The GOP's Close Encounters with the Truth

The GOP's Close Encounters with the Truth
THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter


In the nervous and seminal year of 1950 -- Stalin was no longer our "Uncle," Mao had swept the mainland of our friends the Nationalists, and the twosome's client state of North Korea was metastasizing southward -- the Grand Old Party began to appreciate the limits of intellectual decorum and promise of underhandedness in its quest to reverse this nation's post-1932 tide of progress.

One of its more unforgettable inspirations came from an unlikely source: Rep. George Smathers' Democratic primary challenge against the quintessentially progressive Senator Claude Pepper. Somehow, remarks perhaps not even made by, but nevertheless attributed to, the virulently anticommunist Smathers made their way into Time magazine in the heated course of the 1950 campaign, and what Smathers memorably said or did not say was:

"Do you know that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy."

Said or not, it was out there. And the scandalized senator lost -- not so much because of the exactitudes leveled, but because of the general atmosphere they created: there is something very, very wrong with Senator Pepper. Ain't exactly sure what, but that's what we hear.

Make a note of that, thought the GOP. Deceitful swill really does work, although the party's own Richard Nixon was also striving to prove that at the time in his own scurrilous senatorial race against Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom that trickiest of Dicks effectively framed as "the Pink Lady," and Joe McCarthy was just starting to unearth domestic communists in government by the tens, hundreds or thousands (or as it turned out, the zeros).

Both pols, just as in the Smathers-Pepper case, leveled their charges using mostly precise and undeniably accurate evidence. But their literal truths were utterly false -- because they were either stripped of context or soaked in dark and ominous overtones.

Fast-forward nearly 60 years and what do we find?

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http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/carpenter/179