http://youtu.be/Yolub7gmMlw
Category Archives: JOSEPH MCCARTHY
Louis Budenz Before The Tydings Committee
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qUd0XnK49I&t=10m8s
[at 10:06]
Dead Witness Against Lattimore Proves Obama Birthers’ Case
Birthers, The Blues:Â Orly Orly Incoming! Â 
A dead former witness against Owen Lattimore  has become the latest proof for Barack Obama birther  fantasies.
Serial legal fraudster Orly Taitz is shoehorning Harvey Matusow into her failed crusade against Obama’s fitness to hold office.  Matusow was a former Communist and a witness against Owen Lattimore who later recanted his testimony.  He married a Mormon supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy and joined the church, staying with it until his death in 2002.
Despite this Come To Jesus activity Taitz pretends to believe Matusow somehow remained with the Communists, and that he passed the gene to his alleged cousin, a Honolulu woman named Lynne Matusow. Lynne Matusow certified Obama’s candidacy as Hawaii Democratic Party Secretary, putting her at the center of Taitz’s rich fantasy life.
   Taitz had nothing on Harvey before throwing out this savvy legal argument:
Perhaps her fevers got the better of her:
Taitz’s attention to detail shows in her missing a vowel in Lynne Matusow’s name, and in a later document dump that shows no apparent connection between Lynne and Harvey Matusow.
Left unexamined by Taitz are Matusow’s apparent links to ukulele enthusiasts 
  and membership of a suspiciously Marxist sounding “Central Committee.”
Who Lost China? What The Bible Shows
 Dino Might?   
Anti-evolutionists are feeling pretty good about themselves, so confident they’ve got the godless on the run that their analogy generation skills are shot.
From the crypto-creationist Discovery Institute’s evolutionnews.org  [clever name to propagandize the unwary evolution-curious!] comes a metaphor for the ages: “Creation scientists” are Mao Tse Tung, and Beijing is theirs!
 Proof for this headscratcher comes of course from The Atlantic, where Robert Wright knows who to blame: pushy atheists!
In simpler times only Wright recalls, godless and god-smacked respected one another, we all liked Ike, and god apparently wasn’t shoved into the Pledge of Allegiance or onto our coins.
Then, trouble.
Other than dates and such, right on the money!
 Dawkins’ god squad warnings appeared in 2006, seven years after the Discovery Institute’s “The Wedge” appeared, laying out their strategy for stealth creationism, itself a cleaned up version of the god-struck’s historic strategy.
When called on facts and chronology Wright doubled down on absolving creationists and climate denialists:
                        “Still, my main points are (1) even if this is what provoked Dawkins, Myers, et. al., their gratuitously insulting reaction (IMHO) was still counter-productive, fueling the anti-evolutionism fires; (2) their reaction may well have abetted anti-scientism in areas unrelated to evolution, such as climate change.]”
 First off, demand creates its own supply?  Second, why is Wright pretending this is about hurt feelings rather than power and ideology?  Creationism and climate denial can have roots in religious beleaf, but its whole mobilization infestructure is paid for by somebody. Given their Libertarian pretensions I suspect the Koch brothers may be godless Randians, but they are happy to use the armies of the lord as carbon war cannon fodder.
The Discovery Institute’s analogy does work somewhat about Wright , but on the McCarthy period’s opposite side.  Wright is today’s version of a beloved political type, the liberal or ex-socialist claiming that others on the left created McCarthyism by their insufficient anti-communism.
From Arthur Schlesinger’s eager distinction drawing:
                                              ” Liberals who complain when [HUAC Chairman] Parnell Thomas fails to distinguish between liberals and Communists should remember that too often they have failed to make that distinction themselves.”
To ex-Trotskyite Irving Kristol’s  judgement that
                  “.. there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalis they feel they know no such thing.”
Lets certify that Communisim was feared, but McCarthy was looking for means of doing in domestic enemies. Â The fall of Beijing was to cause the fall of Washington.
Later day former leftist Ronald Radosh still swoons for Kristol’s Lattimore stylings.
Its unclear if Radosh read the report, which is a mishmash of testimony excerpts and theories often proving the opposite of what it claims.*  Radosh even boasts about  Kristol’s outing Lattimore as an opponent of Japanese imperialism in China:
…without pausing to consider the Soviet’s then ally, or the consequences of  backing Japan: Chiang Kai-Shek’s demise fifteen years early.
*After detailing an instance where Lattimore did the opposite of what a communist had asked him to do in editing, the Committee said he was still a bad person, and never mind:Â “From the communist point of view, a given book or article may be to their interest, even designedly to their interest, though in quantity 95 percent of it is neutral or non communist” [page 95]
So no defense then!
Self-Discredited McCarthy Witness Pawn In Internet Battle!
Mr. Matusow Meets The Market 
Harvey Matusow was a crucial witness in the McCarran Committee persecution of Owen Lattimore, reinforcing the tattered testimony of Louis Budenz.
Matusow’s dead, but in the long tail/netherworld of the Internet he apparently has value. Somehow his confessional False Witness finds a market, if you pay the author and publisher nothing.
Budenz’s claims of a seamless web between Lattimore’s writings and the Communist line had suffered from actual reading of what Lattimore wrote, and  of what the Budenz edited Daily Worker said about Lattimore.
