"Once the human tragedy has been completed, it gets turned over to the journalists to banalize into entertainment...."

"... I think of the McCarthy era as inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip as the unifying credo of the world’s oldest democratic republic. In Gossip We Trust. Gossip as gospel, the national faith. McCarthyism as the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious everything as entertainment to amuse the mass audience. McCarthyism as the first postwar flowering of the American unthinking that is now everywhere. McCarthy was never in the Communist business; if nobody else knew that, he did. The show-trial aspect of McCarthy’s patriotic crusade was merely its theatrical form. Having cameras view it just gave it the false authenticity of real life. McCarthy understood better than any American politician before him that people whose job was to legislate could do far better for themselves by performing; McCarthy understood the entertainment value of disgrace and how to feed the pleasures of paranoia. He took us back to our origins, back to the seventeenth century and the stocks. That’s how the country began: moral disgrace as public entertainment. McCarthy was an impresario, and the wilder the views, the more outrageous the charges, the greater the disorientation and the better the all-around fun."

From "I Married a Communist" by Philip Roth.

ADDED: From the Wikipedia article "Stocks": 

Public punishment in the stocks was a common occurrence from around 1500 until at least 1748. The stocks were especially popular among the early American Puritans, who frequently employed the stocks for punishing the "lower class." In the American colonies, the stocks were also used, not only for punishment, but as a means of restraining individuals awaiting trial. The offender would be exposed to whatever treatment those who passed by could imagine. This could include tickling of the feet. As noted by the New York Times in an article dated November 13, 1887, "Gone, too, are the parish stocks, in which offenders against public morality formerly sat imprisoned, with their legs held fast beneath a heavy wooden yoke, while sundry small but fiendish boys improved the occasion by deliberately pulling off their shoes and tickling the soles of their defenseless feet."

In the book of Job, we see God accused of using stocks: "He puts my feet in the stocks, he watches all my paths."

Job comes up in "I Married a Communist" — at the end of a rant about betrayal:

Professionals who’ve spent their energy teaching masterpieces, the few of us still engrossed by literature’s scrutiny of things, have no excuse for finding betrayal anywhere but at the heart of history. History from top to bottom. World history, family history, personal history. It’s a very big subject, betrayal. Just think of the Bible. What’s that book about? The master story situation of the Bible is betrayal. Adam—betrayed. Esau—betrayed. The Shechemites—betrayed. Judah—betrayed. Joseph—betrayed. Moses—betrayed. Samson—betrayed. Samuel—betrayed. David—betrayed. Uriah—betrayed. Job—betrayed. Job betrayed by whom? By none other than God himself. And don’t forget the betrayal of God. God betrayed. Betrayed by our ancestors at every turn.

"Trump’s story of what happened in the 2020 election bears all the hallmarks of McCarthyite myth: conspiring elites, hidden corruption, even the threat of an imminent socialist takeover."

"And though Trump will no doubt leave office on Jan. 20, that story — and the powerful sense of grievance behind it — is sure to thrive in the years ahead. Trump has all but vowed to run again in 2024. Even if he doesn’t, he will continue to sell the tale of his martyrdom through Twitter and cable news and talk radio and conspiracy sites — forms of direct public communication that McCarthy would have envied. After 1954, when media gatekeepers such as Edward R. Murrow turned against him, McCarthy was hard-pressed to find mainstream outlets willing to tell his side of the story. Trump now has an entire right-wing media universe at his disposal, while social media allows him to bypass the gatekeepers altogether.... Even in the unlikely event that Trump himself disappears or retreats or, like McCarthy, succumbs to despair, this vast swath of citizens who love and admire him will still be here, better organized than they were four years ago, now with a martyr’s tale for inspiration. Today’s Republican establishment may ultimately repudiate the man who has held it in thrall — and in fear — for four-plus years. But it is Trump’s base, and their interpretation of his ouster from Washington, that will determine the future of Trumpism."

From "McCarthyism was never defeated. Trumpism won’t be either/Censure brought down a crusading anti-communist senator but fired up his followers" by Yale history prof Beverly Gage (WaPo).

NYT creates a video montage to demonstrate that Trump talks like George Wallace.

