Joe McCarthy was brought down by attacks on his decency. Trump will lose the same way.

[babylonsister]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/08/01/joe-mccarthy-was-brought-down-by-attacks-on-his-decency-trump-will-lose-the-same-way/


Joe McCarthy was brought down by attacks on his decency. Trump will lose the same way.
What the Khans can teach us about the Republican nominee's vulnerabilities.
By Harold Pollack August 1 at 8:33 AM

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago.



Sixty-five years ago, America faced the challenge of a snarling demagogue, who captured the imagination of millions by fusing legitimate fears of an external enemy with the cultural, regional and demographic resentments of people who disliked the changing nature of our postwar country. Then, as now, a demagogue could draw upon widespread weariness with imperfect and occasionally complacent liberal leaders, important or petty security scandals, the grind of military stalemate in an inconclusive long war.

Then, as now, the demagogue benefited from apologists and enablers who privately wanted him defeated, but who would not take risks or bear political costs to openly confront him. Then, as now, his political adversaries were divided and hesitant in their efforts to formulate an effective response. Then, as now, parts of the Republican Party gave a vicious demagogue a congenial political home.

Of course, history doesn’t repeat itself. Donald Trump is no Joe McCarthy. For one thing, President Eisenhower and other Republican gatekeepers never allowed McCarthy near their party’s nomination for president. For another, America is a far more cosmopolitan and diverse nation today than it was at the close of the Korean War.

But history does sometimes rhyme. The Democratic National Convention brought an unexpected echo of the McCarthy era. The occasion was a speech by the 65-year-old immigration lawyer Khizr Khan, of Charlottesville, Va. Khan’s son Humayun, a posthumously decorated Army captain, was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq. The elder Khan immigrated in 1980. He has spent more than half of his life in the U.S. His oldest son founded a biotech company where his younger son now works.

Khan brought no written speech to the DNC. He didn’t load anything into the TelePrompTer. He brought instead his personal eloquence, and his proud memories of a deceased son. In six minutes, the grieving father delivered the blistering response Donald Trump deserved: Khan dispatched Trump’s bluster with an anger made more powerful by its lack of political artifice or the usual focus-grouped finish.

snip//

Like McCarthy, Trump derives political advantage from sheer shamelessness, his willingness to wildly attack others. Yet shamelessness creates vulnerabilities and blind spots, too. Trump’s words betray a strange, indecency toward two Gold Star parents grieving the loss of their son.

Millions of voters are tempted to embrace sweeping rhetoric directed against Muslim Americans and other minorities. That’s a reality of American life. But these attacks lose their potency when they’re directed not against abstraction but particular, sympathetic human beings. Americans saw for themselves that Khizr Khan is the better man, the better American, than Donald Trump ever will be.

[tonyt53]

1. The GOP needs to have the McCarthy era shoved into their faces. Same thing going on now.

Just different names of the players.

[niyad]

2. "at last, sir, have you no sense of decency?"

certainly der drumpfenfuhrer does not

[frazzled]

3. Dont forget that Trump's longtime lawyer/mentor was McCarthy's henchman, Roy Cohn

at whose knees he learned all the McCarthy-Cohn tactics.

Mr. Cohn’s influence on Mr. Trump is unmistakable. Mr. Trump’s wrecking ball of a presidential bid — the gleeful smearing of his opponents, the embracing of bluster as brand — has been a Roy Cohn number on a grand scale. Mr. Trump’s response to the Orlando massacre, with his ominous warnings of a terrorist attack that could wipe out the country and his conspiratorial suggestions of a Muslim fifth column in the United States, seemed to have been ripped straight out of the Cohn playbook.

...

For 13 years, the lawyer who had infamously whispered in McCarthy’s ear whispered in Mr. Trump’s. In the process, Mr. Cohn helped deliver some of Mr. Trump’s signature construction deals, sued the National Football League for conspiring against his client and countersued the federal government — for $100 million — for damaging the Trump name. One of Mr. Trump’s executives recalled that he kept an 8-by-10-inch photograph of Mr. Cohn in his office desk, pulling it out to intimidate recalcitrant contractors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/us/politics/donald-trump-roy-cohn.html?_r=0

I agree, the forces of good willing, that Trump will meet the same end as his predecessors. Love Trumps Hate.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

5. Yes

One could say "Birds of a feather..." but with Drumpf and Cohn it's more like sewer rats.

[Democat]

4. Trump derives political advantage from sheer shamelessness, his willingness to wildly attack others

That's the definition of a thin skinned bully, not a leader.