The New McCarthyism

 

 (By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari )

There's a fast-vanishing segment of the population who still have living memories of Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy. Now a political and historical artifact, he was a man who was so deranged and paranoid that his surname serves as a synonym for Republican fear-mongering, conspiracy-theorizing and dark, sinister retribution against any who stood in his way. Thankfully, McCarthy was toppled from power shortly before his death after the infamous Army hearings of 1954. However, the boozy spirit of McCarthy had apparently occupied the Oval Office between January 1969 and August 1974 in the form of the equally sinister, five o'clock-shadowed personage of one Richard M. Nixon.

   McCarthy's gleeful destruction and immolation of human lives and careers during his endless Communist witch trial hearings today serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when you let megalomaniacs run wild without censures or criticism (save for the  courageous Margaret Chase Smith, Republican Senator from Maine, whose famous June 1950 speech perhaps ought to be studied by her successor, Susan Collins.). McCarthy's power by early 1954 was such that even President Eisenhower dared not directly and publicly oppose him.

     Today, there's another powerful McCarthy on Capitol Hill but in many respects, he's the opposite of Joe McCarthy, who manufactured strength and conviction through his ceaseless and, ultimately fruitless, quest to root out Communists in the US government. In fact, McCarthy would even chortle with derision, albeit privately, at McCarthy's complete absence of a spine while, no doubt publicly lauding fellow conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene.

     In fact, one can practically hear the former Wisconsin senator chuckling between Scotch belches at McCarthy's predictable supine attitude toward a woman who was literally sworn into Congress a month ago to the day and essentially is running the roost. She's already been given a latitude that was initially given to Liz Cheney who'd gotten voted into Congress in the 2018 midterms and was immediately given the GOP committee chair, ergo instantly making her the #3 House Republican behind McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise.

     But then Liz committed the unpardonable sin of finding her inner Margaret Chase Smith and increasingly denouncing Donald Trump, a man who'd taken McCarthyism to dangerous new heights or depths. Now Liz Cheney is no longer the fair-haired golden child of the House GOP and she's been abruptly replaced with Greene, a younger, shinier, newer version who's been screaming about Jewish space lasers and Hillary Clinton wearing the faces of children she'd murdered. She's essentially the toddler screaming in the restaurant or supermarket that no one dares to upbraid because her parents are far more dangerous lunatics.

     This has resulted in Matt Gaetz flying to Wyoming to get Cheney booted from her committee chair and maybe even get her expelled from Congress (In fact, Gaetz had apparently quaffed so deeply of the Trump Diet Coke Koolaid that he told Steve Bannon today that he'd gladly resign his Congressional seat so he could defend Trump during his second impeachment trial). Fellow Florida Man Marco Rubio blamed the media for covering what Greene was saying on social media.

    This all came just hours before McCarthy announced on his congressional page, without actually saying it out loud, that he was not removing Greene from her committee assignments and then used the opportunity to make defamatory remarks about Democrats making anti-semitic comments that were never, in fact, made. By sticking with Greene instead of the Wyoming congresswoman who'd voted for the article of impeachment, the GOP is now officially throwing out the baby while keeping the bath water.

The Other End of the Ideological Dial

On January 6th, theoretically all 535 of our lawmakers, plus Vice President Pence and his family, were running for their lives or sheltering in place, some of them making The Call to loved ones making pre-emptory goodbyes or informing their husbands where their wills were located... just in case. One of them was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY 14).

   The Bronx-Queens congresswoman hid in a bathroom and huddled with fellow Democratic congresswoman Katie Porter of California and even thought about getting running shoes in case she literally had to run for her life. Last Monday, she'd live-streamed a nearly hour and a half-long video on Instagram detailing her harrowing experience during what was the ultimate home invasion. As one can expect, the right wing sneering began, from anonymous trolls curating the hashtag Alexandria Ocasio Smollet to mainstream right wing nutjobs such as Tucker Carlson.

   What these right wing bleacher bums fail to address was where was Lauren Boebert and the aforementioned Marjorie Taylor Green and the arsenals they're ceaselessly trying to get on the House Floor when their lives were also in danger? Where was Madison Cawthorn and his gun (Oh, right. He was at the riot with it.)?

    Obviously, Ocasio-Cortez and Taylor-Greene are at the extreme opposite ends of the radio dial. Cortez is an unabashed Democratic Socialist, an unreformed Bernie Bro and Greene, well, there's no discernible daylight between Greene and the sadistic Nazi Auschwitz nurses who were tried and executed for their war crimes. Yet, the way each of their respective parties have treated each congresswoman betrays, albeit in different ways, the fecklessness of those factions.

