How Right Wing Extremists Try to Paralyze Government Through Ideological Smears and Baseless Attacks

PFAW has assembled a nice, but alarming post, comparing the then & now of McCarthyism.  Perhaps what’s most frightening about its present manifestation is that there aren’t any Republicans with the stones to stand up to the baseless fear mongering.

From People for the American Way, published December, 2009:

McCarthy’s campaign against supposedly widespread communist infiltration of the U.S. government brought down sitting Senators and intimidated even President Eisenhower (who loathed McCarthy) and his advisors.  McCarthy’s campaign was boosted by conservative think tanks, media figures, and clergy, and abetted for years by the unwillingness of most of his colleagues to stand up against his false charges and clear abuses of power.

[snip]

Today’s McCarthyism has many faces and voices, including the household names of right-wing cable television, a plethora of radio hosts, Religious Right leaders, right-wing organizations and the bogus “grassroots” campaigns they generate – and Members of Congress and other Republican Party officials.  Together they engage in character assassination and challenge the loyalty and patriotism of their targets…

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Holy Crap: Richard Nixon was totally a racist!

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Of the 12 historical happenings outlined in the post, my personal favorite is the douchebaggary perpetrated by Reagan, HW Bush, & Rumsfeld:  clandestinely treating with Iran during the hostage crisis, contributing to Reagan’s electoral victory over Jimmy Carter.

From Time for Change’s Journal, 6 March 2009 post, @ DemocraticUnderground.com:

“If Bush and Cheney commit war crimes and everyone knows it, but does nothing, are they still crimes?” – Jonathan Turley

Jonathan Turley’s rhetorical question gets to the heart of one of the biggest problems with our country (and many other countries as well): We sanitize our history to the point where we can believe in and present a version to the world that is vastly at odds with reality. While that serves the purpose of making many Americans feel better about their country, and also serves the purpose of maintaining the status quo, it greatly impedes progress towards making ourselves a better country. You can’t learn from your mistakes as long as you don’t recognize them. And they will be repeated over and over again until we learn from them.

While Jonathan Turley and many others are focused right now on the crimes of the Bush administration, as well they should be, we should also recognize that this pattern is nothing new. The powers that be have been sanitizing U.S. history since its inception.

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Patriotic Organizations and The Big Red Scare, 1918-1920

Originally published @ Suite101.com, by Aaron D. Pendell

The years following World War I were marked by the waning spirit of cooperation that had delicately existed between organized labor and capital during the War. Perhaps it was inevitable that it fell apart as the cooperative situation had been brought into line by the Wilson Administration through, according to historian, M.J. Heale, “… engaging public opinion to the war effort, employing massive propaganda campaigns and secret armies of volunteers to ferret out subversives and slackers.”

Heale describes the Federal Government during WWI as “lacking coercive powers” to deal with a nation that was divided by war. When the cooperative spirit slipped following the War, the citizens that had been receptive to Wilson’s propaganda recognized the voices of labor activists as being associated with subversive elements that had infiltrated the ranks of organized labor…

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Rachel Maddow takes aim at George W. Bush’s history re-writing efforts.

Maddow aptly assesses that the ‘Bush Legacy Project’ is on a fools errand.  Thanks, in part, to the “Google Machine” and the “Internets,” it will be extremely difficult for the  administration to polish the turd that was the Bush presidency.

Rachel is such a gem.  If you’ve got about ten minutes to spare, view the below clip.

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From Huffingtonpost.com, 17 November 2008:

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman was around to remind Will of some history — that the economy improved after the New Deal, and that it was FDR’s attempt to balance the budget in 1937 (a move favored now by many conservatives) that then cut into that progress.
WATCH

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