Some folks have all the subtlety of a whoopee cushion.
In a Washington Post column about the influence of freshman Senator Ted Cruz, Dana Milbank remarked that Cruz “is the same age Joe McCarthy was when he amassed power in the Senate.”
The reader is supposed to recognize in natal form a dangerous McCarthyesque demagoguery in Cruz, who is a vigorous and no doubt sometimes wrongheaded polemicist. Milbank offers no substantive comparison of the two men. He just let slip a hit-and-run innuendo, then raced away.
Why? I can’t read Milbank’s mind. Typically, though, smear artists defame a person in hopes that others will reel back in horror or contempt, thus diverted from relevant considerations of fact. Perhaps the smear-wielder also wants the target to be cowed into silence.
Turnabout is fair play and underscores the silliness here. After the Instapundit blog linked to Milbank’s rapier-like thrust, readers gave reciprocity a try. Christopher Arfaa came up with: “Dana Milbank will turn 45 next week, the same age as Walter Duranty was in 1929, when he secured an exclusive interview with Josef Stalin.” Jay Brinker proposed: “John Kerry is 69, the same age as Neville Chamberlin when he signed the Munich Agreement.” You get the idea.
Sounds easy to get caught in such a net.
I may as well admit it: I too am of a certain age — the same age at which any number of disreputable persons perpetrated some enormity or another.
All my known associates have regular birthdays as well.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?”
AND THE LATE SENATOR MC CARTHY’S TOP 9STAFF) ATTORNEY?
DRUM ROLL, PLEASE.
NONE OTHER THEN THE “SAINTED “(?)
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, BROTHER OF JOHN F. KENNEDY,
SO, WHAT ELSE IS NEW?
I never heard of either the Senator mentioned nor Dana Millbank. So, what is that suppsoed to mean? And, who cares what a Washington newspaper reporter or columnist says, anyhow? Who beleives their s — ?
Kind of funny, I happened to be around when Senator McCarthy was horrifying democrats. I remember that he was publicly castigated and ridiculed. I remember that he went nuts from the pressure and died a broken man.
I also remember he was right! Todays government and democratic party are proof enough of that!!
There are certain individuals lurking around in DC whose birthday is very close to that of the resident in the White House. They should kill themselves.
Millbanks statement makes no sense at all. The point is that this type of stupidity is inferred all the time by many in prominence and even more unthinking people buy into it.
How sad to see liberals (or anyone for that matter, but liberals seem to be doing it quite a bit) smearing others with nothing more than innuendo and assertions. It’s an indication of 1) lack of any argument based on reason for their position and 2) liberals not understanding conservatives and assuming they are evil as a result. In fact, both reasons are related.
As some psychiatrists have written, liberalism is a mental disorder because of their refusal to acknowledge reality. They do so because they’ve a vision in their heads they like (e.g. people in government are angels, socialist schemes like Obmacare work) and reality contradicts their vision. To avoid the pain of holding contradictory ideas in one’s head, they ignore reality. And to explain conservatives, they attribute evil motives to them.
Research has shown that while conservatives understand liberals, liberals do not understand conservatives. This is simple research, asking people to answer a set of politician questions, then ask them to also fill it out as conservatives and as liberals would. Their answers allow them to be categorized as liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc. And the results show liberals, especially the very liberal, do not understand conservatives. See http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/10/born-this-way/2 — the whole article is worth a read.
I’m not surprised this hasn’t made any headlines, as I expect the liberal media to ignore it because it doesn’t fit with the vision in their head, so it’s dismissed. If the results were the other way around, it’d be on the front page of the NYT.