But When We Do It, It’s Cute
for Tom Wolfe’s suits
In the course of a 900-page Jeremiad about Hillary Clinton’s whoopsie-doodle about Bosnia, DINO/sci-fi hack/homophobe Orson Scott Card draws this fascinating comparison about the war records of several famous politicians:
You can hate Joe McCarthy for many reasons, but it’s flat-out ugly that his enemies attacked his war record so savagely and effectively that the story reached a little kid like I was when I heard it.
He was a true soldier, a volunteer who didn’t have to fight; he undertook extremely dangerous work (tailgunner was not a safe place to be in a bomber during combat) and contributed to our struggle against imperial Japan.
Remember this point: Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, who falsely claimed to have been wounded in combat, wrote his own military commendations and falsely claimed they were given to him by his superiors, and fabricated his military history in order to receive a medal for which he was unqualified was in fact a real war hero, and it was wrong wrong wrong for the dirty lying Democrats to make an innocent little kid like young Orson doubt this great man’s war record.
Moving on:
Why do I bring this up? Because a genuine war record is a tremendous asset to any candidate for public office. Look how George W. Bush was vilified for not having been serious enough about his limited military duties during the Vietnam War.
I guess “limited military duties during the Vietnam War” is a technically accurate way to describe what George W. Bush did in the late 1960s. A better way to describe it would be “no military duties during the Vietnam War”, but hey, Orson’s the professional novel-writin’ guy, not me. Of course, Orson himself, like Dick Cheney, also had “limited military duties during the Vietnam War”, having been otherwise occupied converting the heathen savages of Brazil to the true faith of Tailgunner Joe Smith. And, by the same token, I saw “limited military duties during the Vietnam War”, consisting largely of exploring the interior of my mother’s amniotic sac. It was a lot like Bush’s stint in the Air National Guard, but with less blow.
And look how John Kerry, despite his treasonous slanders about the behavior of his fellow soldiers during Vietnam, was able to wrap himself in the mantle of his having been a wounded veteran. And even now, there are those who treat the accusations of the “Swift Boat Veterans” as slander, because war records are sacred.
So, let’s recap: George W. Bush, who spent the Vietnam War drinking tequila shooters at Puddy’s Stumble On Inn, was “vilified” for his “limited military duties”, and barely even won his second term as President of the United States thanks to the lies of the liberal media. Whereas John Kerry, who told “treasonous slanders” about his fellow soldiers (I’m pretty sure that ‘slander’ means ‘not true’, which would disqualify Kerry’s accusations, but again, Orson’s the highly paid famous writer guy, not me), was able to “wrap himself in the mantle of his haing been a wounded veteran” and came terrifyingly close to not losing the election. If it were not for the noble efforts of the Swift Boat vets (which some people are crass enough to categorize as slander, albeit a different kind of slander than John Kerry’s atrocity claims insofar as they were actually untrue), he might be the leader of the free world today.
Orson does not find it necessary to condemn as flat-out ugly the savage and effective attacking of Kerry’s war record the way he does Joe McCarthy’s, even though the charges against Tailgunner Joe were truthful and well documented and the ones against Kerry were the opposite of that. The reason for that is HEY LOOK EVERYONE HILLARY IS A LIAR AL GORE SAYS HE INVENTED THE INTERNETS AND UH OH RIGHT 9/11 GAY CONSPIRACY!
Today we have a candidate for President of the United States who claimed to have been under fire in a combat zone — and the claim is obviously and demonstrably false. If the candidate had been a Republican, the press would have been hounding him constantly about such a lie, and pious editorials and talk-show pundits all over the country would be condemning him for taking upon himself the mantle of our citizens in the military whose lives are on the line every day.
I have to admit, Orson’s got a point there. You hardly ever hear the press ripping into a Republican for lying about their war record. I wonder why that is.
And she would magically turn into a man!
Even then, Joe McCarthy had problems with numbers.
Anyway, wasn’t Tailgunner Joe’s downfall cause by him going after the Army?
Even though I’m a true-blue SciFi fan, I could never understand what people see in Card’s writing. Ender’s Game is a sodden, unconvincing mess I could barely slog through, a glorification of warfare with hardly concealed promotions of massive procreation, eugenics and genocide as the only hope of humanity.