Matusow providentially appeared to tie Lattimore to the Reds.  After first inventing Communist subversion of the Boy Scouts, Matusow built from his experience running a Communist book store to claim he sold Lattimore’s Solution In Asia, and that it represented the party line.
 Saluting Solution – see the title on the blackboard partly obscured by bow-tie daddy.
Later Matusow admitted he’d invented this story
  and many others as he climbed to the heights of the former party-member-tells-all business.
Matusow recanting has done nothing to deter right-wing cranks replicating his old lies.
Somehow this long lost witness lives on in the Internet, with the text of his tell-all “False Witness” available in a vast array of formats. You can buy a musty old copy for $3.97,  and free online reading and downloads are available at the Hathi Trust Digital Library and archive.org.  After that it gets more complicated. Two outfits sell text files of the book to read or download, and one will even print you a copy of the text, allowing you to simulate the Internet experience of no index and weird scanning generated typos:
Goodreads.com is the physical book seller, and also markets ads against online texts and any reader generated commentary, so start  scribbling for the greater glory.
Onread.com is a bit murkier. Â They have malware spreading accusations in their past, although Norton and McAfee find them currently clean.
Others aren’t so sure:
Extra Credit For Joe McCarthy
Look Back In Lethargy    
Some of today’s kids are so bored with Advanced Placement US History [APUSH] they’ve vowed to spread the ennui to those not yet victims.
Through time wasting video, of course.
Sprightly young “Sarah61” Â has gone YouTubular to explain McCarthyism to the kids, mobilizing the power of Rap to inform and enlighten.
Joining the disturbing APUSH sub-genre which haunts YouTube, our Sarah joins alliteration and droopy beats in the service of History!
Proving once more that the Rap must be retired before every white suburban youth shames a generation with lame rhymes and lamer posing.
 Someday, Maybe! 
 Â
Pied Pipers of the Politburo Produced President’s Paramour!
How Owen Lattimore Got Obama Laid, & Policy Made 
Slate’s David Weigel surveyed how wingnuts and their Politico enablers folded David Maraniss’s exciting Obama college girlfriend revelations into their rich fantasy life, finding “A frantic search for something else to be conspiracy-minded about.”
I say they’re missing the shadows in plain sight.
Maraniss tracked down Obama’s girlfriend of his New York years, Genivive Cook, who shared with him, and the nation, her contemporary notes on the affair. Â He mentions Cook’s stepfather Phillip Jessup, with a glancing mention of Jessup’s father, the Philip Jessup. Â That Jessup was a major Joseph McCarthy target, paired with Truman Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Owen Lattimore as Chiang Kai-shek’s banana peels, the “Pied Pipers of the Politburo“.
High on their own fumes heroes managed to link Bill Clinton with Lattimore by inventing connections and ignoring actual facts, and here is an Obama link with the boys who lost China!
Dreams Of Her [Step] Grandfather Â
China’s Stories Past: Ji Chaozhu Remembers.
Tales Of [Comparatively] Ancient China  
Inspired by the current American tour of incipient Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the  New York Times looks back to the start of the current era in US/China relations,  Nixon and Kissinger’s 70s visits with  Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.
Ji Chaozhu was there for most of these events, a lead translator for the Chinese side and later diplomat.
Ji was brought up in New York during the 40s, and his family’s doings in America figured in the Owen Lattimore story. Â Ji’s father edited a Chinese language newspaper in New York, and one McCarthy charge against Lattimore was defending the senior Ji against Communist allegations [He was, but that’s for another day].
Older brother Ji Chaoding was a Columbia economics PhD who worked for Chiang Kai Shek’s government in New York and Chungking in the forties, and joined China’s delegation to the founding conference of the World Bank/International Monetary Fund.  One perjury charge growing out of Lattimore’s McCarran Committee testimony was about whether Lattimore knew or should have known Ji Chaoding was a Communist.
Ji was, and by several accounts headed the American Communist Party’s China Bureau which smuggled funds and supplies to China. While employed by Chiang Kai Shek.
Ji Chaozhu’s memoir isn’t exactly hard hitting, mostly being a chronicle of meetings and translation, sometimes for the Greats.
The best part is his discription of his father’s  role in the film “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” playing a kindly Chinese doctor patching up crash-landed veterans of the Doolittle Raid.  The film was written by future Hollywood Ten-er Dalton Trumbo, and presents China’s anti-Japanese resistance as an incredibly bourgeois affair, with resistance leaders in suits and ties.  Plucky resistance children bring tears and throat lumps to the downed fliers with a Chinese version of “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Chi Senior Rolls Up His Sleeves To Repair Van Johnson  
Your Youth Of Today Discovers McCarthyism
On the Other Hand, Questioning! Â 
Not since I read newspaper copy saying “Adolf Hitler was Chancellor of Germany form 1933 to 1945” have I felt so old.
The 2nd Life of Super Rat Harvey Matusow
Informer, Comic Book Star? Â 
Our old pal Harvey had a 2nd [or 3rd? 4th?] life in England after fingering Owen Lattimore and others, then recanting.
Wire magazine has a post up focused on this period, when Matusow became an avant garde music impresario in England.
They feature a “portal” [remember when they were all the rage!] of links to parts of Matusow’s life in this era.
Radio interviews, bits of his unpublished autobiography, and a comic about the crowd he hung out with.
 Matusow: The Later Years