Giuliani: Divorced again!

In his appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Truth he wanted out and took Honor along with him. Oh, and while he was at it, he completely abandoned Reality.

Why do I give a fig about this? I’ll tell you why.

Just as a person who has been attacked by a dog may thereafter fear all dogs, a person who has experienced McCarthyism may forever be vigilant lest we allow it into our society again.

I was in high school during the ascendancy of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and his counterparts in the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and because my father worked at the U.N. I got a pretty good inside look at the tyranny of those people.

Dad, with the rest of the American employees of the U.N. Secretariat, had to complete a 13-page loyalty/security questionnaire; the final page was blank, with the instructions, approximately, to “use the space below to provide information that will prove your loyalty to the United States.”

Any historian will confirm that Joe McCarthy never unearthed a single enemy of the people, and he eventually got into some hot water for trying to play the U.S. Army for fools. But the inquisitorial process was numbing (“Were you aware that your friend Mr. Soandso was a member of the Communist party 20 years before you met him?” “Have you ever entertained the Soandso family in your home?”) — and the collateral damage was fierce.

Mr. Soandso — whose politics were pretty ordinary, it turned out — lost his job, and — the times being what they were — his children were harangued in school as “commies.” His wife went to work to support the family. He never recovered his job, his good name, or his dignity.

Meanwhile, back at the State Department, where Dad had worked before the U.N., a dear friend of our family was subpoenaed to appear in person, no attorney allowed; she was questioned over a period of hours about her loyalty and friendships. It was rough and it was traumatic, and she resigned because she just couldn’t take any more.

No charges were ever filed against either of the people I’ve described.

But I was impressed, and I was terrified. Even half a dozen years later, waiting at a bus stop I spied a newsstand that displayed the Daily Worker; I was afraid to cast a further glance at it lest I be seen by someone who might do that to me.

I finally got over it as the country seemed to get saner (and Joe McCarthy, who was laughed out of power by Judge Joseph G. Welch during the Army hearings, finally succumbed to the ravages of alcohol and hatred), but I’ll admit to being a wee bit paranoid still.

So Mr. Giuliani got my attention when he said, essentially, that Barack Obama’s community organizing was run by "a Saul Alinsky [Red flag!] group," in league with the Chicago machine politicians, and that the real purpose of that group was to use taxes for the redistribution of wealth rather than for the benefit of the country.

“Redistribution of wealth” — you know, like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez; it’s quite a stretch to claim that trying to put people back to work after they've lost their jobs when the steel plants closed is trying to redistribute wealth.

Rudy said this was “socialist,” called Obama the most left-wing candidate ever, and the most liberal member of the Senate. He repeated the “redistribution of wealth” bit three times, pretty hefty for a few-minute comment.

Naturally, I can’t help but wonder how he would characterize Adlai Stevenson, famously called a “pinko” by Nixon back in the McCarthy era; for that matter how might Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern feel about giving up the “most left-wing” title? And as for the Senate liberals, did he just diss Ted Kennedy? And what about Bernie Sanders, for heaven’s sake, who calls himself a “socialist”?

And Saul Alinsky? Alinsky was in fact the father of “community organizing,” and he was very good at it. He fought AGAINST the Chicago machine because he saw that it wasn’t working for the working poor. Let alone the just plain poor. And he succeeded.
Here’s what the Washington Post said about him:

Alinsky was a bluff iconoclast who concluded that electoral politics offered few solutions to the have-nots marooned in working-class slums. … Power flowed up, he said, and neighborhood leaders who could generate outside pressure on the system were more likely to produce effective change than the lofty lever-pullers operating on the inside.

Alinsky took action with an organizing campaign in 1939 in Back of the Yards, the desperate Chicago meatpacking district depicted in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." Fashioning an unlikely alliance of unions, the Catholic church and others to win concessions from industry and government, he said organizers must listen to people's desires, then find leaders to carry the fight.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

So it’s not surprising that when Obama, trained (and by the way, Rudy, having been very successful) in community organizing, talks about the fixing the economy he calls for building from the bottom up, putting people put back to work, rewarding employers for keeping jobs from going overseas, and paying women the same as men for the same work, for example. That’s part of the beginning.

But Giuliani wants you to think, “Commie pinko!”

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy: We’ve been through all this before, haven’t we? And there are a bunch of us who don’t want to go there again. Better take care, lest you be laughed off the stage like Joe McCarthy!

Originally published September 14, 2008