Ted Olson may support gay marriage now, but he’s still a right-wing hack. Here he is on the Wall Street Journal editorial page literally describing the Obama administration’s response to the Koch brothers’ anti-Obama jihad as McCarthyism:
How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the president’s re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?
What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns? Suppose also that the president’s surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you, sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity. On top of all of that, what if a leading member of the president’s party in Congress demanded your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you have repeatedly — and accurately — stated that you have no involvement?
Consider that all this is happening because you have been selected as an attractive political punching bag by the president’s re-election team. This is precisely what has happened to Charles and David Koch, even though they are private citizens, and neither is a candidate for the president’s or anyone else’s office….
When Joseph McCarthy engaged in comparable bullying, oppression and slander from his powerful position in the Senate, he was censured by his colleagues and died in disgrace.”McCarthyism” defined by Webster’s as the “use of unfair investigative and accusatory methods to suppress opposition,” will forever be synonymous with un-Americanism. Army counsel Joseph Welch’s “Have you no sense of decency?” are words that evoke the McCarthy era and diminish the reputations of his colleagues who did nothing to stand up to him….
The misuse of government power to damage or demean one’s political enemies is abhorrent and the very antithesis of a free society and a government of laws, not men. It is time for the public to ask those engaged in these practices, “Have you no sense of decency?”
Your reaction to the first couple of paragraphs may be to compare the supposedly totalitarian tactics of the White House to those of Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisitors: Poke them with … the derogatory speculative innuendo! And your inability to shed a tear for the poor, suffering victims of this persecution may be reinforced by the knowledge that the net worth of Charles and David Koch has risen from $19 billion each in the last year of the Bush administration to $25 billion each last fall — an increase of more than 31 percent over three years. If that’s McCarthyism, then put my name on a blacklist — please.
Ol’ Perfesser Instapundit has a curious response to this:
…I was talking to a CEO last year — an Obama supporter no less — who told me he was amazed at how openly Administration officials threatened to use media demonization if he didn’t play ball….
But now some of those officials have to be thinking that the people they threaten will be around after Obama’s gone, and they’ll remember.
So if corporate CEOs take vengeance on administration officials after Obama leaves office, hey, no prob! In other words, the reaction of Glenn Reynolds to the notion of alleged McCarthyism is like his reaction to a lot of other things: it’s fine if it’s privatized.
(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog)