It is Eugene McCarthy! Not Joe

StarTribune.com
McCarthy gaffe is like calling Kenneth Starr 'Ringo Starr'

By NICK COLEMAN, Star Tribune

August 27, 2008

Fame is fleeting, prophets are without honor in their own land and idiots rule.

During Tuesday's proceedings at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, a photograph of former Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy was shown during a roll call of the honored dead -- departed stalwarts of the Democratic persuasion who have gone to their rewards since the last convention, four years ago. It would have made a nice moment. But they called him "Joseph McCarthy."

Some little Democrats should get spanked.

It was as insulting as if they had put up a picture of Ted Kennedy and called him "Dick Cheney," confused Hillary Rodham Clinton with Ann Coulter, or called St. Paul "Minneapolis."

Minnesota's Gene and Wisconsin's Joe shared a surname (though Gene's middle name, ironically, was Joseph), but they were not related and were polar opposites in their political views, their intellectual capabilities and their lasting impact on the landscape. Joe, a Red-baiting Republican demagogue whose tactics paralyzed Washington, was discredited and disgraced and left his name on an era of fear. Gene, a Democratic congressman from St. Paul who didn't move up to the Senate until 1958, the year after Joe McCarthy died, was a McCarthy of a different kind. To mix them up is as ignorant as it is hilarious.

That the Democrats would do so while conjuring the names and trying to capture the luster of some of the party's dearly departed (including Lady Bird Johnson and Gov. Ann Richards) would amuse Gene McCarthy, who died in 2005, at 89. He challenged the Democratic Party, and he changed it. But he never got credit. Being called Joe was the final indignity. But what may have been worse is that the Pepsi Center crowd of Obamiaks clapped loudly for Lady Bird but there was only a low murmur of protest when the mislabeled photo of McCarthy came up. There should have been a big shower of rotten vegetables.

(snip)

Taking on a president of his own party, McCarthy's insurgent campaign drove Lyndon Johnson from office, lured Robert F. Kennedy into the race and set the stage for a raucous Chicago convention in which an unpopular war and administration were directly and forcefully challenged. No one would wish for a rerun of the chaos of 1968, but 40 years later, the Democrats are opposing another unpopular war without seeming to have the guts to say so directly.

(snip)


http://www.startribune.com/politics/27567399.html

the craziest element of the Reich wing. Check out the comments and the number of the nuts who defend Joe McCarthy as a great patriot.

instead of casting the Minnesota votes for the Duluth girls hockey team - or something - she should have added: oh, and by the way, it was Eugene McCarthy.