us by a combination of nature and nurture, serve as a general framework for how we see and react to the world. People tend to hold liberal views on some issues and conservative views on others. A “liberal” isn’t necessarily someone rigidly committed to some liberal orthodoxy; he’s usually just someone more liberal than conservative. And vice-versa. There are, of course, lots of people with strongly ideological views but most people aren’t in those camps.[1]

The United States is, fundamentally, a liberal nation. The public is polled relentlessly and this is a conclusion that screams through the body of that polling.[2] One is hard-pressed to find a single issue of major significance on which the public doesn’t, by large margins, hold to a liberal view. A lot of that is “soft” liberalism and that can be a not-insignificant caveat at times but that’s where people’s instincts take them. In last year’s presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders’ politics were treated by the political and press Establishment as far-left, marginal, way out there--a political non-starter. In reality, his views represent those of the broad political center of the U.S., many of them shared by even majorities of Republicans.

While the U.S. is theoretically a liberal democracy, it isn’t particularly democratic in practice. The views of much of the public are not represented in government, don’t drive most important political decisions and are virtually never the deciding factor in any policy dispute. Public influence is relatively very limited; for politicians, “the public” is mostly just an obstacle to be overcome.

The government and the elected officials that comprise it are, as a body, always significantly to the right of the public.

The corporate news media are as well and those who toil within them tend to worship at the altar of a notion of the political “center” that is always defined as well to the right of most of the public. Call it the alt-“center.” They tend to frown upon things that stray too far from this alt-“center.”[3]

Politics isn’t just a matter of how many agree or disagree with who or what. Much more goes into the making or breaking of an issue, a politician, a party, a movement.

Even as the Republican party leaves behind its longstanding conservatism and becomes increasingly reactionary, it maintains grossly disproportionate power in government. This is a consequence of structural advantages, not of ideological preference by the public. There is, in general, very little public support for right-wing policies.

The President of the United States is always going to be the most visible politician in the U.S. and fairly or not, the public is almost always going to associate the state of the nation and its politics with that president and his party. In times of prosperity, that party will enjoy good will; when times are tougher, it will shoulder a disproportionate share of blame for this.[4]

The two-party system confers upon the opposition party--meaning that party not, at the moment, in the White House--a structural advantage, as, when it comes to expressing dissatisfaction with the incumbent party, that opposition party is seen as the only game in town.

The American political system wherein campaigns of escalating expense are privately funded by interests regulated by the state--essentially legalized bribery--bakes in a huge conservative advantage, both for candidates avowedly of the right, whose ideological support for these status quo interests acts as a money-magnet, and for so-called “neoliberal” candidates, who combine conservative, pro-business economic policies aimed at attracting Big Money donors with liberal social policies aimed at drawing votes at election time. Candidates who don’t pander to the established interests will face the combined money-power of those interests mobilized in opposition to them.

An elected official’s real constituency is virtually never the people of his district, state, country; it’s those who pay for his campaigns.

In presidential contests, the electoral college--an anti-democratic anachronism of the 18th century--confers advantage on regions at the expense of people, and most states award their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis; those who receive 50%-1 get nothing. Two of the last three presidents were, as a consequence, candidates rejected by most Americans then given the office anyway. Such outcomes are not only anti-democratic, they significantly disadvantage an administration so elected, which must then try to govern without any public mandate a country that doesn’t want them.

Very few congressional districts in the U.S. are competitive. This is a consequence of both regional distribution--supporters of one party are just quite strong in some places--and of deliberate gerrymandering. Most elected officials never face a serious challenge from the other party.

Republicans presently hold the U.S. House of Representatives in an essentially guaranteed lock until at least 2022 because of widespread Republican gerrymandering in several blue states.

The system of gerrymandering not only confers unfair advantage, it helps give rise to extremism. If a congressman is in a safe district, he isn’t concerned with a challenge from the other party; he’s concerned about having to face a primary challenge from his own, in which his opponent would argue he isn’t extreme enough.