When Islamic terrorism hit the big time after 9/11, Card saw the chance for his drooling fantasies of endless war between good and evil to be hailed as prophecy, with the evil brown people cast as his insectoid alien invaders. Why oh why wouldn’t anyone listen to him when he warned us about those godless Buggers?
Myself, I want back the hours of my life I wasted reading his dreck.
OSC claimed to be a Democrat? That’s the most futile act imaginable.
Card claims its because he can’t stand the racism in the republicans. I choose to believe him on it. I still think that column is so full of shit. And I love it. It’s just amusing. Yes, Joe McCarthy did volunteer to sit in the ass end of plane and risk not getting his ass blown off, being the ass that got blown off. That’s admirable. McCarthy was also a walking ego, but most politicians are. McCarthy was a true-blue anti-Communist, but he knew nothing and he was a reprehensible person. Kerry is another walking ego, but he did go to Vietnam and put his life on the line. Then there is Dubya.
Orson Scott Card is a homophobe? The guy who wrote this and this and this?
I think that I got some of my first adolescent hardons from his descriptions in The Memory of Earth of muscular young men soaping their giant cocks in a city without women. Methinks the lady doth… etc.
Hey, I have limited experience as a member of the Velvet Underground, and playing centerfield for the 1998 Yankees, and having a torid love affair with Uma Thurman!!! Look at me!!!! Praise me!!!!!
“it’s flat-out ugly that his enemies attacked his war record so savagely and effectively that the story reached a little kid like I was when I heard it.”
This is by a professional writer? “the story reached a little kid like I was when I heard it”?
It should more properly read, “…the story reached the little kid I was when I heard it because, at the time I heard it, I was the little kid that I was at the time, while it failed to reach the little kids who did not hear it at that time.”
HTH.
Thanks, pedestrian, now I want to read that book. (well, skim it for the dirty parts)
Hey, Pierce asshole.
How dare you slander an American hero like Senator Joe McCarthy. He volunteered and served his Country valiantly during the Second World War.
What the hell have you ever done for your Country except writing leftwing excrement slandering America and its Patriots?
Oh, jeez, this idiot again?
I’d almost forgotten about him.
Y’know, kinda seems to me that when somebody with some actual brains, like maybe kristol or bobo says something mindbendingly stupid, it’s genuinely worth noting and mocking. But when somebody who’s clearly stupid, who’s always been stupid and has never been on record saying something that isn’t stupid, when that person says something stupid, it should be more like ‘ho hum, the stupid guy is still stupid, film at eleven’ kind of a deal.
Y’know?
mikey
Senator Joe McCarthy was on the frontlines of homeland defense against communism during the height of the Cold War.
Alot of people including regretably some Conservatives consider McCarthy to have been a fascist and a bully.
He was nothing of the sort! His tireless invesigations helped America to root out and convict many communist sympithizers in government, hollywood and academia possibly preventing a communist takeover of the Country. Imagine America as a satelite state of the Soviet Union?! The free world would have been finished!
Ann Coulter had it right, Senator Joe McCarthy truly was a Great American Hero.
I used to respect Orson Scott Card. But now I wouldn’t buy one of his books for toilet paper.
Actually, McCarthy was a true-blue whiskey-soaked cynic who didn’t seriously believe in anything. He began spouting anti-communist bullshit in 1950 solely because he thought it might gain him some much-needed good press after several miserable years in the Senate. His red-baiting made him famous overnight, and he ran with it till the bitter end.
What the hell have you ever done for your Country except writing leftwing excrement slandering America and its Patriots?
I recently bought a Wingnut-to-Human dictionary. If anyone’s interested, “leftwing” = “intelligent”; “excrement” = “arguments I don’t understand and can’t refute”; “slandering” = “demythologizing”; “America” = “Republicans”; and “Patriots” = “particularly vicious and stupid Republicans.” Based on the resulting translation, I’d say Mister Leonard has done his country a great service, Matt. Thanks for asking.
Oh, and “Matt McMahon” = “Bastion Booger.”
Oh, and “Matt McMahon” = “Bastion Booger.”
