The mainstream media, egged on by Democrats, is trying to pin the “McCarthy” label on Ted Cruz.
It doesn’t matter whether there is a basis, all that matters is that there’s a name connection made.
It’s a meme started by the usual cabal of Democratic politicians and supportive media:
Without naming names, Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, offered a biting label for the Texan’s accusatory crusade: McCarthyism.
“It was really reminiscent of a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such and such a date,’ and, of course, nothing was in the pocket,” she said, a reference to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s pursuit of Communists in the 1950s. “It was reminiscent of some bad times.”
Actually, there was a new Senator who claimed to have the goods on witnesses without ever producing the evidence: Elizabeth Warren, who outrageously suggested in her Senate banking debut that bank books were not worthy of investor confidence and that there were banks which should have been taken to trial.
Really, which banks have cooked books and which banks should have been taken to trial rather than settlement, with all the risk that would have created for the viability of the bank? Warren never named names.
I don’t think Warren was pulling a McCarthy, but I do think she was pulling a meaningless made for YouTube political ploy. Yet Warren gets a media pass and becomes a progressive hero while Cruz is vilified and the conservative media is mostly silent.
Juan Williams knows the media dance very well:
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Comments
As a former liberal, what I’m observing now is that the liberal lefty hypocritical American MSM does not seem to understand that more independents like me know how the game is played. We know the bias now.
Influence through bias only works when the bias isn’t evident, or rather the observer doesn’t realize there is a bias, once the person knows there is a bias, the influence of the MSM is discounted.
Not to say that there aren’t drones who will readily take what the MSM tells them, but more independent minded people at least no longer see the American MSM as an impartial entity, I know I don’t, and I was a devout believer of all American MSM, CNN, MSDNC, NBC, SeeBS, etc… now I don’t watch them, listen to them, or read them. I no longer trust them to have the integrity or the intelligence or the ability to tell the real news.
Internet is the way to go, no filters.
Nevertheless, I think Senator Cruz needs to begin to do media spots to define himself, rather than letting the Left do it for him- especially on Spanish language media outlets. Go on Leno, hit some of the morning shows, go on Colbert, perhaps. Cruz is the smartest guy in the room and is a kind, gentle man who can reason rings around any Leftie commentator without being unpleasant when he does it.
“I don’t think Warren was pulling a McCarthy…”
I guess we’d best define what that term means, Prof., because I think that is exactly what she was doing.
Wiki-Dogma: “McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or
treason without proper regard for evidence.”
It also means “the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
And the corollary, wiki defines “unfair” as any tactic which establishes as fact an inconvenient truth.
some might find this intresting
Dispatch International: “Joe McCarthy Was Right All Along”
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2389/Dispatch-International-Joe-McCarthy-Was-Right-All-Along.aspx
Good for you, Aggie95. I read Diana West daily; I trust her and agree with her conclusions. One thing to keep in mind, as far as McCarthy is concerned, is that the smear of him is itself an operation of the left. That is what the left does: discredits and basically destroys TRUTH TELLERS in the mind of the public. Read Whittaker Chambers’s “Witness,” for example. Also, just out is “Stalin’s Secret Agents,” by Evans and Romerstein. (Sorry for the use of quotes; haven’t yet figured out html code :-(.) These authors demonstrate conclusively that McCarthy was right; it’s just that subversives cry foul when exposed, deflecting attention away from their treason.
That was just an attempt to tarnish him while reminding him that just because he knows what Marxism looks like does not mean he is free to point it out without consequences.
It absolutely permeates the education model being pushed on K-12 and even preschool in the name of Common Core and Race to the Top. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/who-knew-karl-marx-had-a-human-development-model-or-that-it-fit-our-facts-so-well/
Many of the Marxist profs took to using synonyms where you get the function of Marxism but use a different name like Systems Thinking or a new form of capitalism or even social or developmental psychology. In fact I finished a Harvard B School prof’s book called Support Economy and it reminded me so much of Marx that I went back to reread that passage of All that’s Solid Melts Into Air to confirm.