Elected officials tend to like to hold on to elected office. They really, really like it.

People tend to dislike a politician in direct proportion to how much they’re exposed to him. This is to the advantage of most congressmen, who, because they’re so numerous and so few managed to grab substantial headlines, remain out of most people’s sight and thus out of mind. In fact, most people can’t even identify their own congressman.

Because so much of congress comes from safe districts, those who do know their own congressman tend to like him--he’s usually out of sight and thus out of mind--and to reelect him over and over again. When people grumble about congress, they’re usually grumbling about the representatives others elect.

Control of the presidency tends to retard turnout for the incumbent party in off-year elections. Such elections lack a nationally unifying figure, get significantly less press attention and just aren’t treated as if they’re as important, while the idealistic motivating passions that are so often kindled by a successful presidential election campaign are smothered by presidencies that inevitably fail to live up to the hopes people invest in them. A motivated opposition, even when a numerical minority, is advantaged by this.

Long-running presidential incumbents, who, while in office, are never out of sight and thus out of mind for very long, are always a drag on candidates of their own party. People get tired of the same old thing.

In political contests, the lesser of two evils is still evil. People want political candidates they can support. Candidates who offer voters something for which they want to vote almost always succeed over those who merely try to get people to vote against their opponent.

Wars always result in the public rallying behind the president. Terrorist attacks on the homeland lead to an escalation in support for right-wing policies. Such boosts proceed from a sort of mania, the political equivalent of temporary insanity; they prove remarkably resistant to reason but also inevitably prove to be merely temporary.

--j.

---

[1] For some, politics is, like religion, merely an inheritance from their parents. Many treat it as a virtually substance-free spectator sport, dividing up into camps and rooting for their favored “team,” without much serious thought what they’re actually supporting or opposing.

[2] In examining this particular question, ideological self-identification polling has proven worthless. Our political labels become quite polarized in public discourse. The big, obvious example is that the political right has spent decades demonizing the word “liberal,” which has meant that people are much more reluctant to apply the word to themselves. The word “moderate” is without real substance--huge swathes of people who may actually be conservative or, particularly, liberal will see themselves that way, not only because they aren’t particularly ideological but also as a reaction against political polarization, which is judged quite negatively (particularly by liberals).

[3] Part of the traditional liberal theory of the free press is that it’s supposed to act as a check on those with power. In the context of the U.S. at present, the corporate press is, itself, a source of concentrated power--just another power-player, just another interest. Those who work in it at the level of regular journalists tend to see themselves as merely reporting the news rather than, themselves, being major players in shaping public perception. That’s part of what makes them so problematic.

[4] There are exceptions, of course. Even if people confer favor or blame on presidents, (who really have little control over the course of the economy, they aren’t entirely irrational about such things. The U.S. economy was in a horrible state in the early years of Barack Obama’s administration; polls showed that most didn’t blame Obama for this and recognized it was a mess he’d inherited from the Bush Jr. administration.

Melania Is A Civilian, "Liberals": An Editorial

A commentary written for Facebook:

Today, the internet, concerned as it always is with the important things in life, is buzzing like a bunch of busybody biddies about some erotic photos Melania Trump made some years ago. The New York Post devoted its front page to one in which she's shot in the sultry embrace of Scandinavian model Emma Eriksson. The Post is owned by also-Fox-News-chief Rupert Murdoch, so this is the sort of low-dog "journalism" one has some to expect from such a source.

But it isn't trash-peddling rightists like Murdoch who are taking this "story" viral today. Instead, so-called "liberals" are plastering it everywhere, pointing at it and tittering like a troupe of 10-year-old twits at Republicans' would-be First Lady. Specifically, "liberals" supporting Hillary Clinton for president.

This makes me curious; where do you "liberals"--the ones doing this--get the idea that it's ok to act like this?