Check it out:



The main thing seems to be the phrase "law and order." It would help the anti-Trump cause quite a bit if people would believe the phrase "law and order" signals white supremacy. It's easy to do the counter-spin however: It is racist to hear "law and order" as white supremacy.

Accompanying that video montage is this article — "A Half-Century After Wallace, Trump Echoes the Politics of Division/George Wallace’s speeches and interviews from his 1968 campaign feature language and appeals that sound familiar again as the 'law and order' president sends federal forces into the streets" by Peter Baker:

The president rails about the “anarchists and agitators” and accuses “the radical left” of running rampant through the streets of cities run by “liberal Democrats.”...

Like Mr. Trump, Wallace denounced “anarchists” in the streets, condemned liberals for trying to squelch the free speech of those they disagreed with and ran against the elites of Washington and the mainstream media....

Like the pugnacious Mr. Trump, Wallace enjoyed a fight. Indeed, he relished taking on protesters who showed up at his events. “You know what you are?” he called out to one. “You’re a little punk, that’s all you are. You haven’t got any guts.”

MEANWHILE: At the New Yorker, they're talking about Joe McCarthy because — don't you know?! — Trump is like Joe McCarthy. The article, by Louis Menand, is "Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods/McCarthy never sent a single 'subversive' to jail, but, decades later, the spirit of his conspiracy-mongering endures." Excerpt:

Larry Tye’s purpose in his new biography, “Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is to make the case that Donald Trump is a twenty-first-century Joe McCarthy.... He more than makes the case. The likeness is uncanny.

McCarthy was a bomb-thrower—and, in a sense, that is all he was.... To his supporters, he could say and do no wrong.... He was... a conspiracy-monger.... What distinguished McCarthy’s claims was their outlandishness. He didn’t attack people for being soft on Communism, or for pushing policies, like public housing, that were un-American or socialistic. That is what ordinary politicians like Richard Nixon did. McCarthy accused people of being agents of a Communist conspiracy.... McCarthy lied all the time.... He was incapable of sticking to a script. He rambled and he blustered, and if things weren’t going his way he left the room. He was notoriously lazy, ignorant, and unprepared, and he had a reputation for following the advice of the last person he talked to. But he trusted his instincts. And he loved chaos. He knew that he had a much higher tolerance for it than most human beings do, and he used it to confuse, to distract, and to disrupt.

Trump is like McCarthy, who loved chaos, and Trump is like George Wallace, who loved law and order. Oh, that Trump — he's everything you need him to be.

"We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law."

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."

I'm reading "Edward R. Murrow: A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy/See it Now (CBS-TV, March 9, 1954)" not because I was looking for old content that resonates with current troubles. I found it because I was looking for a recording of Edward R. Murrow's voice:



The reason I wanted to hear Murrow is that — as I sit at my desk — I'm overhearing the television news, and some of the voices annoy me. There's a modern way of speaking that is informal and often harsh and strangled. I said out loud that I wished they'd get vocal training, but immediately realized that the trained, open, resonant voice I was thinking of would seem old-fashioned and radically uncool.

Then I had my idea. Feel free to steal it and make this for me: A cable news channel with old-school voices, like Edward R. Murrow's. Embrace the uncoolness.

I think this could be very popular, because I see how much people of today love to listen to The Report of the Week ("Review Brah"). Here's his newest:



Like many people, I love listening to this man talk. I don't care what he talks about. Often it's fast-food items that I would never eat, but I like to listen. Get some new people like that, and it's a plus if they're unconventional looking. Review Brah is proof that it doesn't matter how you look if you figure out an approach to visual style that's neat, clean, and retro.

Can I get that in a cable news channel? And while you're at it, you who are stealing this idea I am trying to foist on you, please use language in the more literary, elevated style exemplified by Murrow... and Review Brah.

Remember that we are not descended from fearful men —not from men who feared to write, to speak...

"A sad day indeed! This whole sexual harassment thing is devolving into McCarthyism I fear."

"Does sexual harassment exist? Of course it does - we've seen a number of perpetrators fall. In my 84 year old opinion I don't think Senator Franken is guilty of harassment, and I suspect the female senators who have asked for his resignation are guilty of grandstanding for political reasons. Sad day!"

