The last time that liberals got into real big-time trouble was back in the McCarthy era.
You see, liberals, being the fashionistas they are, had gotten tangled up in the big political fashion of the 1930s: communism. They had joined the American Communist Party, many of them, or even done a bit of spying on the side. See Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss.
So along came the young generation of politicians, WWII veterans like Richard Nixon (R-CA) and Joe McCarthy (R-WI) and made a little political hay out of it.
How Dare You! That was the response of the liberals of the time. You see, men like Nixon and McCarthy came from rather modest backgrounds and Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White came from the bluest of blue American blood. A chap like Alger Hiss could never have betrayed his country! And the very idea of believing a shambling accuser like Whittaker Chambers, darling. Do you know where he grew up? Brooklyn and Lynbrook, Long Island.
The beauty of it all was that after the whole thing had blown over and Sen. Joe McCarthy had left the Senate we were all taught to believe that the problem was McCarthyism and "guilt by association". Why, do you know, those wascally Wepublicans were actually investigating the innocent political associations of good New Deal liberals.
It's true that Sen. McCarthy had used rather florid rhetoric in his campaigns against Communists in the State Department, and he could never get straight just how many Communists there were. But hey, who expects a politician to be precise on his arithmetic or consistent in his rhetoric? Certainly not President Obama!
The current liberal mess is not, of course, a conspiracy, any more than the liberal Communist spies of the 1930s and 1940s were a conspiracy. No, it's been really worse than that, both times.
In the 1930s and 1940s liberals were getting their fingers burnt in the Communist Party because that's what "idealistic" young people did back then. They all drank the KoolAid of the era, that World War I was the fault of the Merchants of Death and that capitalism was a dead letter -- when it wasn't exploiting the workers. Why, their college teachers told them so! (And KoolAid hadn't even been invented yet!)
Same thing today. There isn't a conspiracy to deep-six conservatives and their political associations. There doesn't need to be. Nice young ladies like Lois Lerner don't have to be recruited into obstructing and harrassing conservative politicians and activists at the Federal Elections Commission and the IRS. They were taught to "hate Republicans and everything they stand for" when they went to high school and latterly when their college professors railed against racists, sexists, homophobes, and anti-choice fascists. They just know that conservatives are wicked. Why do you think we have government schools?
And now we learn that the media is tied to the Obama administration by blood ties. There are lots of media types married to people in the Obama administration.
The more I think of it, the more it feels like the years leading up to the French Revolution. Budget problems? Check. Monetary instability? Check. Doofus head of state? Check. Exciting but foolish intellectual movements? Check. Mindless attitude of superiority in the ruling class? Check. Laws do not apply to the ruling class? Check. Douceur de vivre (for the ruling class)? Check.
Will liberals manage to blame conservatives for the whole thing after the Revolution, like they did after the Communist spy era? Who knows? It all depends on how much cultural power they have left after the dust settles on the Great Obama Scandals.
You see, liberals, being the fashionistas they are, had gotten tangled up in the big political fashion of the 1930s: communism. They had joined the American Communist Party, many of them, or even done a bit of spying on the side. See Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss.
So along came the young generation of politicians, WWII veterans like Richard Nixon (R-CA) and Joe McCarthy (R-WI) and made a little political hay out of it.
How Dare You! That was the response of the liberals of the time. You see, men like Nixon and McCarthy came from rather modest backgrounds and Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White came from the bluest of blue American blood. A chap like Alger Hiss could never have betrayed his country! And the very idea of believing a shambling accuser like Whittaker Chambers, darling. Do you know where he grew up? Brooklyn and Lynbrook, Long Island.
The beauty of it all was that after the whole thing had blown over and Sen. Joe McCarthy had left the Senate we were all taught to believe that the problem was McCarthyism and "guilt by association". Why, do you know, those wascally Wepublicans were actually investigating the innocent political associations of good New Deal liberals.
It's true that Sen. McCarthy had used rather florid rhetoric in his campaigns against Communists in the State Department, and he could never get straight just how many Communists there were. But hey, who expects a politician to be precise on his arithmetic or consistent in his rhetoric? Certainly not President Obama!
The current liberal mess is not, of course, a conspiracy, any more than the liberal Communist spies of the 1930s and 1940s were a conspiracy. No, it's been really worse than that, both times.
In the 1930s and 1940s liberals were getting their fingers burnt in the Communist Party because that's what "idealistic" young people did back then. They all drank the KoolAid of the era, that World War I was the fault of the Merchants of Death and that capitalism was a dead letter -- when it wasn't exploiting the workers. Why, their college teachers told them so! (And KoolAid hadn't even been invented yet!)
Same thing today. There isn't a conspiracy to deep-six conservatives and their political associations. There doesn't need to be. Nice young ladies like Lois Lerner don't have to be recruited into obstructing and harrassing conservative politicians and activists at the Federal Elections Commission and the IRS. They were taught to "hate Republicans and everything they stand for" when they went to high school and latterly when their college professors railed against racists, sexists, homophobes, and anti-choice fascists. They just know that conservatives are wicked. Why do you think we have government schools?
And now we learn that the media is tied to the Obama administration by blood ties. There are lots of media types married to people in the Obama administration.
The more I think of it, the more it feels like the years leading up to the French Revolution. Budget problems? Check. Monetary instability? Check. Doofus head of state? Check. Exciting but foolish intellectual movements? Check. Mindless attitude of superiority in the ruling class? Check. Laws do not apply to the ruling class? Check. Douceur de vivre (for the ruling class)? Check.
Will liberals manage to blame conservatives for the whole thing after the Revolution, like they did after the Communist spy era? Who knows? It all depends on how much cultural power they have left after the dust settles on the Great Obama Scandals.
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