Unfortunately for the prof who now writes for Business Week, although she never mentioned Uncle Karl, she kept footnoting to other people who are known to push 20th century updates to his pernicious ideas.
Now would be a good time for everyone to read Kenneth Minogue’s work or Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia to brush up on what its fundamental tenets are whatever it calls itself and when it is not coming in the front door by nationalizing the means of production.
The works of C. Bradley Thompson come to mind as well. Vlad Tepes featured a 54-minute video lecture by Thompson this past week entitled, Lecture on Marxism and contemporary fascination with it. Here is the link:
http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=59938
I highly recommend it.
Thanks Harriett. Minogue is at LSE and Revel in France and they are used to dealing with people who were openly Marxist and said so and why and how it impacts their theories and worldviews.
I also find Robert Conquest both helpful and intriguing. Richard Pipes as well.
Revel has a book from the 70s when the outcome was so unclear called The Totalitarian Temptation that is hugely insightful. And still pertinent.
Here’s a name I’ll bring up for Boxer and her ilk. Alynski.
Her tactics are pure Saul Alynski (and Vladamir Lenin to boot).
“Accuse others of what you yourself do.”
“Without naming names, Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, offered a biting label for the Texan’s accusatory crusade: McCarthyism.”
The irony .. the irony.
I’m sure that have no idea.
She doesn’t need to go the full distance, she puts it out there in a general way and the Times and The New Yorker and Think Progress do the rest.
…and thus the birth of “Boxerism”.
The remedy is push-back — hard push-back, not just in form of fact to refute the outrageous lies of the left (a la Hitler’s ‘big lie’ theory), but in the form of ridicule: massive ridicule.
Otherwise, this is the kind of cancer that will fester until it kills us:
Al Gore: The False Spontaneity of the Tea Party
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-gore/tea-party-koch-brothers-big-tobacco_b_2689380.html
Environmental Charter High School
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Environmental-Charter-High-School/322675152446
As more of a realization than a revelation it occurred to me that if all the Republicans who were elected based on the representation that they were conservative would simply start acting like conservatives, i.e., like Ted Cruz, the left-wing slander machine would become completely ineffective.
Just as the police can arrest one protester, but not 10,000 of them, the Democrat Calumniators are essentially paper tigers who have only the power we give them by backing down when they start yapping.
The solution for Republicans who run and hide in fear of criticism is to, en masse, become hyper-aggressive. Just vote no. Just attack. No surrender. No retreat. Tell Obama to shove it. Start acting like Newt on a good day.
The only thing stopping us from taking our country back is us, the liberal media be damned.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/284533-ted-cruz-harvard-law-did-have-marxists
ZOMG…!!! Now Cruz is finding Commies at Harvard.
Wul, duh.
Without naming names, Senator Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz
Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, Republican of Texas offered a biting label for theTexan’sCalifornian’s accusatory crusade:McCarthyismAlinskyism.Fixed that for ya’ Bab’s
Funny how when Barack Obama brags about choosing to hang out with Marxist professors in college no one questions their existence. When Ted Cruz mentions they exist at Harvard all hell breaks loose.
From DREAMS FROM MY FATHER:A STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE
“There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”)
That statement seems to have offended Ann Althouse, also a law professor.
“It was an inflamatory statement and he (Cruz) needs to stand by it (and back it up), defend it as hyperbole, or concede he was wrong.” according to Professor Althouse.
Of course, it would seem that the phrase “overthrowing the United States government” has her all in a twit.
I guess Professor Althouse doesn’t understand that Marxism comes on all shapes and sizes and that “overthrowing the United States government” doesn’t necessarily mean by violent means as supported by Karl Marx and carried out by those like Obama’s friends, William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn.
