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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cautious_Optimist who wrote (87762)	4/29/2012 1:22:52 AM
From: joseffy	Respond to of 89467

Nutty as a fruitcake, huh?

To: Cautious_Optimist who wrote (87762)	4/29/2012 10:54:28 AM
From: longnshort	2 Recommendations Respond to of 89467

Obama voted 'present' on Bin Laden assassination President Obama is trying to use the hit on Osama Bin Laden as a campaign point, but the fact is - as the CIA memo above shows - that he had very little to do with it (Hat Tip: MFS - The Other News). The narrative that we have been told since May 1, 2011 is that President Obama made the call to kill bin Laden, with one aide even going so far as to say President Obama's action was " one of the ... gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory." The White House has run with this, milking bin Laden's death for everything its worth. It's even to the point where if go to " gutsycall.com," your browser will automatically direct you to barackobama.com. Honestly, if the final decisions were up to President Obama, and no other President would have even considered carrying out the raid that killed bin Laden, the President should have the right to use bin Laden's death any way he sees fit. The problem is that the so-called "gutsy call" never existed. Putting aside the fact that any President with Mr. Obama's intelligence information would have made the same call, a new memo released yesterday that Mr. Obama did not make the "final" call, nor was it terribly gutsy. Instead, it shows that the President merely authorized the possibility for going to Abbottabad... and left everything else up to Admiral William McRaven.

To: Cautious_Optimist who wrote (87762)	4/29/2012 10:58:35 AM
From: longnshort	2 Recommendations Respond to of 89467

Joe McCarthy was right. Now that I've grabbed your attention, let me tell you why. For fifty years I trust there isn't an educator in either the academy or high schools who hasn't failed to castigate Joe McCarthy as a hate-monger, liar, destroyer of careers, and someone who routinely accused innocent people of wrong doing. "McCarthyism" has become the reflexive adjective among those on the American Left when accused of anything of less than patriotic motives or, for that matter, taken to task for questionable behavior. McCarthy was not only right, he's been given a bad rap by history. For four years, from 1950 until 1954, McCarthy was the only voice in America speaking out against those in government that were Communists, fellow-travelers (liberals who believed in but did not join the Communist Party), Russian sympathizers, and Stalin apologists. His enemies, consistent with the Left today, chose to attack the messenger rather than the message. From the earliest years of the New Deal until the late 1940's the government was deeply infiltrated with Communists and their supporters. There was no shortage of either messages to the President or evidence to support such infiltration. Yet, Roosevelt then Truman chose to ignore such evidence. Adolph Berle, Undersecretary of State for internal security at State, went to Roosevelt in 1940 with a list of Communists in government provided by Whittaker Chambers, a party member who'd defected. Roosevelt, according to all accounts laughed it off and refused to deal with it. J. Edgar Hoover, in 1943, informed Roosevelt of Soviet spying both within the government and at the Russian Embassy. On this occasion Roosevelt not only disregarded the evidence, he sent Harry Hopkins, his Domestic Affairs advisor, to warn the Soviet embassy that their phones were tapped. In 1946 Hoover again went to the White House, this time providing Harry Truman with a list of known Communists and sympathizers still in the government. Truman's response was: "What am I going to do? Give those @#%&* Republicans up on the Hill something to bash me with." McCarthy's detractors, Communists, and Soviet sympathizers never anticipated two things: One, the Venona intercepts and their subsequent release; Two, the