Legal Commentary

Fred Hiatt And John McCain: Partners In The New McCarthyism

By Big Tent Democrat

Fred Hiatt is a shameless man. Today he publishes an editorial in the Washington Post chiding John McCain for his McCarthyite smear of Barack Obama:

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, had one of those unfortunate moments the other day, when he charged that his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, "would rather lose the war to win a political campaign." . . . It's one thing to say Mr. Obama is wrong. It's another to accuse him of putting political self-interest over country. This is not the "politics of civility" that Mr. McCain was promising as recently as last month.

A rather tepid critique from Hiatt's WaPo. But there is a reason for that -- Fred Hiatt has his own history of McCarthyite smears of Democrats:

. . Congress . . . pours most of its Iraq-related energy into allegations of manipulated intelligence before the war. "Those aren't irrelevant questions," says Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). "But the more they dominate the public debate, the harder it is to sustain public support for the war."

What Lieberman doesn't say is that many Democrats would view such an outcome as an advantage. Their focus on 2002 is a way to further undercut President Bush, and Bush's war, without taking the risk of offering an alternative strategy -- to satisfy their withdraw-now constituents without being accountable for a withdraw-now position.

Many of them understand that dwindling public support could force the United States into a self-defeating position, and that defeat in Iraq would be disastrous for the United States as well as for Mahdi and his countrymen. But the taste of political blood as Bush weakens, combined with their embarrassment at having supported the war in the first place, seems to override that understanding.

Hiatt basically wrote about Democrats what McCain said about Obama. Fred Hiatt remains a disgrace and a stain upon the Washington Post, which will never remove the stain and disgrace it carries until Fred Hiatt is removed as Editor of the Washington Post Editorial Page. The Washington Post does not have the moral standing to criticize John McCain for the New McCarthyism McCain is practicing. And it won't until Fred Hiatt is gone from its pages.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 26, 2008 (boomark / email).