The Reincarnation of Tail Gunner Joe
McCarthyism, a chronic disease infecting the American body politic, rears its ugly head
Let’s admit it, we’re living in a political moment when a virulent strain of “McCarthyism” troubles the nation once again. According to Wikipedia, the term is defined as “the practice of making false or unfounded accusations of subversion and treason, especially when related to anarchism, communism and socialism, and especially when done in a public and attention-grabbing manor…The term originally referred to the controversial practices of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and covers the period of the late 1940s through the 1950s” during which time McCarthy conducted his infamous campaign to rid the American government and business community of “communists.” This time around the McCarthy in the spotlight is Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), a 21st century version of the aforementioned right-wing Republican Senator from Wisconsin, also known as “Tail Gunner Joe,” the derisive sobriquet that originated from the Senator’s false claim to have been a tail gunner on American bombers during World War II. Kevin McCarthy’s symptoms of the affliction are also shared by a cohort of right-wing Republican Congress members who like the new Speaker, have no moral inhibitions about making false accusations, without evidence, “especially when done in a public and attention-grabbing manor.”
In Kevin McCarthy’s GOP, mendacity defines the Republican cause as never before and continues to drive the antics of the entire coterie of like-minded fascists that connived to get him elected as Speaker of the House of Representatives in 2023. Amanda Marcotte, an esteemed senior writer at Salon.com, sorted out all the shenanigans surrounding McCarthy’s election as Speaker in a post on January 5, 2023. “The New York Times called the anti-McCarthy faction ‘ultraconservative’ and The Washington Post noted that most are full on election deniers,” she wrote. “Not only are these euphemisms for what they actually are—a bunch of fascists—it also falsely implies that the disagreement is ideological. It’s not. McCarthy is in full agreement with the anti-democratic views of this group. He was among the 147 House Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol attack. While McCarthy was initially cranky about the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, he has done everything in his power to shield the powerful conspirators who incited it, including Donald Trump himself, from any accountability.”
It has now come to light, thanks to Robert Hubbell’s Substack reports, that Kevin McCarthy is further abusing his power by making a “devil’s bargain” in releasing the official surveillance tapes of the January 6th attack on the Capitol to Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, who is a Big Lie promoter and January 6 denier. McCarthy is also giving the Insurrection Caucus of the GOP access to the tapes, a group “which claims that the assault on the Capitol on January 6th was a ‘false flag’ operation rather than an attempt to overturn an election,” as Hubbell described the situation in Today’s Edition Newsletter, March 1, 2023. “McCarthy’s decision to grant an ‘exclusive’ to Tucker Carlson is especially depraved because Carlson has been an unrelenting critic of McCarthy for years,” Hubbell writes. “What better way to ‘buy’ favorable coverage than to grant an ‘exclusive’ to your biggest critic?”
Hubbell goes on to report that Carlson was given access “so he could prepare a ‘special report’ that would, presumably, demonstrate that the violent assault on the Capitol was just a big misunderstanding.” As Hubbell says, the story gets worse, much worse, and I urge everyone to read his excellent detailed report in full for its revelations of corruption and blatant violations of The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. As per Hubbell:
The member of Congress who will supervise access to highly sensitive surveillance tapes by January 6th defendants is Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA). You may recall Rep. Loundermilk because he was accused of giving tours of the Capitol on the day before the insurrection (January 5th)—a day the Capitol was closed to the public. Loudermilk vehemently and indignantly denied that charge until the January 6th Committee released a video of Loudermilk giving tours of the closed Capitol to a group of people on January 5th.
With this and other revelations, Hubbell’s report amounts to a devastating indictment of Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his GOP cronies’ disingenuous, evasive responses to questions and criticism concerning these matters and his conclusions serve as a clarion call to citizen action:
There are no innocent explanations in response to those questions. Kevin McCarthy can bob and weave all he wants, but the result is incontestable: Republicans in Congress have taken the side of those who mounted the violent insurrection on January 6th—because Kevin McCarthy’s pathetic, shriveled ego would not be satiated until he became Speaker of the House, regardless of the damage inflicted on our democracy.
