No offense against old people, but most of us don’t give a crap about Alger Hiss and The Pumpkin Papers. Joe McCarthy drank himself to death a long time ago. Dwight Eisenhower thought he was a dirtbag and I trust Ike’s judgment on that one. Anyone who is still intellectually invested in vindicating tail-gunner Joe’s witchhunt should probably cut down on their Metamucil dosage and drive their Cadillac over to the diner for the early-bird special.
If Sen. Ted Cruz’s appearance and style remind some people of Joe McCarthy, it isn’t because he’s out there arguing that the Army is filled with communist sympathizers, so the connection here is pretty limited. In any case, Hugh Hewitt is pretty clear about one thing. The effort to defund ObamaCare is not about defunding ObamaCare. It’s about “banking for future mobilization the names and contributions of hundreds of thousands if not millions of activists.” They are collecting the names and contact information of an army of dupes. Morans. People who can be bilked of their money and asked to man the phone banks in the upcoming midterm election cycle.
Mr. Hewitt approves this approach and will play his part to the best of his ability.
Once again, your biased, partisan lens is evident.
So what? is this not what Obama’s staff did, mining “big data”, using social media to raise money and get out the vote for the 2012 election?
It’s OK if the dems do this, but not if the GOP does it?
As far as “dupes”, you should be more concerned regarding the young progressives who gave small donations and worked hard to get Obama elected, and are now wondering why they bothered, since they are not seeing the progressive changes Obama promised.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/harper-reed-obama-campaign-microtargeting
There is an important difference.
This is an explicit con game.
Insofar as the president has been unable to deliver on many of his promises, he has, for the most part, been stymied by his political opposition, sometimes from within his own party (see Gitmo).
You will find few areas, and none outside of national security, where the president has deliberately failed to keep a promise, or went out on the campaign trail and made promises he had no intention of trying to keep. He never did anything like what the Republicans are doing now in raising money and collecting names to defund ObamaCare.
It’s one thing to say that you are going to try to do something that you know will not succeed. It’s another to say that you can succeed when you have zero chance of succeeding.
Just a hunch, but I don’t think they’ll find too many suckers out there that aren’t already on their mailing list.
What else is new? for years now the GOP has been promising to overturn Roe vs. Wade in order to appeal to their fundamentalist Christian base and raise money– when in fact there’s little to no chance they can do anything about Roe vs. Wade.
I suspect we’re looking at the same GOP generated hyperbole over “defunding” the ACA by people like Cruz which is more about pandering to his base than it is about actually doing it. there are enough reasonable GOP’ers who are not on board with this.
You’re buying into the hype.
“There’s a sucker born every minute”
I think P.T. Barnum was off by 59 seconds, and quite a few milliseconds.
I thought it was about knocking down the achievement of a Democratic administration much as they attempt to chip away at Social Security.
Er, BooMan. You now are “old people”.
It’s conservatives, and not just old ones, who are still hyped up on McCarthy and the Pumpkin Papers. It was their last shining moment apparently, one which their revisionist histories have been working on for two decades.
IMO, there are only these reasons for comparing Cruz to McCarthy, and I don’t know how many of them apply:
How many of those did you think applied?
Thought so.
Now can we leave Hugh Hewitt and Ted Cruz to their soon-to-be well-deserved fates?
Or have Democrats decided that Ted Cruz is a great foil to run against?
What Tarheel said. The McCarthy connection is Cruz’s use of the big-lie technique, making up the most insane accusations with no shame or fear of contradiction by a pathetic excuse for “major media”. Or “centrist” Dems.
BTW, As far as appearance and manner go, McCarthy, Cruz, and Guv Walker could have been stamped from the same mold — and probably were. If we really fear the enemy within we ought to be hunting for the makers of these creepy clones.
in the interest of accuracy…
>>Dwight Eisenhower thought he was a dirtbag
and gutlessly never said this in public, only in private.
Correct. He stayed “neutral” until others finished the fight. Just as he did wrt the military-industrial complex. He may have been a heroic soldier, but he was a timid observer when it came to domestic issues.