That's (the first part of) the top-rated comment — with 1963 votes — on the NYT article "Al Franken Announces He Will Resign from Senate Amid Harassment Allegations." (The second part is a demand that the Senate go after Donald Trump.)

The comment jumped out at me because I'd just read a column by Ana Marie Cox at The Washington Post, "Al Franken isn’t being denied due process. None of these famous men are," which had a high-rated comment that sensed the arrival of McCarthyism:

What a sorry column. Yes, Franken is being denied an ethics probe and impeachment [sic] and conviction in the Senate. To tap dance around the established procedures to placate a Twitter Mob and a devious, grandstanding Senator whose doing a hell of a Joe McCarthy impression in a dress. And the spineless Senators that lined up behind her are a disgrace to the rules and procedures of the U.S. Senate.

I don't really think Franken can complain about due process: He's expelling himself. He just experienced political pressure to quit and he yielded. And I laughed when Franken said:

I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office, and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party.

He's leaving because he's deciding to leave. They're staying because they're deciding to stay. Same treatment. No irony. (And why is he "of all people" aware of irony? Because he's been a comedy writer?)

But I am interested in seeing how people in general may be shifting from enthusiasm about believing women and taking women seriously to feeling something is going wrong when the accused goes down so fast. Maybe Franken's case is where the public sentiment turns. Franken wouldn't admit to his misdeeds (so he couldn't apologize), and he described his predicament:

I was shocked. I was upset. But in responding to their claims, I also wanted to be respectful of that broader conversation because all women deserve to be heard and their experiences taken seriously. I think that was the right thing to do. I also think it gave some people the false impression that I was admitting to doing things that, in fact, I haven’t done. Some of the allegations against me are simply not true. Others, I remember very differently.

He was afraid that to defend himself, he'd only make his troubles worse. He'd be questioning the credibility of his accusers. But maybe he should have defended himself. Because at some point people are going to flip into have-you-no-decency mode. And poor Franken may regret that he went with what seemed to be the trend at the time and gave up without a fight. Fighting may catch on.

Now, I'm searching the news reports for other invocations of McCarthy, and here's Cathy Young in The Daily News yesterday: "Al Franken, the latest casualty of the 'Weinstein' effect, now a victim of sexual McCarthyism." By contrast, here's lawprof Stephen L. Carter in Bloomberg, 3 days ago:

Are we facing a new McCarthy era?

No. Perhaps there is occasionally too great a rush to judgment, but that’s a familiar problem in human history. McCarthyism involved a huge effort to punish people for their opinions, not their actions. That’s despicable at any time.... Disciplining an employee because he expresses views that some hate is McCarthyist; disciplining him for harassment or assault isn’t.

It would be McCarthyist for an employer to fire an employee for insisting on more due process for those who are named, or for coming to the defense of one who has been accused. But taking strong action when there is credible evidence that an individual has been abusive toward women is simply the turning of the wheel of justice.

That's one man's opinion, but it might be the view from 3 days ago, and the culture has shifted since then.

"There’s a confluence between the alt-right and the alt-left regarding Vladimir Putin and the..."

"... ratfucking (to use a venerable Watergate-era term) performed by Russian hackers, trolls, and bots. The Tyler Durden Fight Club alt-right idolizes Putin as a bare-chested manly man, as opposed to a metrosexual like Obama and an emasculating harpy like Hillary. This isn’t a beefcake fetish the alt-left shares. Instead, it invokes McCarthyism and the specter of a new Red Scare to characterize rising alarm over the Russian cyber-warfare as a rehash of Cold War bogeyman tales. In a widely noticed Facebook post, director Oliver Stone (whose most recent film was a soft-focus portrait of Edward Snowden) reminisced, 'I remember well in the 1950s when the Russians were supposed to be in our schools, Congress, State Department—and according to many Eisenhower/Nixon supporters—about to take over our country without serious opposition (and they call me paranoid!).' Stone ascribes the hysteria over the Russian hijacking of the democratic process to mainstream-media mau-mauing. 'As much as I may disagree with Donald Trump (and I do) he’s right now target number one of the MSM propaganda—until, that is, he jumps to the anti-Kremlin track because of some kind of false intelligence or misunderstanding cooked up by CIA. Then I fear, in his hot-headed way, he starts fighting with the Russians, and it wouldn’t be long then until a state of war against Russia is declared.'"