No way d00d, it’s gotta be saul the rabbi!
Snorghagen, salut. That’s the best three-sentence summary of McCarthyism I’ve ever seen.
Anyway, wasn’t Tailgunner Joe’s downfall cause by him going after the Army?
And the Protestant clergy, and the Eisenhower Administration. In other words, it became clear to even the most shortsighted, vote-grubbing Republican that McCarthy was out of control, loyal to no one and nothing but himself.
Orson Scott Card – totally not gay. Because nothing says Not Gay™ like cream sport jackets with matching shirt and shiny ties. That and the impeccably manicured hands and meticulous grooming all spell rough and ready, salt of the earth hetero butch hetero style heterosexual. Nope, no gay impulses so deeply repressed they come out sideways here, no sir, no way, no how. But I still weep for my first totally heterosexual man crush on Joe McCarthy 40 years later which is all perfectly normal for such a completely heterosexual man like me.
Oh my god, you called Joe McCarthy “bitter.”
I insist you recant.
Actually, McCarthy was a true-blue whiskey-soaked cynic who didn’t seriously believe in anything.
Isn’t it fortunate that GWB had someone to look up to and emulate?
I thought he was going for the Tom Wolfe Natchez pimp look.
Card is a fucking tool.
Back when I read it, I found Ender’s Game a facile and trite bit of pablum that was understandably popular, much in the way that Danielle Steele is popular. I didn’t get what Joe Max did from it, though if I were to injure myself by re-reading it now, I might. It struck me as more the sort of thing that was written by someone whose mother kept them bundled inside throughout their adolescence, lest they have any fun, or play with girls. Mostly, it struck me as a tearful ode to Card’s lack of membership in the Boy Scouts, a horror from which he has clearly never recovered.
At least he had the ability, and desire, to neatly turn a phrase back then, something he seems to have lost. His bizarre and transparent piece of gibberish, Empire, is truly awful by any metric this side of a third grade mud fight. I swore off reading anything he put to paper after losing precious minutes of my life perusing one of his WSJ editorial screeds, a hate filled bit of rotten haggis for the base.
I can’t speak with any authority on the guy’s sexuality, but, it does sort of sound like his stand against teh gheys has some parallels to his overt stand against guns while exhorting war, killing and hate in both fiction and non-fiction, and his purported distaste for corporatist rule while degrading the only real populist to run in the current Presidential election as being “absurd, insincere, and an opportunistic shill.”
Nice tie, buddy. No, you can’t babysit my kids.
His tireless invesigations helped America to root out and convict many communist sympithizers in government, hollywood and academia
Umm, sadly no.
Alger Hiss was convicted of espionage.
The only other convictions were for “Contempt of Congress” for not naming names.
I haven’t read much of Card’s fiction, just bits here and there. The one that I remember was an old short story about some musical genius who was raised isolated from any human contact and especially no outside musical influence. This character was exposed to all the great trad. musicians as a very young child but then that was all withdrawn. The premise of this was that it made him a better composer I guess. But all of this was for the sole consumption and enjoyment of some nebulous but powerful elites. Unfortunately this genius escaped and heard other composers (thereby ruining him) and performed for working class folk. Eventually some “man in black” came around and amputated his fingers.
Somehow this was all supposed to be “spiritual redemption through unbearable suffering” I guess. I think it tell us a good deal about Card’s childhood. Someone most likely beat the living shit out that boy. So now as an adult he thinks that’s a virtue. (Surviving all that, yes. As parenting advice, no.) I wonder if this isn’t behind a lot of wingnut psychology.
Not directly. In the 1950s, he was convicted of perjury for denying under oath that he’d ever been a spy – they couldn’t indict him for espionage because the statute of limitations had run out on that charge. Whether or not Hiss actually was a spy is still a matter of controversy. In any event, Hiss testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and not before any Senate committee. McCarthy had nothing to do with the Hiss case.
The number of Soviet agents uncovered by McCarthy was a nice round zero.
Snor, that’s what I meant to say.
Card at least got one thing right :
“So Fox News is profiting from the love and loneliness and fear of our military people?”
Whether or not Hiss actually was a spy is still a matter of controversy.