Yes, the Republican rightists hate queer folks and yes, they hate porn--in their recently-completed platform, they continued their despicable quadrennial ritual of bashing both--and yes, Donald Trump is a major scumbag running a protofascist campaign of hate and division and deserves to be hit with just as much shit as he's thrown. But this isn't hitting Trump and it isn't hitting those tight-assed rightists either. Does Melania, the one actually being slimed, deserve this? Do you "liberals" think there's something wrong with queerness or erotic representations of same or erotic representations in general? Are "liberals" suddenly getting behind things like slut-shaming? Do you want to make those quote-marks around the word "liberal" mandatory whenever intelligent people refer to you?

Here's something that shouldn't have to be explained to a "liberal." In these ridiculous political contests, spouses, unless they involve themselves too much and too obnoxiously, are civilians. Melania Trump is no politician. She seems to be a nice and inoffensive lady. It's probably hard enough for her to be married to Donald Trump in the first place and to be dragged into this freakshow of a campaign, something that puts her under a microscope but in which she probably had no real say. She's standing with her husband now, making the best of what must be a very unpleasant situation.

I would think the faction of "liberals" involved in making this "story" trend today would particularly understand this. During the 1992 Republican convention, speaker after speaker took to the stage to launch blistering salvos at the Democratic candidate's wife. It was a phenomenon modern American politics had never seen and became a sort of scandal. Press outlets questioned it, the public decried it, Democrats denounced it. It was clear a line had been inappropriately crossed. The Democratic candidate that year was, of course, Bill Clinton, and that convention was the launch of a quarter-century of calumnies aimed at his wife.

Those who objected to this back then were right. Some things shouldn't be dragged into the ridiculous food-fights that now pass for political discourse in the U.S. And no, the fact that conservatives and rightists have continued this disgraceful behavior by relentlessly smearing Michelle Obama throughout the current presidency doesn't create some loophole that excuses liberals if they take up the same practice. The hypocrisy of the rightists re: queer folks, sexy media, etc. is absolutely appalling but you can't hit a hypocrite by indulging in hypocrisy. If you do that, you're no better than he is. You're no "liberal" either.

Leave Melania alone.

--j.

Mythmakers & Joe McCarthy

The name of Sen. Joe McCarthy became synonymous with his method. From him issued forth a seemingly endless string of extravagant, reckless, ill-substantiated and false allegations that called into question the loyalty and legitimacy of his targets. In his time, he was able to exploit a paranoid age to fashion from these slurs a celebrity status for himself, McCarthy, the commie-fighting folk-hero. He eventually self-destructed when his own nonsense caught up to him; today, as did his critics then, we call what he did "McCarthyism," and no one thinks of anything heroic when that word comes to mind. Ever since that time though, there have been McCarthy apologists, cranks who insist "Joe McCarthy was right." They floated around the nut-right fringe for decades and no one paid them much mind but these days, it seems there are few nut-right fringe views the right-wing Rage Machine won't try to mainstream. A number of high-profile works have appeared that take up the McCarthy torch from the various John Birchers, anti-Semites and anti-water-flouridationists who have kept it lit since the 1950s. In the Spring of 2008, longtime conservative commentator M. Stanton Evans had just published a "McCarthy was right" book and I wrote this piece as a response (actually, I cannibalized it from an older article and fashioned it into a review of Evans' book). While it adequately covers some of the history, I don't think it is, overall, a very good article. Make of it what you will.


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 efforts of Arthur Herman appeared, just as quickly to collapse under scrutiny and fall by the wayside. Ann Coulter, one of the most prominent of the nut right's assorted brainless polemicists, 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 under examination 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 hatemongering 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 falsifications 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. History's verdict of McCarthy is correct.

Joseph McCarthy's personal anti-communist crusade would rage throughout the federal government for four years and in the process forever link his name in the public mind with wild and unsubstantiated accusations, baseless smears and irresponsible charges.

Remarkably enough, it all began as merely a publicity stunt by a publicity hound looking to get his name in the paper.