The Alt-House is trying to read James Wolcott's article "Why the Alt-Left Is a Problem, Too/Much of the media spotlight has been on the 'alt-right.' But the 'alt-left' provides a mirror image distortion: the same loathing of Clinton, rejection of 'identity politics,' and itch for a reckoning."

Is President Trump going to adhere to the presidential tradition of press conferences?

Here's a transcript of Hugh Hewitt's conversation with Sean Spicer, who will be the new White House Press Secretary. They're talking about whether President Trump will have the same kind of press conferences we've seen from past presidents, which Hewitt characterized as "regular" and "energetic."

I had to stop and check to see what the tradition of press conferences really is. Has it been distinct and consistent? Here's a piece from the White House Historical Association. Woodrow Wilson started the practice of press conferences, and all of his successors (so far) have used it.

Calvin Coolidge considered it "rather necessary to the carrying on of our republican institution that the people should have a fairly accurate report of what the president is trying to do." Fairly accurate. Trying to do.

JFK — who's right in the middle of the line of men that begins with Wilson and ends with Obama — gave the first live, televised press conferences. Up until Eisenhower, the sessions were not even on the record, and the President retained the power to rewrite his quotes. When Truman said "I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy," the reporters helped him see that the quote was too exciting and they even assisted him in mushing it up into: "The greatest asset that the Kremlin has is the partisan attempt in the Senate to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States."

JFK made the televised press conference into something that served his agenda and suited his particular gifts and desired image. Later Presidents accepted Kennedy's approach but also adapted it. George H. W. Bush introduced the joint press conference with world leaders. Obama has often substituted interviews with one chosen reporter. In his first 2 years, Obama did 21 Kennedy-style press conferences to a roomful of reporters and 269 of those one-on-one encounters.

With that background on presidential press conferences, let's get back to Hewitt and Spicer:

"Women aren’t any meaner to women than men are to one another. Women are just expected to be nicer."

"We stereotype men as aggressive and women as kind. When women violate those stereotypes, we judge them harshly. 'A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless,' Marlo Thomas once lamented. 'All a woman has to do is put you on hold.' In one experiment, researchers asked people to read about a workplace conflict between two women, two men, or a man and a woman. The conflict was identical, but when the case study was between two women, the participants saw it as more damaging to the relationship and expected them to be more likely to quit. When men argue, it’s a healthy debate. When women argue … meow! It’s a catfight."

Write Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant in "Sheryl Sandberg on the Myth of the Catty Woman."

And I'll just add: Women co-authors aren't any more credit-demanding than men co-authors. It just looks better to have their name as part of the title.

Who is hurt... who is helped...

... by this picture?

(Which I found on Facebook, here.)

There's also this:



As you contemplate the anti-Trump propaganda, please take into account the analysis of the editors of The Nation in "Against Neo-McCarthyism/In their eagerness to defeat Trump, liberal pundits are reviving a damaging discourse":

In their zeal to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president—a goal we share—representative voices of the liberal establishment have joined with the forces of neoconservatism to engage in what can only be described as McCarthyist rhetoric. This magazine, which has a long and proud history of standing up to the
 worst excesses of McCarthyism, repudiates this unwelcome echo of the past. Let us recall that McCarthyism impugned the loyalty of American citizens by accusing them of allegiance to the Soviet Union. This political defamation—often a joint undertaking of Congress and the media—suppressed democratic debate over alternative policies and ideas, and in the process destroyed lives by stigmatizing those whose views were deemed insufficiently loyal to Cold War–era orthodoxies. The overall effect was to poison, chill, and censor the political discourse of the nation....

"We hear of the stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were no problem at all: as if physical kindness would cure everything...."

