From Tail-gunner Joe to Moscow Mitch

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
~Joseph N. Welch, US Army general consul, to Joseph McCarthy.

So, Mitch McConnell doesn't like being called "Moscow Mitch."

He calls it "McCarthyism" that Democrats and even some Republicans are calling him out for blocking various election-security bills, and saying that he's Un-American.

Never mind that the Russian corporation RusAl is building a huge aluminum plant in Kentucky. If one wants to get really technical, given who RusAl is owned by, oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and his relationship to the Russian government and Vladimir Putin, the fucking thing damn well ought to be named the "Hero Of Socialist Labor Mitch McConnell Aluminum Factory."

And the son of a bitch...whose party is currently bent over with the Russians balls deep in them, kept aloft on a sea of Commie dark money and information warfare...has the nerve to get mad?

There's a reason, as I've said before, that I keep using that word. Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent. There are no ex-KGB agents, the KGB was the "Sword and Shield of the Party." Putin has even gone so far as to revive Josef Stalin's personality cult and reintroduce "Young Pioneers" style youth programs as well as making extensive use of old-school KGB tactics, but updating them to the Information Age.

Say what you will about old Joseph "Tail Gunner Joe" McCarthy. That motherfucker at least understood that Communists and Russians were the fucking enemy.

Granted, the actual reason for Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunts was basically demagoguery in the service of building his own power base. He accused an awful lot of people, actually mostly his fellow Republicans...of being Communists.

Like Donald Trump, he was hugely popular with a certain type of authoritarian assholes.

Joe started out as a local judge, served as an officer in Marine Corps aviation in WWII (where his actual nickname was a lot less flattering than the one he would later try to give himself) and ran for Senate after the war. His first few years in the Senate were unremarkable, he was considered a moderate Republican but was also an engaging speaker and thus he ended up giving a lot of speeches around the country on various topics. His national notice and resulting fame came from an incident in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he held up a sheet of paper that he claimed had a list of 205 Communists on it that supposedly worked for the State Department. That was on February 9th, 1950.

McCarthy spent the next four years or so bullying, showboating, and picking huge public fights with the Army, the CIA and the State Department, until it all came crashing down when the televised Army-McCarthy hearings revealed him to be a cruel, reckless, small man who sought to do nothing more than build up his own power by hurting other people. He was ultimately censured, and became a public nonentity while serving out the rest of his second term before he died of Hepatitis stemming from his alcoholism in 1957. Aside from a small number of far-right motherfuckers who've tried to act as his apologists down through the years...his name and legacy remain so soiled that even Mitch McConnell can comfortably use it as an epithet.

Ironically, a Democrat won the special election to replace him and then remained in office until 1989.

But the tendrils of Joe McCarthy's influence seep down to today. For one thing Roy Cohn, his lawyer, later mentored one Donald J. Trump.

So yeah, I think it's rich that any Republican...much less the current batch that spends its time fear-mongering about Communism and Socialism (while breaking America in the service of a Communist!) would have the guts to accuse anybody else of McCarthyism.

Again, for the 100,000,000th time, the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the Soviet Union fell on Christmas Day of 1991. Even the Chinese aren't really Communists anymore.

All that the accusation of Communism or Socialism by Republicans against Democrats is, is a stick to beat them over the head with and a trope to fool the feeble-minded reactionary white idiots out there.

You know, the people who Republicans basically steal from the most while dealing them backlash politics and racism like some backwoods Kentucky heroin dealer offering a free hit to the rail-thin lady that's paid up her debts and sworn to kick the habit that she picked up after her health insurance and Opioid prescriptions ran out when she couldn't go back to work after the accident.

Tell me one thing, people: Has blame or hate or nativism or racism or voting for the party of big business and tax cuts solved any ONE of the problems that you actually have?

Republicans, for all of their power, keep constantly acting like angry losers. There's still a steady trickle of people leaving, and I kind of feel like all of Trump's efforts to consolidate power and protect himself using the executive branch really aren't going to amount to anything...not least because just like everybody else the number of actual people in those agencies who support him is decreasing.

Even as one third of us drinks deeply of the Trump-cult Flavor-aid on the daily, two thirds of us are consistently against him. Every day there's some new stupid scandal, and both a panoply under-the-radar economic warning signs and a plethora of un-addressed international threats...all of which have been ignored and would likely be handled very badly by These Fucking People.

And to top it off, if the Republicans don't put the brakes on the divisive talk I think there's an excellent chance that by November of next year, Americans could be shooting at each other and each side might hold separate elections in its own territory.

And that seems to be a feature of, rather than a bug in, Republican plans.

for all of the Democrats' herd-of-cats affect, I have a feeling they're most likely going to nominate somebody that's relatively moderate...yet scrappy...like Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden.

AOC, Ilhan, Rashida, etc. represent a substantial part of the Democratic electorate...and each seems to be popular enough in their own districts that they're likely not going anywhere anytime soon.

But they're all junior House Reps, who knows where they're going to go in the long term?

If *I* were a Republican strategist, I'd be striving to make Marianne Williamson the face of the Democratic Party, not the Squad.

Of course...just like even the Chinese aren't really Communists anymore...Republicans aren't really conservatives or religious people or any of the other things they said they were for all those years.

Here's the thing though, having actual positive principles other than your own self and what's best for your ego or your wallet will keep you going through one hell of a lot of adversity.

Most of these motherfuckers can't even stand up to accurate criticism or exposure, for fuck's sake, just like Tail-gunner Joe couldn't.

We'd best remember that, and act accordingly.