It was born on January 7, 1950 at the Colony Restaurant in Washington. McCarthy was discussing his political future over dinner with staffer Charles Kraus, attorney William Roberts and Father Edmund Walsh, arch-anti-commie of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. McCarthy was dismayed that, with only two years left in his term, he'd done nothing as Senator to attract the national attention he craved. He needed a hot-button issue to get the spotlight on him. Throughout the course of the meal and in conversations after, a number of ideas were kicked around, all rejected as being of insufficient heat. Eventually, Walsh, in a move that changed history, suggested communism as an issue. McCarthy brightened immediately. A perfect way to make some headlines, no doubt. "The government is full of Communists," he declared. "The thing to do is hammer at them."

And thus began his career as an "anti-communist."

Within a few weeks, McCarthy went public, offering extravagant charges in various public forums around the country.

He began with a speech on Feb. 9, 1950 to the Women's Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he claimed that a number of individuals known to be Communists were then working in the State Department and shaping U.S. policy. The actual number of these individuals offered by McCarthy became a subject of much controversy. A reporter for the Wheeling Intelligencer who was present for the speech wrote an item for the next day's paper, in which McCarthy was quoted as saying:

"...I have here in my hand a list of 205--a list of names that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party, and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy in the State Department."

McCarthy's rough notes of the speech include this comment but the notes were extremely rough and totally unreliable at other points, rendering them of no real evidentiary value. In any case, McCarthy, as everyone agreed, was largely speaking extemporaneously and not from a written speech. The only recording that was made of the event (by a local radio station) was erased the next day. The exact content of the speech is lost to history. The controversy regarding it has many aspects but they aren't particularly relevant here.
Without going into too many details, the best available evidence suggests that McCarthy, in describing how many Communists were known to be in the State Department, used both the number 205 and, at a different point, the number 57.

The 205 number comes from a letter written, in 1946, by then-Secretary of State James Byrnes to a congressman regarding several thousand government employees transferring into the State Department from other wartime agencies. 284 of them had been flagged as potential security risks and out of that, 79 had, at that time, been discharged, leaving 205.

The source of the number 57 requires a bit more background. In 1947, the staff of the very conservative House Appropriations Committee had prepared a collection of dossiers, drawn from security files provided by the Truman administration. This was known as the "Lee list," named after the committee's chief clerk Robert Lee, and it consisted of 108 individuals--past, current, and potential government employees, as of 1947--whom the partisans on the committee and of the administration review board considered to be of mostly questionable "loyalty." The number 57 came from an administration official (John Peurifoy) who had, in 1948, testified to a different committee that, at that time, there were 57 of these 108 individuals employed by the government.

McCarthy seems to have used both these numbers at Wheeling. The controversy over the numbers, however, is of little consequence and has been unnecessarily run into the ground by McCarthy's critics over the years. Score one for Evans for noting this. Relevant here are two things:

1) McCarthy made some extremely sensational and potentially explosive charges and

2) McCarthy, after making such momentous charges, wasn't even sure of what he, himself, had said. He hadn't worked from a written speech and, over time, told several contradictory versions of what his speech had contained. Once, he told the Senate: "I do not believe I mentioned the figure 205. I believe I said over 200." But on perhaps dozens of other occasions, he not only admitted using the number but went into detail on the point. For example:

"Up in West Virginia, we read to the audience a letter written by Jimmy Byrnes, the then-Secretary of State, to Congressman Sabath, in which he said that out of the 3,000 employees screened--employees who were being transferred from other departments into the State Department--they found 284 unfit for government service. He said of the 284 we discharged 79, leaving a total of 205. That night, I called upon [Secretary of State Dean] Acheson and the President to tell us where those 205 were, why they kept them in if the President's own board says they were unfit for service." (McCarthy, from U.S. News & World Report, 7 Sept., 1951)