"... as if one need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible. This mere belief in bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental; it is simply snobbish. For if comfort gives men virtue, the comfortable classes ought to be virtuous — which is absurd. Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and more watery type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist who says, with a sort of splutter, 'Flog the brutes!' or who tells you with innocent obscenity 'what he would do' with a certain man — always supposing the man's hands were tied. This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak and unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental humanitarian and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern babel."

Wrote G.K. Chesterton,  in "Tremendous Trifles," something I ran across looking up the word "brutalitarian" in the OED, which has only 4 quotes, 2 of which are from Chesterton. The other is "And in this the brutalitarians hate [George Bernard Shaw] not because he is soft, but..because he is not to be softened by conventional excuses." Those quotes are from 1909 and 1910. The oldest iteration of "brutalitarian" (from 1904) is the title of a journal: "The Brutalitarian, a journal for the sane and strong." The word — used as a noun or adjective — is patterned on "humanitarian" (not on "totalitarian," which is a word that doesn't get started until 1926, and which migrates into English from Italian ("totalitario").

You might think: Brutalitarian! What a great word! Why don't we hear it more? A Google search turns up only 26,000 hits, and the first couple of pages are mostly dictionary definitions. A search of the NYT archive turns up only 5 articles, and the only 2 in the last 50 years were in letters to the editor. The New Yorker has only used the word 3 times, and 2 of those were in the mid 1930s. The recent one, from 2008, seems to be a malapropism: "F.B.I. headquarters in Washington is still housed in a brutalitarian structure known as the J. Edgar Hoover Building." I think the author (Hendrik Hertzberg) intended the architectural term "brutalist."

Why was I looking for "brutalitarian"? The previous post quotes the famous line from the Army-McCarthy hearings — "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" — and links to the transcript. If you keep reading the transcript, you'll see that Senator Joseph McCarthy has plenty to say, including:

... I think we must remember is that this is a war which a brutalitarian force has won to a greater extent than any brutalitarian force has won a war in the history of the world before. For example, Christianity, which has been in existence for 2,000 years, has not converted, convinced nearly as many people as this Communist brutalitarianism has enslaved in 106 years, and they are not going to stop. I know that many of my good friends seem to feel that this is a sort of a game you can play, that you can talk about communism as though it is something 10,000 miles away.... let me say it is right here with us now....

If you're going to run for the presidency from the Senate, you shouldn't rack up years of experience. You have to go early.

I had been thinking that it's ridiculous for Rand Paul and Ted Cruz to imagine that they're ready to run for President. They're first-term Senators, as was Barack Obama. But Barack Obama won, and suddenly, I'm thinking that wasn't a fluke. That is, in fact, what you must do if you're running as a Senator.

I'm thinking this as I'm reading Robert A. Caro's "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV." Read this:

"You know, Americans have come so far since, let's say, the era of Joe McCarthy. I mean, think about it. We're less racist."

"We're less sexist. We're less homophobic than we used to be. We only have one remaining bigotry. We don't want to be around anybody who disagrees with us."

Said Bill Clinton, the former U.S. President, speaking at the 100th anniversary festivities for The New Republic.

"There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates."

Wrote Montesquieu, quoted by Senator Ted Cruz in the introduction to — PDF — "THE LEGAL LIMIT: THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S ATTEMPTS TO EXPAND FEDERAL POWER," which is mostly a set of lists of (purported) abuses of power, with each item footnoted to a media source.

I found that via Dana Milbank's "Ted Cruz, the reckless accuser," which begins:

Sen. Ted Cruz, in a speech to fellow conservatives at the Federalist Society this week, provided detailed evidence of what the right calls the “lawlessness” of the Obama administration.

The Texas Republican, in his latest McCar­thyesque flourish, said he had a list of "76 instances of lawlessness and other abuses of power."

To his credit, Cruz made his list public.

So, basically, Dana Milbank, you old bullshitter, it wasn't McCarthyesque at all, and you knew it wasn't McCarthyesque when you wrote that it was McCarthyesque, but you just wanted to say it was McCarthyesque.

And you're calling Cruz "the reckless accuser"?!  Oh, I didn't say he was exactly the same as Joe McCarthy. I said it was McCarthyesque. Don't you know the meaning of -esque?

