F**K YOU Ted Cruz, Allen West, Michelle Bachmann, et al. This Is Personal.

Cruz and West; and those emitting the 2008 Tea Partying rally cries of “Socialist!”, and “Communist!”, and “Kill him!!!”; and all of their enablers in Congress; Reince Priebus and other apologists for Ted Cruz at those recent hearings:

Fuck you!!! My dad would’ve kicked your asses!

(And my wife will kick Sarah Palin’s and Michelle Bachmann’s asses.)

Okay, I am speaking figuratively about the ass-kicking, but this is deeply personal.

My father was dragged in front of the McCarthy Commission for Un-American activity. He lost his security clearance: a Masters in Electrical Engineering, just starting out in the post-war world, intent on a career in government contracting work. He lost his security clearance, and almost his entire career.

I slightly fictionalized his life story in Aldus Shrugged, but everything in this diary is absolutely true and heartfelt.

My dad was a genius; easily the smartest person I ever knew. He was my father and my google, and I was always too lazy to look it up myself in the encyclopedia (remember encyclopedias: those stacks of paper, with the hard thing covering the papers, like a sandwich?)

Anyway, he earned a four year mayoral scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania (his immigrant parents couldn’t have even afforded the application fee, though the entirely yearly tuition to UofP in 1938 was 400 dollars!!!)
His grades earned him another year of graduate study and he became an Electrical Engineer, not the most popular profession for Jewish boys back then.

To make a long story short, my dad was a very complex man: he supported Nixon because of Nixon’s support for some missile program for Israel. My dad even wrote a couple of letters to Henry Kissinger and got a personal reply.

He had a heart of gold, and a big heart at that. I saw his kindness to strangers and acquaintances many times in my life. One time on a vacation to Atlantic City, we were pedaling the board walk headed to a sunrise visit at Captain Starn’s to feed the seals. My dad saw an old lady fall off her giant tricycle on a ramp, and he stopped and stayed with her until an ambulance came. I was about eight and ranted and screamed because we ended up missing the rest of our planned morning. I was just a bratty little kid, but he was consistently caring.

When he worked for Bell Laboratories in Baltimore, back in the late 1940s, my dad asked a guy on the job to stop using the n-word. The guy’s response to my dad was something like:

But that apparently was not the end of it for that racist, for my dad was soon informed that his Jewish student associations in college were deemed Communist associations, and his security clearance was revoked by the McCarthy Commission.

More at: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/28/1190481/-F-K-YOU-Ted-Cruz-Allen-West-Michelle-Bachmann-et-al-This-Is-Personal