Unlike in today’s corporate-controlled congress, when the antics of blatant liars like Speaker McCarthy, and his flamboyant colleagues Representatives George Santos (R-NY) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) are tolerated and even encouraged by the GOP leadership, back in the 1950s, the majority of the members of the Senate at least, harbored no such intentions. In December 1954, the Senate passed S. RES. 301, a motion of condemnation in a vote of 67 to 22 to address the problem of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s egregious behavior. “Resolved, that the conduct of the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy, is contrary to senatorial traditions, and tends to bring the Senate into disrepute, and such conduct is hereby condemned.” But that unusual action was taken by men and women of integrity during the Eisenhower administration when the GOP still upheld ethical and moral standards. In a letter to the editor published on January 16, 2022 in the Daily Freeman, the writer said the difference between the two McCarthys is that “Senator Joseph McCarthy was stopped by some of his own party because they recognized his dangerous conduct.” Today, Kevin McCarthy goes out of his way to defend and promote the aberrant behavior of known liars like Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos, Paul Anthony Gosar, and the rest of the Speaker’s gang of fascist thugs. With leaders like McCarthy, the GOP of our time, while impervious to the traditional norms of democracy and the interests of the Common Good, is passionate to the verge of codependency about satisfying the personal whims and illegal demands of the man James Howard Kunstler called the Golden Golem of Greatness, the wannabe King of America, His Royal Majesty, Donald J. Trump.
Max Boot writing in the Washington Post, December 14, 2020, made the case that “The new (Kevin) McCarthyism is even worse than the old one…Although there are many differences between the two McCarthyisms,” he writes, “there is also a lot of continuity. In the 1950s, most Republican leaders were too cowardly to challenge what Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine), a lone profile in courage, called the ‘Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.’ Today, most Republican leaders are too cowardly to stand up not only to those four ills, but also to Trump’s attempts to destroy our democracy—something that not even Joe McCarthy dared to do.”
In a story about our present day McCarthy’s alliance with congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the January 24 edition of The Guardian newspaper reported the House Speaker as saying “he would ‘never leave’ the far-right conspiracy theorist after she backed him through a right-wing rebellion and 15 rounds of voting for the leadership position of that he coveted. An avowed advocate of violent insurrection, Greene claimed that if she had led the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the protestors ‘would’ve been armed.’” Despite numerous obvious violations of her oath of office and attempts by outraged Georgia voters to keep her off the ballot for reelection, a Republican judge decided she was eligible to run. It was an unconscionable decision, allowing the violence prone Greene to continue doing her part to implement the fascist GOP plan to destroy the processes of democratic government. Yes, I used the F-word again, just as President Biden did in September 2022, provoking the ire of then House Minority Leader, now House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy. When the aspiring Speaker of the House criticized Biden publicly for using the F-word to describe the ideology of Trump and his enablers, McCarthy ironically described himself instead. “President Biden has chosen to divide, demean, and disparage his fellow Americans—Why? simply because they disagree with his policies,” he wrote. “That is not leadership.”
He was right, it’s not leadership; it’s Fascism with a capital F, the driving force at the core of the GOP leader’s depraved authoritarian view of democratic governance, the very antitheses of the New Deal era policies that the majority of the American people value. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, fascism “is a mass political movement that emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of both the nation and the single, powerful leader over the individual citizen. This model of government stands in contrast to liberal democracies which support individual rights, competitive elections, and political dissent.” Fascism is also frequently referred to as a “virus” in some political circles, which reflects the violent connotations the term shares with the bellicose intentions of the Nazis during World War II. In his February 20, 2023 Substack report The Fascist Cancer Has Spread, Paul Street writes “One of fascisms key components is the legitimatization of political violence over and against previously normative elections, legislative deliberations, and rule of law,” which are primary elements of the extremists’ plan to overthrow liberal democracy. There’s a lot of that kind of violence reflected today in the behavior of Republican lawmakers such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, as Street makes clear:
A number of Republican representatives have posed for photographs with assault rifles and left little effort to hide their violent contempt for the supposedly ‘radical left’ Democrats, especially for leftish female Congresspersons like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. As Draper (Weapons of Mass Delusion: When The Republican Party Lost Its Mind by Robert Draper) notes, the fascist lunatic and Congressperson Majorie Taylor-Greene (Rf-GA) has run campaign ads saying AOC ‘wants to plunge us into communism.’ Frau Taylor-Greene even ‘posted [a] notorious ad…proclaiming herself as the ‘worst nightmare’ of AOC and her Squad while firing rounds from her AR-15”(Draper, p. 170). A demented maniac influenced by such political madness invaded Nancy Pelosi’s and broke the skull of her husband last October.