In a less-than-clever maneuver, McCarthy would later enter into the congressional record the text of a speech he asserted was the Wheeling speech, claiming his text "was taken from a recording of the speech." In reality, he never, in fact, had any such recording and what he entered into the record was a different speech, one he'd made in Reno days after Wheeling. When this was exposed, McCarthy justified what he'd done by claiming the two speeches were identical but the Reno speech only uses the 57 number and makes no mention of 205 or anything regarding the Byrnes letter. Fred Woltman, a Scripps-Howard reporter, veteran anti-commie and McCarthy friend (who eventually became a critic), later admitted that, many times, he'd "heard McCarthy and his advisors wrack their brains for some lead as to what he said in that Wheeling speech." (quoted by Richard Rovere in "Senator Joe McCarthy")

This sort of recklessness would characterize the entirety of McCarthy's time in the public spotlight.
In Denver, the day after Wheeling, he told reporters his comments from the day before had been misquoted and that he'd actually said "205 bad security risks," instead of 205 Communists. He also told them that he had, in the words of an AP dispatch, "a complete list of 207 'bad risks' still working in the State Department," which was entirely false; the Byrnes letter, as noted, was several years old and McCarthy had no list of those described in it. McCarthy also repeated his charge that there were "57 card-carrying Communists" in the State Department. He offered to show his list to reporters and made a great show of going through his briefcase for it. A picture of this farce was taken and also ran in the Denver Post. Eventually, he declared he must have left it in his luggage on the plane. When he arrived in Salt Lake City and this wasn't a credible excuse any more, he refused to show the list to the assembled newsmen, saying he would only give it to the Secretary of State. But, at the same time, he asserted that the Secretary already knew the names.

In Salt Lake City, later that evening, McCarthy characterized his Wheeling speech thusly: "Last night, I discussed the Communists in the State Department. I stated I had the names of 57 card-carrying members of the Communist party" working in the Department. In a radio appearance, he said "Now I want to tell [the Sec. of State] this: If he wants to call me tonight at the Utah Hotel, I will be glad to give him the names of those 57 card-carrying Communists." While McCarthy was running his mouth like this on a local radio station he knew no one in D.C. would ever hear, the State Department had actually wired him that morning requesting the names and promising an investigation. Another wire followed the next morning and he replied. Referencing the information from the Byrnes letter (the 205), he said that "the records are not available to me" on that group, this being only a day after he'd apparently told the press he had a "complete list" of them. He did insist, in his response, that "I have in my possession the names of 57 Communists who are in the State Department at present... Despite this State Department blackout, we have been able to compile a list of 57 Communists in the State Department." This, like his other comments about the 57, was also a lie. McCarthy claimed these people were "in the State Department at present" but the John Peurifoy testimony from which the number was derived was, at that point, two years old. Contrary to McCarthy's representations, the "Lee list" wasn't of "card-carrying members of the Communist party" either--it listed 108 individuals whom a very partisan right-wing congressional committee believed to be security risks, mostly because of their politics or alleged politics or the alleged politics of people they knew or their politics as alleged by someone who knew someone who knew them 10 years ago (no kidding; some of it is really that bad). McCarthy was also misrepresenting the source of "his" list as well, a matter to which I'll return momentarily.

The next stop on his traveling sideshow was Reno, where he alleged that the State Department "is thoroughly infested with Communists" but--perhaps finally becoming somewhat aware of how over-the-line he'd been--somewhat softened his charges: "I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist party but who, nevertheless, are still helping to shape our foreign policy." This, allowing that the 57 "appear to be" commies, rather than flat-out saying they are commies (as he'd done at every stop until Reno), was the softest version of these charges he made in these appearances. Tellingly, this is the speech he later tried to pawn off in the congressional record as identical to Wheeling.