     As with Liz Cheney, Congresswoman Cortez was swept into Congress on the tail of Bernie Sander's hamstrung presidential run of 2016. She'd immediately made waves, championing the Green New Deal, Medicare For All and other progressive reforms. Except, unlike the GOP's subsequent, silent and frankly creepy embrace of the Munchkin from Georgia 14, the congresswoman from New York 14 was met with open hostility from rank and file DINOs all the way up to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

     The nadir of the Democrat establishment's overt contempt for AOC came in mid December last year when she was stiff-armed at the last minute from the Energy and Commerce Committee, a spot for which she was born and destined. Instead, the Democrat Steering Committee was ordered to keep AOC off at all costs and they went with Kathleen Rice. However, the backstory behind that backstabbing is rarely told.

     What happened was Ocasio-Cortez made it known to Pelosi that the House Democratic caucus had the votes to bring to the House floor a motion to vote on Medicare For All, which is supported by a wide margin of the American people. Pelosi, infamously, has been as hostile to the M4A proposal as is Biden. So, Pelosi struck a deal with AOC- Don't press the issue, vote for me for House Speaker on January 3rd and I'll make sure you get on the Energy and Commerce committee. And that's when the piano wire artists of the Democrat Party showed their true colors.

 

 Why, What Happened, Mikey?

I'm glad you asked! Well, M4A, obviously, never got to the House floor and Cortez was stabbed in the back when Pelosi ordered the Steering Committee to appoint, instead, Blue Dog nonentity Kathleen Rice (In a secret ballot that went 46-13). To show what a good and loyal Democrat she was, AOC even voted for Pelosi, anyway, who nearly lost to Kevin McCarthy despite the Democrats nominally retaining their majority in the House. Rice, pointedly, had refused to vote for Pelosi for Speaker eight years ago.

     Liz Cheney, on the other hand, voted for McCarthy both times. And, just as the Tammany Hall 2.0 wing of the Democrat Party had with AOC, the GOP had put Liz Cheney on an ice floe aimed for parts unknown. The snotty explanations from Democrat "leadership" said AOC hadn't "cultivated" enough relationships and that her stiff-arming from the committee should serve as a lesson to her. In other words, make more friends in our neoliberal circles or you'll get more of the same.

     Of course, like the true conservatives they are, that self-same Democrat "leadership" is blithely ignoring the exit poll data that showed beyond a doubt that not only did true blue liberals like AOC and the rest of the Squad get re-elected in 2020, and by massive margins, Blue Dogs like Rice lost their elections in droves or barely eked out wins. Again, the zeitgeist was that AOC was to blame for her crushing defeat for that committee seat. Yet, as the American Prospect drily put it last December, "Many of the representatives who came out most forcefully against Ocasio-Cortez have close ties to oil and gas, especially (Henry) Cuellar."

    Cuellar, a sobbing, moaning, semen-flecked fuck doll for the oil and gas industries for decades during his masquerade as a Democrat out of Texas, remembered all too well AOC's endorsement of his 2020 primary opponent, 27 year-old Jessica Cisneros. Other DINOs were terrified of AOC's power and feared that she'd endorse their primary opponents in the 2022 midterms. If that was their tactic, to scurrilously vote against her in secret and publicly snipe at her to keep her from campaigning against them, then perhaps those Blue Dog poseurs need to take a remedial course in political science and perhaps even in reverse psychology.

     Meanwhile, as this right wing parlor drama was unfolding last December, the more radical right wing was already rolling out the crimson carpet for Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the toxic Munchkin from northwest Georgia whose constituents root against Burt Reynolds and for the hillbilly ass pirate when they watch Deliverance. Her public comments on the campaign trail were already well-known. That didn't matter to the GOP any more than it mattered to them that she ran essentially unopposed after her Democratic opponent was run off the campaign trail, by her fans, and out of the state of Georgia.

     The GOP's quiet, creepy uncle embrace of Taylor-Greene and the Democrat Party's skeeving of AOC betray the party leadership on both sides, if there can indeed be discernible sides anymore, to be made up of, to use Samantha Bee's phrase, "feckless cunts." It betrays a Republican Party afraid of its own voters, like the ones that made AOC run for her life and a Democrat Party contemptuous of the voters that had put, twice, that liberal congresswoman in their midst for some Goddamn good reasons.