Far be it from this blogger to quibble with an essay by the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, but there is a glaring omission in this account of the similarities between Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King presently in the Oval Office. The nexus between "Tail-Gunner Joe" and The *ILK was a New York attorney, Roy Cohn. This lawyer, who was disbarred in the State of New York, was McCarthy's "Chief Investigator" during the Second Red Scare from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. And Roy Cohn was The *ILK's lawyer and mentor after The *ILK took over his father's real estate business in New York. It was an Axis of Evil in NYC at that time. Look below at the Word Cloud of the most important names and terms in the essay below it. There is one glaring omission: "Cohn." If this is a (fair & balanced) but somewhat flawed account of political paranoia and anti-intellectualism in the US of the 1950s and the US in the 21stcentury, so be it. [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x The New Yorker]
What Donald Trump Shares With Joseph McCarthy
By David Remnick
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
On January 6, 2017, at around 8:30 AM, Donald Trump undoubtedly had serious matters on his mind. In just two weeks, he would come into possession of the nuclear codes, attempt to fill out the upper ranks of the federal government, and assume responsibility for the course of American policy at home and abroad. So he picked up his phone and began to tweet an assessment of his replacement on “The Celebrity Apprentice”:
Wow. The ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got “swamped” (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT. So much for . . . being a movie star—and that was season 1 compared to season 14. Now compare him to my season 1. But who cares, he supported Kasich & Hillary.
In the years to come, Trump’s social-media goals expanded. His tweets and retweets, which can come at a fevered rate of more than a hundred a day, provide real-time talking points for right-wing media outlets, and are absorbed as doctrine by millions of faithful constituents. As President, Trump takes to Twitter to declare who is “pathetic” and who is “dopey,” who is a “total nut job” and who is a “low class slob.” He fires staff and touts the dimensions of his “Nuclear Button.” The tone is so consistently devoid of empathy, good faith, or good will that even “HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY” sounds like a threat.
The Library of America recently [2020] put out a collection of writings by the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter. It includes two full-length studies published in the early nineteen-sixties: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Hofstadter was trying, in part, to understand right-wing leaders, such as Senators Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, and the prevalence of an antipathy toward expertise and an embrace of conspiracy theories that had been, he wrote, “catnip for cranks of all kinds.” Hofstadter, who died in 1970, saw the country as “an arena of uncommonly angry minds,” and it is hard to read him and not think of Trump’s dark descants on “the Deep State,” “the Enemy of the People,” and, now, “Obamagate.”
In The Paranoid Style, Hofstadter quotes McCarthy, speaking in 1951, on the “parlous” state of America:
"How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”