Yeah, it means bullshit. Joe McCarthy talked about have a list of names of individual human beings, a list he never revealed, of names that were currently unknown to the public and that he was threatening to reveal. Cruz's list was a list not of people but of things the Obama Administration has done, and these were not secret things. They were known things that Cruz had collected on a list. What is the threat of revealing the already-known things in the form of a list? And the list was made public, so it wasn't even a secret list, a list to which one could refer as a scary threat — which wouldn't even be a scary threat anyway because it wasn't a list of names of human beings whose lives would be ruined.

(Milbank goes on to question the accuracy of a few items on Cruz's list and to characterize the whole list as really about Cruz's disagreement with the "politics and policy" of the Obama administration.)

"State legislators cannot withhold the names and email addresses of constituents who contact them..."

"... the Wisconsin Court of Appeals decided Wednesday."

Currently, some public officials, including [Gov. Scott] Walker, leave names on correspondence requested under the open-records law while others have blacked them out. Dreps said the ruling creates a “bright-line rule” for all officials to follow.

Brett Healy, president of the MacIver Institute, called the ruling “a win for transparency in government and the taxpayers of Wisconsin.”...

“I think people don’t realize how far-reaching this is,” [Sen. Jon] Erpenbach said...

Blacklisting Prop 8 supporters and gay-rights antagonists is perfectly analogous to the old blacklisting of Communists and Communist "sympathizers."

Isn't it? I'm inviting you to probe this analogy, which may be a good or great but not perfect analogy. Help me locate any possible lack of alignment between the 2 phenomena, for the purpose of close examination.

Today, at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, the law school presents a lecture by John Dean about Watergate, criminal law, and ethics.

That's later this afternoon. Meanwhile, here's a local media interview with Dean that engages him in some of the issues of the day. The interviewer Paul Fanlund invites Dean to attack today's Republicans with the prompt: "You wrote that book a few years ago and focused on politicians such as then-Vice President Cheney. But now the GOP looks ever more radical."

Dean says that 30% of Americans have a "personality trait" that some social psychologist he's talked to labels "authoritarianism," and that's now "the dominant force" driving Republican politics, which is why he and his friends — Dean lives in Beverly Hills — aren't Republicans anymore and also why Republicans are stuck with only 30% of the electorate. But Dean wonders "if the authoritarian people will ever get up to the 51 percent number because that would make a very different United States."

Unsuprisingly, Fanlund doesn't follow up with any questions about whether authoritarianism ever manifests itself in Democratic Party politics or whether some people with the authoritarian personality trait ever feel drawn into the hopes and dreams of left-liberal projects.

Fanlund's next question is a model of fawning and imprecision, the very opposite of what I'd want from a journalist: "You’ve done so much scholarship and have your first-hand experience. What do you think the future holds?"

Attacking the aggressive Ted Cruz when Liz Warren simultaneously hits the Senate in full aggression mode.

Big Media is hot to wreck Ted Cruz. Here's the NYT piece: "Texas Senator Goes on Attack and Raises Bipartisan Hackles." Oh? Bipartisan has hackles? Well, then I guess those bipartisan hackles are also raised by Elizabeth Warren. Here's HuffPo: "Elizabeth Warren's Aggressive Questioning Prompts Anger From Wall Street."

The NYT forefronts this quote from Barbara Boxer:

“It was really reminiscent of a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such and such a date,’ and, of course, nothing was in the pocket,” she said, a reference to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s pursuit of Communists in the 1950s. “It was reminiscent of some bad times.”

Boxer didn't name names, but the NYT wants us to know that referred to Cruz, but why not Warren too? Because the NYT wouldn't have structured its rhetoric that way if it had known that a new Senator from the Democratic Party was going to go into attack dog mode the day they published the piece?

In just two months, Mr. Cruz, 42, has made his presence felt in an institution where new arrivals are usually not heard from for months, if not years....

In a body known for comity, Mr. Cruz is taking confrontational... sensibilities to new heights...

Ha ha ha. Cruz, that clod, doesn't know the comity tradition. Meanwhile, here comes the brilliant Harvard lawprof, and she's not meekly conforming to the be-seen-and-not-heard routine. So how are those hackles doing now — those bipartisan hackles — raised... or lying flat and flobby?



