Allen West goes full retard. Again

Until about 10 years ago, the worst thing that you could call a conservative was a McCarthyite, so shameful was the legacy of the gloriously long-dead, drunken junior senator from Wisconsin. The author of that legacy was reviled by conservatives for several decades, even to the point of his name being used as an epithet.

As is true with most things in the last decade, there has been a mighty attempt at historical revisionism regarding Joseph McCarthy by what laughably passes for "public thinkers" in the Republican party (as opposed to the conservative movement) such as Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck.

Aside from destroying innumerable lives for no reason at all, undermining the First Amendment's free association and speech rights, and going a long way in creating the great American National Security State, it's largely forgotten that McCarthy never actually produced any actual communists. I'll grant you that he had innumerable lists of supposed communists but he never went so far as to actually name any, despite repeated threats to do just that. In his six year political reign of terror, McCarthy's investigations didn't lead to the conviction of a single person for subversion, communist or otherwise. Not. One.

That isn't to say, of course, that there was a lack of communists to convict in Washington. We now know, as was largely known at the time, that there was indeed communist infiltration of the highest levels of the federal government during the height of the Cold War. It's just that McCarthy didn't expose any of them. In the final analysis, Tailgunner Joe was an opportunist, a drunken demagogue and, most important, an abject failure at what he saw as his life's mission.

You would think that such an appalling record of incompetence and needless personal destruction is something that the modern Republican party would want no part of. But things, it appears, have changed. With Coulter's rise to prominence, most especially with her book, Treason, McCarthy has become almost fashionable in some circles of the GOP and has become mainstreamed with the rise of the Tea Party.

Despite the protestations of their high priests at Newscorp and Freedom Works, the Tea Party and (to a large extent) Fox News aren't conservative as much as they populist. Because of the rise of both, the Republican party itself has become more populist than conservative but it could be the strangest form of populism in American history.

Traditional populism aligned itself with the condition of the "common man" or "the worker", which is why it has, up until very recently, been associated with the political left. Even Reagan-era conservatism had some scholarly bearings. You'll remember that supply-side economics was predicated on the theory of the Laffer Curve. While Reagan's style and rhetoric were often populist, his ideology wasn't.

The Tea Party and the opinion hosts on Fox haven't bothered with ideas like the Laffer Curve in years. I would be stunned to the point of senselessness if I saw evidence that Sean Hannity even knew what it is. Theirs is a populism based on the premise that jiggering the tax code to the benefit of the very wealthy for it's own sake is something that "the common man" should expect will benefit him. This is why Paul Ryan's deficit reduction plans have been front-loaded with tax cuts that dwarf even those of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Like populist movements throughout U.S history, it is built on a foundation of  not just ignorance, but proud ignorance. The less you appear to know, the more successful you'll be in a populist movement, which explains Sarah Palin's entire career better than anything else.

Which brings me to Representative Allen West of Florida's 22nd congressional district. Being of a military background, Congressman West doesn't do things halfway. Where people like Palin and Hannity are proudly ignorant, West fetishizes stupidity in a way that normal adults would stop at nothing to hide, but modern politics rewards. Add to that the fact that he's an unrepentant fucking war criminal and you have a natural leader of the Tea Party.

Well, over the last couple of weeks, young Allen has come to embrace his inner McCarthyite with endlessly entertaining results.

On Tuesday, Rep. Allen West spoke at a town hall in Florida. During his appearance, he told the crowd he’s “heard” that up to 80 House Democrats are members of the Communist Party.

The Palm Beach Post reported on the event, adding that West “wouldn’t name names” to back up his assertion. Currently, there are 190 Democrats in the House.

That's notable in so far as even McCarthy himself never went that far. He said that communists subverted the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, not that they were welcomed into them. Nor did McCarthy ever go so far as to say outright that nearly half of the Democratic congressional caucus were actually members of the Communist Party of the United States.

Of course, West's assertion was so blatantly and laughably ridiculous that it couldn't be ignored, except by Fox News and the Tea Party blogosphere, both of whom are as spectacularly dumb as West himself. The only people who took him seriously was the actual Communist Party of the United States, which is insulted that anyone would associate it with something as spineless as the Democrats.

But the Goddamn Liberal Media, which always loves to pick on a retard, pressed the Congressman to clarify his remarks. This is where things went from amusing to hilarious with astonishing speed.

Regarding his original comments, West said, “No, I don’t regret it whatsoever.” He went on to imply that Wilson was a communist who hid behind the label “progressive”

“And I think that if you would take the time to study the political spectrum of ideologies, you’d understand that at the turn of the [20th] century, American Communists renamed themselves as progressives. If you study the Woodrow Wilson administration, people referred to the Woodrow Wilson administration as a progressive administration.”

Wow. It's been a good, long time since I've seen something so stunningly, yet beautifully stupid. His comments are ignorance in Technicolor.

First, the idea that progressives are communists was invented by Glenn Beck about three years ago. Like West, Beck uses the terms "progressive", "socialist" and "communist" interchangeably, demonstrating that they don't know anything about any of them. Everything Beck knows about history came from a lunatic named W. Cleon Skousen, who was too racist and paranoid for even the Mormon Church of the 1950s. More sadly still, everything Allen West knows about history, he learned from Glenn Beck.

Second, not only was Wilson not the most progressive of American presidents, he wasn't even the progressive in the 1912 campaign in which he was elected. Former President Theodore Roosevelt was the nominee of the Progressive Party. An honest-to-goodness Socialist, Eugene Debs, was on the ballot that year and won 6%, garnering nearly a million votes.

Allen West won't tell you this (most probably because he doesn't know it) but the progressives were more closely associated with the Republican party than with the Democrats. The most politically successful progressives of the era, including Robert La Follette and Hiram Johnson, were Republicans.

Most Americans don't know this, but the McCarthy era wasn't the first Red Scare in the United States. That actually occurred following the Russian Revolution and America's entry into the First World War. There had been political witch hunts in the U.S before, but they mostly targeted anarchists. Anarchism hadn't yet ceased to be a political philosophy and become a fashion statement for people like Malcom McLaren and the former John Lydon.

Just as Beck and West morph progressivism, socialism and communism into one another, Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer bundled trade unions, anarchists, socialists and communists together and went after them with the full force of the federal government. This assault on civil liberties became known as the Palmer Raids, and it was far worse than anything that Joseph McCarthy managed to pull off because Palmer was both competent and sober. Moreover, it was carried out under the supervision of a young man named J. Edgar Hoover.

The Palmer Raids were finally stopped by a federal court judge, who included in his ruling this sentence  "a mob is a mob, whether made up of Government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals and loafers and the vicious classes."

And who did Mitchell Palmer work for during this American nightmare, you ask? The answer might shock you, especially if you're Allen West.

It was President Woodrow Wilson.