So what was the story? Were there 205 "members of the Communist party" in the State Department or were they "205 bad security risks"? Did he have a list of these more-than-200-whatevers or did he not have access to this info, as he wired the President? Were there "57 card-carrying members of the Communist Party" making policy in the State Department, as he'd said on Feb. 10th then again on the 11th or was there "57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist party," as he said in Reno? Were these names already known by the Secretary of State, as he claimed on Feb. 9 then again on the 11th, or did the Secretary lack the names, as McCarthy suggested on the 10th? He was never able to get his story straight twice running. In the end, it didn't matter. McCarthy got his issue. By the time he returned to Washington, he'd become the center of national attention--a degree of attention, as it turned out, for which he was utterly unprepared.

"[McCarthy's] knowledge and understanding of Communism were sparse," wrote Woltman, a conclusion that would echo time and time again from those who knew the Senator. "Essentially he's no investigator. He's a headline-maker."

McCarthy biographer Thomas Reeves summarized: "McCarthy was not a serious student of anything, lacked any intellectual or moral sophistication, and was an alcoholic by the time he reached his maximum fame. True, some of his charges, while not original, were on target. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and an assortment of right-wing journalists slipped him information from time to time, and thus it was natural that the senator would come up with some correct information. But most of McCarthy's activities had very little to do with actual Reds in high places and much to do with the politics of the period and Joe's own peculiar personality."

Richard Fried, in NIGHTMARE IN RED, offers this: "He once dumbfounded his mentors [the anti-commies who sometimes worked with him] by professing ignorance of Earl Browder, former head of the CP. One tutor recalled that Joe ‘didn't know a communist from a street cleaner.'"

In real time, the truth behind such after-the-fact assessments were painfully apparent from the beginning.

On February 20, McCarthy laid out his charges to the Senate in a long, rambling, frequently contradictory and nearly incoherent speech in which both the number accused and the nature of the accusations radically shifted yet again. Now, the number was suddenly 81, and while he said he was "only giving the Senate... persons whom I consider to be Communists in the State Department," many of them suddenly weren't presently employed by the State Department. "A sizeable number of them are not" so employed--and had, in fact, never been so employed. After all of his hardcore ranting about all the card-carrying commies at State and his assertion that he was "only" giving the Senate those cases, he also, at one point, backed off on that question, allowing that, upon further investigation, "some of these persons"--the cases he was offering--"will get a clean bill of health." Obviously unfamiliar with the information he, himself, was relaying, he went through the alleged 81 cases, which, as it turned out, didn't number 81 either--he skipped several of them entirely and others turned out to be duplicative (he repeated cases he'd already covered). The actual number of cases he presented was 66. Many of the individuals worked for the United Nations, not the State Department. Some were just people who had applied for State Department jobs years earlier. One was suspect only because he worked under one of the others on McCarthy's list. One had been, years earlier, a Commerce Department employee (no connection to State). One--my  personal favorite--was suspect because "there is nothing in the files to disprove his Communist connections." And so on.

Echoing his earlier wire to the President ("despite this State Department blackout..."), McCarthy grandly proclaimed he'd "penetrated Truman's Iron Curtain of secrecy," acquiring the files he was using via the efforts of "some good, loyal Americans in the State Department" whose jobs "would be worth nothing if [their] names were given." That all sounds very dark and conspiratorial but in reality, the source of nearly all of these "cases" was the "Lee list." McCarthy hadn't penetrated any "Iron Curtain" to get them, nor had any State employees risked their necks by secreting them to him in the dead of night; the "Lee list" dossiers were drawn from files openly provided by the administration itself to the House of Representatives three years earlier. They'd been bandied about the capitol for years. McCarthy had portrayed his information as current, then had weaved this spy-novel-style fiction about his primary source, which was, in reality, just a long-out-of-date committee file.

Evans, in writing about this, chooses to blow a lot of smoke:

"...arguably his [McCarthy's] single biggest miscue [in his oration to the Senate] was an error of omission--not telling his colleagues he was mining data from this list [the Lee list]. The reasons for this aren't entirely clear, as he would elsewhere freely cite the list as an important source of information..."

