McCarthy was one of the least ideological demagogues ever to spark an ideological movement. His agenda was purely and simply to get as much attention as possible for Joe McCarthy, and he didn’t care how he did it. If his political circumstances had been such that he could have gained more by being a demagogue of the left, like Huey Long, rather than the right, he would have done it without a second thought.

In Senator Joe McCarthy, Richard Rovere’s definitive biography, we find this footnote:

I talked with [L. Brent] Bozell [co-founder of the National Review] one evening in 1956 and asked him how he felt about McCarthy as a conservative. “Terrible,” he said. Bozell said he continued to like and admire McCarthy but that he was hurt by the discovery that McCarthy wasn’t a conservative at all. He could not be brought to repudiate the welfare state and was becoming, in fact, more and more like a Left liberal in domestic affairs—favoring more public housing, more social security, more federal subsidies of all sorts.

Best comment of the day – and there are a lot of good comments.

SO ARE THE LEFTISTS. THEREFORE MCCARTHY WAS A FASCIST.

my work here is done.

Führer more, many scientists worked for the NAZIs so I would never be seen in public with such a tool of fascism.

I was not clear yet that Jo’berg’s theoretical analysis allowed us to conclude that Nazi’s were actually fascists, except for the Nazis who were teaching grade school and the French Revolutionary Nazis.

But this is central to my point.

You know, someone ought to just walk up to Pantload and cock-punch him.

I know it’s a small target, and will require a little bit of planning but Fudgie really needs it.

Good Lord man, don’t be ridiculous. Do you have any idea how much an electron microscope costs?

Führer more, many scientists worked for the NAZIs so I would never be seen in public with such a tool of fascism.

Yes, Gus, but more people some people actually read War and Peace. And some people can make sense of Ulysses.

I know it’s a small target, and will require a little bit of planning but Fudgie really needs it.

[Strokes chin]

[Marks calendar]

[Polishes DMs]

Heh.

In other words, this is a 400 page Onion commentary. Minus the funny.

Wow. The “Great Society” was the necessary consequence of the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and what Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized as the fundamental challenge of the U.S. after making institutional racism illegal: ending economic ‘racism’ by attacking the root causes of entrenched poverty in the U.S. regardless of race. In a way, the Great Society was the direct analog of Reconstruction. it recognized that even if legal barriers to equality were removed, there would be no equality without profound and immediate economic reforms.

Once you put Goldberg’s language back into its real-world context (which he carefully ‘milks’ of any racial overtones), it reads like a KKK pamphlet.

Adds famed 18th century English lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, “That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.”

LOL, Jennifer. Precisely correct, and right.

What a loser country we have become if this tribute to intellectual flatulence does well.

One wonders how bad it needs to get. History, I think, and I’m not the historian many of you are, seems to this non-historian to suggest that it has to get REALLY bad.

Rudy could turn the trick, as it were.