According to Oleg Gordievsky , Hiss was a spy . (The damn book was the size of a dictionary!, and parts of it, about as enthralling ) . The bigger revelation IMHO was that Ronnie Ray-Gun almost (unknowingly) started WWIII. Supposedly, some backdoor communication by less crazy people, including, in small part, the author, prevented it. A self-serving assertion, to be sure, but entirely made-up?????
g,
You clearly haven’t had access to Smiling Mortician’s Wingnut-to-Human dictionary. See, by “root out and convict”, he means “harass beyond the point of reason, stripping all dignity even from the process itself, solely for short term political gain”, and by “many communist sympithizers in government, hollywood and academia”, he means “anybody who disagrees with me, or would make a useful political pivot.”
Try the substitution sometime. It works almost every time. No translation is ever perfect, but once you get the feel of it, Wingnutese is a cinch. Just point and blame.
This all, of course, about the guy that elicited the question, on the Senate floor, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” I believe we are all aware of the answer history has writ, “Sadly, no.”
How many times? Is this in reference to the “We begin bombing in five minutes” speech, or something else?
Not sure . It was after the Evil Empire speech, during NATO exercises. (Sept ’83?) . The NATO exercises were deliberately much more extensive, and aggressive than usual (with this aspect unannounced?) . That, combined with RR’s rhetoric and Soviet paranoia , had them thinking we might be going to launch a first strike, so contemplating doing it first themselves.
Fifty years ago, most people thought Hiss was a spy. Thirty years ago, after the flimsy evidence he was tried on was made public, most people thought he wasn’t a spy. Ten years ago, after the release of the Venona decryptions, most people again thought he was a spy. Most people still do today, though there are dissenters. Nothing definite has turned up from the Soviet archives, so it’s still not absolutely confirmed.
I’m no expert on this stuff, but from what little I know it looks like he probably was. I could be wrong.
I am shocked at how little liberals know of American History, Law and the Constitution. Absolutely shocked!
I am shocked at how little liberals know of American History, Law and the Constitution. Absolutely shocked!
So that’s news to you too, eh Matt? 😉
The NATO exercises were Able Archer.
It really was an extreme crisis, though the public was unaware of it.
Thanks Snorg. Been awhile . Forgot the name .( with > 1400 pgs, there was a lot to forget;)
You can tell someone is completely living in a fantasy world when they write something like “if a Republican lied about something, the media would hound them 24 hours a day!”
Orson, buddy, come on back to Earth. The weather is usually nice and there are lots of good restaurants.
a 900-page Jeremiad about Hillary Clinton’s whoopsie-doodle about Bosnia
Personally I think that the word “Jeremiad” should be reserved for novel-length epic poems (not necessarily written by Homer), in heroic couplets, describing the adventures of anyone called Jeremy.
Poor Orson, he’s still trying to “crap himself into the mantle” of a science fiction author who can write a second decent novel.
I have never read anything by Awsome Scrote Turd, and now I never will. Thanks, guys.
Wait, so Orson claims to be a Democrat but he despises John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Which wing of the party does he claim to belong to? Are there any other Democrats Orson supports, or is he just playing with himself in a one-man alternate-reality version of the party?
Well, he supported this universally beloved former Democratic senator. Remember him?
Jeremiad was a Bullfrog!
He didn’t leave the Democratic Party; The Democratic Party left him. Like it did ex-Gov. Zell “What’re ya tryin’ ta do? Blackmail me?” Miller.
It’s a sad shame that such a great science fiction and fantasy writer is so wilfully misinformed about actual reality. And so resistant to truth injections, such as McCarthy’s actual record, etc.
It almost seems as if all of his politics is one long apology for actually having indicated that war is bad with “Ender’s Game” and the rest of the series that spawned from it.
Basically he’s a closeted self-hating liberal, or a closeted self-hating gay.
Or he could just be a tool outside of his creative world, which actually gets something closer to 100% of his higher self.
Whatever. In any case, he and Michael Crichton should just stick to writing novels. At least there they can shape the worlds so as to fit their stories, and not hurt our brains by mistaking their fantasies for our realities…
“I am shocked at how little liberals know of American History, Law and the Constitution. Absolutely shocked!”
Your winnings, Monsieur.