There are others, like the Frankfort Marxists, who believed in a peaceful revolution, brought on by the indoctrination of the young in educational settings. Drip by drip, inch by inch, until the goal of Marxism was acheived. Those Marxists, the Frankfort Marxists, were the very ones who fled Germany during the rise of Hitler for green pastures at our tony Ivy League schools like UCLA, Columbia and Harvard. They were the professors who taught the professors who taught our current crop of professors. Can anyone deny that Robert Jensen, University of Texas Austin is a Marxist? Nope, and who do you think taught him?
But then, what can we expect from Dear Ann? She voted for the Marxist currently propping his feet up on the Resolution Desk.
Just a minor tick, retire…
Frankfort is the capital of Kentucky.
The Frankfurt School set up at Princeton, if memory serves, once presided over by Wilson, who was our WORST president before Obama.
And, just a reminder, the Collective is made up of various subspecies of statists, all of whom share common traits, and a few minor differences.
As is their norm, they play as if those minor differences are a big deal, and take rolling-cat-fits if you refer to them as the wrong branch of the family (i.e., socialists v. communist v. fascists).
In the case of Obama, he is a true Collectivist opportunist, and takes elements of all the branches that he finds useful, such as fascist economics (which is very dangerous and effective in America).
Collectivists are true utilitarians. They will foreswear violence as a means to their ends when it suits them. But they are always pursuing their ends, by whatever means are at hand.
Rags, you are correct that it is the FranffUrt School, but it wasn’t set up in Kentucky. It was set up at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. It was those professors there that gave us “social” Marxism, i.e. political correctness.
When Hitler came into power, those professors, a lot of them Jewish, migrated mainly to the U.S. only to be allowed to teach in the universities I have already mentioned.
Gee, you mean there is something the Great Rags doesn’t remember, or actually know?
Not that this matters much, but…
Princeton is in New Jersey. I have no idea where your Kentucky thing came from.
When the Frankfurters came to America, they set up at Columbia, not Princeton (see, my memory is as fallible as the next person).
I can forget all kinds of things. Like an imaginary slight. I actually think that’s a good trait we all should develop.
But some stayed, and branched out: Lowenthal to UC Berkley and Stanford; Marcuse to Columbia; Erich Fromm to the University of Michigan. They taught the students who became the professors to William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, who were the kids that became the professors we now have that subscribe to Gramsci Marxism.
Bottom line? Is there any doubt that Harvard is cranking out Marxist professors, then, during Ted Cruz’s time there, or now?
All true comments. But just playing defense won’t cut it anymore.
There has to be an offense, a la the Tea Party movement in 2010. And that offense has to continue indefinitely. Like there is a permanent war on drugs, there has to be a permanent war on leftism.
Fine: Excellent point. However, what also must be recognized that being on point does not mean that that person must also be a spear catcher. We need to get to more nimble with our tongues and learn to parry those damnable Socialists, who proclaim themselves to be masters at word games; often times true because we let them get away with it.
Yet we can shut’em up with sharp responses, directed right back at them and directly at the crux of their miserable arguments.
Way too often, we’re too darned polite and not willing to strike right at their miserable souls, and let’s do so, but strictly in a non-violent sense unless they choose differently.
[…] by Politico and The New York Times. Senior Texas Sen. John Cornyn and voters across the …That new Senator had a secret list in hand (but it wasn't Ted Cruz)legal Insurrection (blog)'Cruz missile' or misguided? Newest Texas senator stirs […]
[…] Democrats and the major news media — but I repeat myself – have decided that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s opposition to the Chuck Hagel nomination makes him the “New McCarthy.” […]
Warrenism: pretending to be something you are not and gaining approbation.
[…] Democrats and the major news media — but I repeat myself – have decided that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s opposition to the Chuck Hagel nomination makes him the “New McCarthy.” […]
I think that an appearance of a McCarthy-like character on the hill might be the best medicine for the country considering what level we have sunk to.
If it takes a guy like Ted Cruz to shake things up, so be it. I’m tired of listening to mealy-mouthed politicians worried about self enrichment rather than what is best for the country.
Cruz is the exact opposite of the fake Indian…
As annoying as he can be to watch on Fox, I now have a new-found respect for Juan Williams.