McCarthy wasn't committing some minor "error of omission" in this matter though, and his motive seems pretty obvious--he was actively trying to mislead both the Senate and, by extension, the public he'd regaled with his wild charges, about the source of his information. This seemingly obvious fact tends to be given insufficient weight in the standard histories. The "Lee list" was a series of numbered cases. McCarthy, in presenting the information in the "Lee list" files, renumbered all of those cases. This made an orderly accounting of the charges much more difficult, and obfuscation, of which McCarthy proved a master, seems to be the only possible motive. Senator Homer Ferguson apparently deduced the "Lee list" origins of McCarthy's cases and asked McCarthy why he "had taken them out of order" (a reference to the renumbering). McCarthy replied "I did take them in order. I get the impression that the Senator may have a file of his own." Essentially a denial that he was using the "Lee list" at all.  McCarthy also presented findings by those who had assembled the files as though they were things he, himself, had learned. Again, his game seems pretty obvious.

In addition, McCarthy distorted the information in the files beyond recognition. In his recitation, he verbally transforms rumors and allegations into established fact, changes words like "liberal" into "communistically inclined," repeats charges recorded in the files without mentioning that the files also say those same charges were subsequently investigated and found to be without merit, and so on. William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell, in "McCarthy and His Enemies" (one of the earliest and still the best of the McCarthy apologies) mention this:

"A comparison of the dossier from which McCarthy got his material with McCarthy's own version of this material reveals that in 38 cases, he was guilty of exaggeration. On some occasions, 'fellow-traveller' had turned into 'Communist'; on others, 'alleged pro-Communist' had developed into 'pro-Communist.'"

Actually, the authors significantly understate the mendacity of McCarthy's presentation. A much better and more detailed account of these distortions, omissions and outright lies is provided by Robert Griffith in "The Politics of Fear." Among other things, Griffith illustrates McCarthy's method by reprinting the actual "Lee list" information of a McCarthy subject and comparing it to McCarthy's characterization. This is "Lee list" case #40:

"The employee is with the Office of Information and Educational Exchange in New York City. His application is very sketchy. There has been no investigation. (C-8) is a reference. Though he is 43 years of age, his file reflects no history prior to June 1941."

Here's how McCarthy presented the same case to the Senate:

"This individual is 43 years of age. He is with the Office of Information and Education. According to his file, he is a known Communist. I am not evaluating the information myself. I am merely giving what is in the file."

Evans says almost nothing about this behavior and he spins it like a top:

"...as his critics would note, if the security information said someone had been identified as a Communist, he tended to cite the identification as fact--no 'allegedly' about it. In prosecutorial mode, he pushed the evidence hard to make an indictment and seldom erred through understatement."[1]

Unmentioned by Evans is that, at the same time McCarthy was falsifying this information (in a way that, contrary to Evans' gross mischaracterization, would get a prosecutor fired), he was also assuring the Senate that he was giving them the straight story about the files. Even Buckley and Bozell concede that McCarthy "deserves to be censured" for telling the Senate that, in his presentation of the information, "I have given Senators the fullest, most complete, fairest resume of the files that I possibly could." He'd done no such thing.

Evans feigns cluelessness about all of this:

"Whatever his [McCarthy's] motive, his failure to cite the [Lee] list in the beginning allowed his critics to make this a salient issue--deflecting notice from what the security information said to the procedural question of where, exactly, it had come from (a tactic used in many later conflicts)."

Suggesting that the worst possible interpretation of information in an old, out-of-date committee file raises questions about security procedures in the State Department three years earlier? Not very sexy. Not the sort of thing that gets one's name in the paper. It sounds much snappier if you charge, as McCarthy had repeatedly, that you have the names of a number of card-carrying Communists who were then making policy in the State Department. To state the obvious, the relevance of McCarthy's source, bearing as it does directly on the accuracy of his charges, is self-evident in this matter. It's unclear by what logic Evans deduces that a question of such critical relevance is some sort of diversionary tactic or a mere "procedural question." Probably the same sort of "logic" that told him it would be a good idea to waste six years of his life writing an "untold" story of Joseph McCarthy.

