They are digging ol' Joe McCarthy's bloated, maggoty, rotten corpse up out of his well-deserved grave of obloquy, and re-making him into some shining, neglected paradigm of mistreated patriotism.
I object!
What will those brilliantly deluded conservative revisionists – you know who you are – think of next? Does their misplaced compassion know no bounds?
Let sleeping fascists lie! And lie! And lie!
Why must these asinine apologists persist in plundering the festering cemeteries of the political undead which roam the excrement-filled tunnels crisscrossing the subterranean bowels of Washington, D.C.? To provide fresh political carrion for our morally bankrupt, ethically imperiled and intellectually undernourished ruling class?
Um, why bother?
Bad enough America's already endured previous Republican rehabilitative spit-and-polishings of those justifiably tarnished tin gods, the "new Nixon" and "Reagan reconsidered." Must we now refashion still another stinking sow's ear into a temporary ideologically fashionable silk purse?
Bulletin: As their stock rises, our interest falls. And falls. And falls.
Or, "Puke," as one left-wing activist so cogently responds with a balanced assessment of this luridly nightmarish situation.
And let them explain away that oh-so-masterful incident at a Washington, D.C., party where McCarthy reportedly slapped and kicked controversial gadfly columnist Drew Pearson around.
Certainly McCarthy is a perfect revisionist saint for this tainted post-millennial era of corporate whorishness and unparalleled government evil.
But here's the thing about opinions – they are ubiquitous.
Actually, a convincing case could again be made for McCarthy being an outrageously paranoid drunk and an abusive megalomaniac whose often irrational conduct, televised or not, was an embarrassment to real right-thinking Americans. And so his "premature" death, from cirrhosis of the liver, would hardly be an occasion for weeping, but rather, rejoicing, since it tidily accomplished what awful karma he earned by his unjustified ruining so many lives of others.
Anyone sane who actually watched him rant and rave and roll his eyes during those dreadful Army-McCarthy TV hearings in New Jersey could not help but be appalled. He was no visionary protector of "the American way." He was a brutal government-issue thug who ran roughshod over the rights of the individuals he bullied.
Indeed, McCarthy's sham "investigations" needlessly threatened and terrorized hundreds and hundreds of decent, law-abiding people, including – I know this for a fact – my childhood next-door neighbor "Harry," a meek and mild federal employee who would eventually flee with his family – a bewildered wife and two children – in the middle of the night to start new, and anonymous, lives in the hinterlands.
I suggest those folks out there feeling the onset of an irrational inclination to indulge in the bathos of McCarthy worship immediately rent and watch "Point of Order," Emile de Antonio's searing 1964 documentary film, which was later re-released for television as "McCarthy: Death of a Witch Hunter," with Paul Newman as host – NOW!
What originated as McCarthy's investigation of "disloyalty" in the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, N.J., soon expanded to other Army operations. For 36 days in 1954, the Army-McCarthy hearings – held by the Senate committee on government operations – were televised live, April 11-May 24 that year, to a daily audience of perhaps 20 million Americans. Emile de Antonio used kinescopes of portions of the hearings for his film – a powerful indictment of McCarthy's, and the era's, excessive anti-communist zeal in that Age of Paranoia.
Insist what you will, McCarthy's would-be anti-communist purges and pogroms were never quite vindicated. His mucked-up exploits remain a dim, dark, dank, damned chapter in the history of our nation that should never be repeated, but, if we continue on the present fascist path we seem headed, doubtlessly will.
However, one may hope such idiocy only fuels the likelihood of genuine massive citizen revolt.
Bring it on!