collapse of Communism and the opening of Soviet files. From 1943 until 1980, unbeknownst to virtually everyone, the National Security Agency intercepted every Soviet message going from or to the United States. It was not until 1994 that their existence was even acknowledged, and 1995 when the first 1,400 of 240,000 intercepts were released to the public. Their content was damning and supportive of the contentions of not only McCarthy but Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, Hoover, and others. The collapse of Communism opened files of not only internal Soviet spy documents but also gave the FBI, CIA, and American scholars access to the files of the American Communist Party that had been hidden in a Russian warehouse since 1950. The cat was out of the clichéd bag. Just who was exposed by these documents. Alger Hiss who had been the number three man at State behind Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk, and who, most assuredly, at some point, would have eventually been Secretary of State. Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who purposely withheld allocated funding for the Chinese Nationalists, during their Civil War, that destroyed their currency and, thus, their efforts against Mao's Communists. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been conduits for even more damaging information than the atom bomb, for which they were executed. Lauchlin Currie, Special Assistant to F.D.R. Samuel Dickstein, member of the House of Representatives from Brooklyn. William and Martha Dodd, son and daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Germany in the 1930's. Lawrence Duggan, State Department Director of Latin American Affairs. Harold Ickes, Sr., father of Clinton's impeachment flack, who was Secretary of the Interior. Finally, William Weisband, U.S. Army Signal Security Agency. This is just a very few, the most prominent or household names one might say. Was Robert Oppenheimer, the Director of the Atom Bomb Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, a member of the Communist Party? Quite emphatically, no! His wife was. His brother was. His mistress was. As were many of his closest associates at the University of California. In addition, Oppenheimer was one of those scientists in the 40's who thought that all scientific information should be shared universally for the good of mankind. Were any of the aforementioned exposed by McCarthy? Not one. He'd been too late at the spy discovery game. After all, Alger Hiss got Richard Nixon the Vice-Presidency. White had been shifted to that historical ashbin where failures are allowed to "resign" to, the International Monetary Fund. Hiss, unquestionably the most brilliant of the rising stars at State at the age of 43, in 1947 became the head of the Carnegie E0ndowment for Peace; a position usually held by a senior citizen with insufficient retirement funds. Lawrence Duggan, as the FBI closed in on him, had the presence of mind and good sense to jump from a window and commit suicide. Of course, he was considered a "victim" of a non-existent "Red Scare". Just how many did McCarthy catch? Darn few. Of the 10,000 government employees who were exposed as Communists, security risks, or of questionable loyalty and lost their jobs, at the least, only forty can be attributed to McCarthy. Any of the major players? None, as most had either been moved laterally by Truman or snared by the FBI. Most of the forty were small time functionaries such as Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service, Philip and Mary Jane Keeney, and Howard Shapley; and these were the most prominent. In every case, of the forty, they were all accorded trials and attorneys before their dismissal. Lattimore had been Director of the School Of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, advisor to FDR on China in 1941, advisor at State in 1946-1947, preached that Mao's Communists were "agrarian reformers", in 1948 encouraged George Marshall to stop aid to Chiang Kai-Shek and his Nationalists, and in 1949 urged U.S. withdrawal from Korea.