Two days after this miserable performance, the Senate authorized an investigation into these charges. The Tydings committee assigned to carry out the task was a very partisan body and though Evans and its critics have heaped a great deal of scorn upon it--often deservedly so--the fact is that McCarthy couldn't substantiate his charges and after his public shenanigans, the committee reached the only conclusion open to it; a thorough repudiation of McCarthy. Unfortunately, the damage was already done; in the atmosphere of early Cold War fear and paranoia, McCarthy's star was in ascendancy. He would continue to rage for four years, making charges carelessly and as a matter of routine, including in his target package pretty much anyone who disagreed with him until, finally, even his own Republican party turned on him. He fell from grace, was censured by his colleagues and ended his life in obscurity, drinking himself to death at age 48.

In this ignorant, backwards age that is the Bush America, Evans and the other McCarthy revisionists have a built-in audience and the internet offers them a powerful new tool with which to spread their nonsense. Still, it's difficult to imagine this particular thesis ever gaining any sort of widespread acceptance. McCarthy's history is just too well-documented, his reputation to much of a lost cause. One suspects books like Evans' aren't really written to convince anyone. They're aimed at the true believers, those in the rightist subculture who don't really care about the real world, who only want to be told they're right and that those with their views always have been. Whatever the case, the best that can be said of these efforts to rehabilitate McCarthy is that, the more resources rightists like Evans pour into the projects, the less they'll have for causing trouble for the rest of us.

---

[1] These sorts of misrepresentations are legion throughout Evans' text. In a manner not unlike that of McCarthy himself, the author buries material inconvenient to his premise that McCarthy is a hero, distorts the available record beyond recognition and isn't above outright lying to make his case. A good example of that turns up in his handling of the Esther Brunauer charges. McCarthy had charged that:

"Esther Caulkin Brunauer was very active in launching an organization called the American Union for Concerted Peace Efforts... [The AUCPE] was cited [by HUAC] as a Communist-front organization, the leader of which was the editor of the Daily Worker."

Brunauer admitted her involvement with the group, even said she took great pride in it. She said it was a patriotic enterprise, denied it was a communist front and denied that Clarence Hathaway (the Daily Worker editor in question) ever had any connection to it.

Evans pretends as though McCarthy's only "mistake" was in mentioning Hathaway as "the leader" instead of "a leader":

"So, sorting out the details, we find that McCarthy upgraded Clarence Hathaway to 'a' leader in the Peace Efforts agitation to 'the' leader, obviously a different connotation in terms of Communist influence. Over against this we may place the categorical statements of Mrs. Brunauer and the Tydings panel that Clarence Hathaway had no involvement with the enterprise whatever. Thus neither side in this dispute earned top marks for precision. Readers may judge for themselves which of the two errors was more misleading."

That's what passes for a caustic remark from Evans. Readers will judge for themselves how appropriate was Evans sarcasm when learning that the AUCPE, the organization to which Brunauer was connected, had, in fact, never "been cited as a Communist-front organization" by HUAC and that Hathaway had, in fact, never been involved in it at all. The common speculation is that McCarthy may have confused her organization with another, the Union of Concerted Peace Efforts, which had been cited by HUAC as a front and did have Hathaway as a leader. Whatever the case may be there though (and it's probably just as likely that McCarthy intentionally chose to exploit the similarly named orgs in making his case, figuring no one would ever know the difference), the fact is that what Brunauer said was correct, what McCarthy had charged was a lie and Evans knowingly lies in his comments on the matter in order to "defend" McCarthy. We can ascertain this last because the facts regarding this accusation aren't new--they were detailed in "McCarthy and His Enemies," a McCarthy apology written all the way back in 1954 by William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell. Evans has read that book; he references it throughout in his own. He read it, so he knew the truth and chose to lie.

That's the "scholarship" on display in this latest McCarthy apology.