Time to stand up to today's deranged McCarthys

(“Anticommunist crusader Senator Joseph R. McCarthy stepped into national prominence on February 9, 1950, when he mounted an attack on President Truman’s foreign policy agenda. McCarthy charged that the State Department and its Secretary, Dean Acheson, harbored “traitorous” Communists. McCarthy’s apocalyptic rhetoric made critics hesitate before challenging him. Those accused by McCarthy faced loss of employment, damaged careers, and in many cases, broken lives. After the 1952 election, in which the Republican Party won control of Congress, McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy then extended his targets to include numerous government agencies, in addition to the broadcasting and defense industries, universities, the entertainment industry. and even The U.S. Army.” -- Courtesy of “History Matters” website)

You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

The question was posed by lawyer Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy on June 4, 1954, during the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings. It came at a moment after Mr. McCarthy had accused a young lawyer working for Mr. Welch of being associated with a communist-front organization. Mr. Welch, incredulous and outraged, confronted Mr. McCarthy in the drama of live television in its early days, with a national audience glued to their sets:

"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

By those two questions, most historians agree, Mr. McCarthy's reckless demagogic career was effectively over. (He was subsequently censured by the U.S. Senate and died a year or so later.)

Sadly, this confrontation came much too late to save many innocent careers of newsmen, film actors and directors, entertainers, writers and various governmental officials, as Joseph McCarthy levied his demagogic rants, preying on a national fear of Communism.

Anyone attempting to stand up to his wild accusations ran the risk of being branded a Communist supporter. “Godless Communism” wore the same deadly cloak as witchcraft in Salem, Mass. centuries before.

I am old enough to have witnessed some of these events (not Salem, thank you) and others of a similar nature. I was witness to the vile bigotry of a man named George Wallace who ran for President on a platform of racial hatred.  Due to a vast fear of “Integration” and allegations that America was on the verge of becoming a “Mongrel Race,” Wallace was actually able to secure a rather large following before he was crippled by a gunshot from an individual almost as crazed as he.

There have been many others in various positions of “authority” who have been able to lead a willing group of followers off a precipice. Some drank Kool-Aid. Some burned innocent people at the stake. Many gave their souls (and their money) to a charlatan named Marjoe Gortner who was anointed “The Voice of God” at an early age, having been well trained by his parents to relieve the willing masses of their money. The list goes on and on.

Public hysteria , like a wildfire, has no regard for its victims, and once begun is extremely difficult to combat. It usually must burn itself out. Later, in the calm of a new day, the ashes and debris reveal nothing but vast damage.

In my lifetime, as I said, I have witnessed these things come and go. Never, however, until the present time, have I seen such a widespread viral anger consume such a wide sector of the public without someone or something standing up and calling the hand of the ringleaders. Wild and slanderous accusations concerning American government are being tossed around without restraint like confetti

I used to have a misguided respect for a man named Newt Gingrich, for example. After all, he taught a history class at the college where my son graduated. He was, and is, no doubt a brilliant individual who even rose to the level of Speaker of the House of Representatives, only to resign when he ran afoul of some moral issues with his marriage, plus elections began to threaten his party’s majority.

Lately, this man appears to be on a deranged quest to discredit every portion of his perceived enemies. His pronouncements are vitriolic, drooling snarls with no resemblance to informed or educated enlightenment. In his latest appeal to the mindless, he twists the actions of Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius to fit his accusation of  what he chillingly called Soviet style tyranny (he apparently still lives in the Cold War era).

Mrs. Sebelius had rightly called upon the insurance industry to cease falsely blaming their increase in premiums on health care reform legislation. Gingrich claims this is “Punishing insurance companies that ‘told the truth’ about the cost of Obamacare.”

In other words, he states that he is in favor of false and misleading statements and doesn’t want them monitored.

He is not alone. There is a growing wave of psychobabble swallowing up large segments of otherwise intelligent Americans. Quick slogans with no logical backbone are being grasped like proverbial straws in the wind by what is beginning to look like an intentional runaway “Dumbing Down” of what used to be a dependable solid core of level headed, fair minded people who refused to be misled by phony “band standers.”

The scary thing is that the virus appears to be spreading from sources other than political parties. Republicans are not totally at fault, even though in election years some pretty nasty things are usually said. No, this movement is a different thing. It is a cancer, indifferent to any attempt at rational treatment. It seeks to destroy with no reasonable suggestion of how to properly re-build.. It can be identified by its clear intention to mislead by distortions and lies. Attempts to challenge the lies are met with statements like Mr. Gingrich’s.

And so we are becoming an OZ with no Dorothy -- a frenzied Tea Party with a Palin inserted as a smug Alice. Don Quixote is abroad in the land, but his quest has lost its honorable intent..

Where are those who would say to the Gingriches and Limbaughs et al, “You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Well, you can count me as one.