Hackles? More like hacks.

"The Wisconsin delegates to the Republican National Convention in Tampa were treated like royalty."

"They were given a prime location on the convention floor, right up front and to the right of the stage. The delegates from Wisconsin aren't nearly as well positioned when the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte officially opens Tuesday."

What's happened to Wisconsin? Here's the L.A. Times trying to figure it out:

Four years ago, it might have sounded preposterous that Wisconsin, a state that preferred Barack Obama to John McCain by 14 points, would become a wellspring of successful GOP candidates and leaders.

But the impossible has happened. The state features three prominent speakers during the GOP convention -- RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, Gov. Scott Walker and vice presidential hopeful Paul Ryan, who hopes to wow the nation with a speech Wednesday night. In 2008, the state’s two U.S. senators were from the Democratic Party. Polls indicate that after Nov. 6, both will be Republican.

Red isn’t necessarily a strange color for Wisconsin – after all, the Republican Party was founded as an anti-slavery party in the state in 1854. But what may be surprising is the strong conservative bent of the politicians who have come out of a state that has not chosen a Republican for the White House since 1984.

The Republican Party was founded as an anti-slavery party in Wisconsin. Interesting to see that highlighted, especially with the L.A. Times failing even to mention Joe McCarthy.

Why isn't the Democratic convention treating the Wisconsin delegates better? When I look at the Electoral College maps, I can easily see how our 10 electoral votes could make the difference for Obama in this tight race. Perhaps the Dems think they're doing enough by giving Tammy Baldwin a prime-time speaking spot. (Tammy is the congresswoman from Madison's district who is all but doomed to lose to Tommy Thompson in the Senate race in November.)

"We've seen Paul Ryan and Scott Walker on the national stage. I'm going to talk about the Wisconsin I know," Baldwin said in an interview, emphasizing fairness and hard work over influence and wealth.

The Wisconsin I know... i.e., Madison. Do tell!

"Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy. Their political convictions and the two moments in history are quite different."

Writes UW history prof William Cronon in a NYT op-ed:

But there is something about the style of the two men — their aggressiveness, their self-certainty, their seeming indifference to contrary views — that may help explain the extreme partisan reactions they triggered. McCarthy helped create the modern Democratic Party in Wisconsin by infuriating progressive Republicans, imagining that he could build a national platform by cultivating an image as a sternly uncompromising leader willing to attack anyone who stood in his way. Mr. Walker appears to be provoking some of the same ire from adversaries and from advocates of good government by acting with a similar contempt for those who disagree with him.

The turmoil in Wisconsin is not only about bargaining rights or the pension payments of public employees. It is about transparency and openness. It is about neighborliness, decency and mutual respect. Joe McCarthy forgot these lessons of good government, and so, I fear, has Mr. Walker. Wisconsin’s citizens have not.

A couple preliminary observations:

1. The protesters and the Democrats in the Wisconsin legislature are making a much bigger show of lacking "neighborliness, decency and mutual respect" than the Republicans, who won the election last fall and are attempting to solve a terrible economic problem. Legislators ran to another state and hid out to obstruct the majority, and the protesters have been chanting unneighborly chants and carrying outrageous signs — depicting Scott Walker as Hitler, etc. — for a month. They took over the Capitol, covering its marble walls with nasty signs, defiling its war monument, and breaking things. They mobbed a state senator. They made death threats! Not all of them. But how can you talk about neighborliness, decency and mutual respect and not acknowledge these things?

2. Cronon's the historian, and he points to Joe McCarthy. But couldn't one also point to Ronald Reagan? Yeah, I know: not from Wisconsin. But he was perceived as "a sternly uncompromising leader" when he was Governor of California. All the college kids — including me — thought he was a demon. Cronon says McCarthy "helped create the modern Democratic Party," but Reagan's role in creating the modern Republican Party is even more dramatic. Walker is much more like Reagan. In fact, Reagan's resemblance to McCarthy is greater than Walker's. Reagan got in front of the camera and said some pretty harsh things back in the late 60s. Walker always comes across as a nice person, making tough decisions and doing what he thinks needs to be done.