To: Cautious_Optimist who wrote (87762)	4/29/2012 11:00:36 AM
From: longnshort	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

WASHINGTON — Although Joseph McCarthy was one of the most demonized American politicians of the last century, new information — including half-century-old FBI recordings of Soviet embassy conversations — are showing that McCarthy was right in nearly all his accusations. “With Joe McCarthy it was the losers who’ve written the history which condemns him,” said Dan Flynn, director of Accuracy in Academia’s recent national conference on McCarthy, broadcast by C-SPAN. Using new information obtained from studies of old Soviet files in Moscow and now the famous Venona Intercepts — FBI recordings of Soviet embassy communications between 1944-48 — the record is showing that McCarthy was essentially right. He had many weaknesses, but almost every case he charged has now been proven correct. Whether it was stealing atomic secrets or influencing U.S. foreign policy, communist victories in the 1940s were fed by an incredibly vast spy and influence network. The conference, a gathering of old McCarthyites and younger scholars, commemorated the senator’s first speech, in Wheeling, West Virginia 50 years ago, when he first held up a list of names of employees of the State Department whom, he said, were major security risks. McCarthy questioned how, in six short years after America’s winning of World War II, the communist world was triumphant and had expanded to include 800 million people. Of the lists, a key one consisted of 108 names from a House Appropriations Committee report, of persons declared as “security risks” in the State Department — the Lee List. The House committee chairman had complained that State wasn’t bothering to do anything about the suspects. Details of the list and its accusations were presented at the conference. Speakers detailed many of the cover-ups used to smear McCarthy. Veteran journalist and teacher Stan Evans, director of National Journalism Center, told of the Tydings Committee, which had investigated McCarthy’s charges of communists in government. Its report had exonerated everybody. Among the accused it stated categorically that there was no evidence against Owen Lattimore, a man McCarthy said was a major figure in the communist conspiracy. Lattimore had been Roosevelt’s key advisor on China policy. Yet Evans showed evidence from 5,000 pages of FBI files on him — files released only a few years ago to the public, although the White House had access to them. However, evidence before the committee showed that Lattimore had supported Soviet policy at every turn, even declaring that the Stalin purge trials in Russia, “sound like democracy to me.” With then-Vice President Henry Wallace in Russia, Lattimore compared concentration camps to the Tennessee Valley Authority, and later urged Washington to abandon China to communism and to withdraw from Japan and Korea. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who had fed information to McCarthy, broke with him afterwards, fearing McCarthy would prejudice FBI sources of information for its criminal prosecutions. Although most of McCarthy’s cases involved actual spies and “security risks,” the really important issue was that of communist influence over American foreign policy, argued Evans. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest advisor who lived in the White House, had regular contacts with Soviet intelligence. He helped bring about the disastrous Yalta and Pottsdam agreements. The Morganthau Plan, to prevent German reconstruction and starve the Germans to make them desperate enough to go communist, was the product of Laughlin Currie and Harry Dexter White at the Treasury Department. The abandonment of Chiang Kai-shek by denying military support was the product of “China Hands” led by John Stewart Service, John Patton Davies, and Lattimore. Evans described other major spy networks — in England, the Burgess Maclean group which infiltrated Washington as well as London. Reed Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Media, told how he himself had been a leftist in his early career. He had been against McCarthy, but McCarthy’s speeches had made him think and start to read “evidence that I had avoided.” He described how all during his military career as a Marine officer and later in Japan with the U.S. occupation he had never hidden his leftist views and later had even been offered a job at the CIA. Irvine argued that real communists were only in the hundreds, but that thousands of leftists, such as he, all feared McCarthy and had wanted him discredited. Pulling all the latest evidence together was luncheon speaker Professor Arthur Herman. His new book, “Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator,” and featured in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, shows the vindication of most of McCarthy’s charges. Herman, who is also coordinator of the Smithsonian’s Western Heritage Program, said that the accuracy of McCarthy’s charges “was no longer a matter of debate,” that they are “now accepted as fact.” However, the term “McCarthyism” still remains in the language. Asked whether McCarthy had understood all the forces arrayed against him, Herman said no, that McCarthy hadn’t realized he’d be fighting against much of the Washington establishment. President Truman was fearful that exposures would reflect on key Democrat officials, he said, and big media and the academic world were very leftist, a heritage of the Depression and World War II. High government officials also feared investigations of their past appointments and associations with people who turned out to be communists or sympathizers. That was the reason McCarthy was so demonized, he said. Joe McCarthy had been a Marine air gunner, an amateur boxer, a county judge and towards his end, under constant attack, he began to drink heavily. Herman said he certainly was over his head and his fall came about after sweeping attacks on General Marshall and the Army. Senator Taft and other key supporters began to draw away from him. If Robert Kennedy, his competent and well-connected co-counsel, had stayed on, McCarthy might have behaved more carefully, said Herman. An argument with other co-counsel Roy Cohn left Cohn in charge, but Cohn and staffer David Schine were disastrous for McCarthy. Still, McCarthy’s original charges helped bring about Eisenhower’s electoral victory and the defeat of the Democrats and key leftist Democratic senators such as Tydings of Maryland. Four years after his original charges, Joe McCarthy was censured by the Senate and died shortly thereafter. There is more evidence to come. Herb Romerstein, another speaker, who started out with the old House Un-American Activities Committee, is writing a book about the Venona FBI intercepts and their links to other evidence from his comprehensive study in Russia of Soviet archives, made available to Westerners since the fall of communism. His book, The Venona Secrets, will be released by Regnery Gateway this fall. Audiotapes of the “Accuracy in Academia” conference are available online.