But instead of condemning Greene, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy appointed her as one of 21 Republican legislators on the House Oversight Committee, a collection of extremist nitwits that, as Heather Cox Richardson pointed out in the February 25, 2023 edition of Letters from an American, wrote a letter to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg complaining “that the federal government had not responded effectively to the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, erroneously thinking the (NTSB) National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency, that authored a preliminary report, was part of the Department of Transportation. In her detailed story about the matter, Richardson described the letter writers’ fascist intent in pandering to their base. “Either 21 Republican lawmakers charged with oversight of our government don’t know how the government works and didn’t care to find out, or they are deliberately misleading their loyalists.” (Italics mine) Richardson went on to report:
We are becoming accustomed to certain Republican lawmakers saying ridiculous things. Just two days ago, in a now deleted tweet, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) claimed that ‘6 billion’ people have illegally crossed the border since Biden took office. (There are slightly fewer than 8 billion people on earth.)
But the letter these representatives wrote shows such a profound disinterest in how our government works that it suggests these representatives have no interest in the job they were sent to Washington do, and instead are weaponizing the government to mislead their followers into believing things that are not true.
The Democrats, of course, are also complicit in all this “gullible nitwitery and predatory assholiness,” aided and abetted in large part by the American media, a point Chris Hedges’s illustrator, the great satirist Mr. Fish, succinctly makes in the cutline for the illustration accompanying the February 26, 2023 Chris Hedges Report: The Trump-Russia Saga and the Death Spiral of American Journalism. The mainstream press, writes Mr. Fish, “has been corrupted by gossip and the false narratives curated by the right and the left for the purpose of manipulating voting blocks away from recognizing the virtues of universalism.” The word “universalism” is defined by Oxford Languages as “loyalty to and concern for others without regard to national or other allegiances” a rectitude most of our representatives in congress are unlikely to comprehend in a political climate bought and paid for by corporations. The result is the media circus we have today where honor is rare, integrity is corrupted and truth is a fugitive, as Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges makes clear:
When mistakes occur, they must be acknowledged and publicized. To cover them up, to pretend they did not happen, destroys our credibility. Once credibility is gone, the press becomes nothing more than an echo chamber for a selected demographic. This, unfortunately, is the model that now defines the commercial media…Once fact becomes interchangeable with opinion, once truth is irrelevant, once people are told only what they wish to hear, journalism ceases to be journalism and becomes propaganda.
It’s no wonder, as Hedges also notes, that “The U.S. media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among 46 nations, according to a 2022 report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.” To control the information void that results in these dire circumstances, the orange demagogue Donald Trump, the greedy rascals at Fox News, and the gang of congressional jackals in Kevin McCarthy’s orbit descend on the gullible, and like vultures feasting on road kill, poop all over themselves in their attempts to sanitize the toxic lies they have curated as they devour the carcass of Truth in order to expand their power and enhance their bottom lines. What’s more, they go about their nefarious endeavors with impunity. 147 avowed insurrectionists are still sitting members of the U.S. Congress and the twice-impeached former president Donald Trump is still at large, freely undermining the foundations of liberal democracy with his lies and deceit. The outrageous, predatory machinations of the GOP and the failure of the Democrats to respond with sufficient righteous indignation have gotten so bad at this point that law abiding citizens are going crazy with frustration. It might not be polite, but I decided to end this post with a colorful vulgarism, a salty quote from my friend Maria Vandegrift, who has an eye for metaphor when commenting on these grave matters. “The response to the threats from the GOP on the part of the Democratic Party,” she said, “and especially the lack of action by Merrick Garland and the DOJ, has been comparable to the performance of an old man with a limp dick in a whorehouse.”
Rashida Tlaib, the woman who called Donald Trump a “motherfucker,” couldn’t have said it better.