What is it with Republicans named McCarthy?
Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin staged a years-long witch hunt against nonexistent Communists in the federal government, ruined multiple lives in the process, ended up being censured by the Senate, and died a drunk in 1957. Today he is universally reviled as everything that can go wrong with America. (Runner-up: Charles Lindbergh.)
Congressman Kevin McCarthy of California is currently defenestrating himself before our eyes. As we write this, he's losing his 11th vote for Speaker of the House. (And before the night is over, by our count Hakeem Jeffries will have received 2,332 votes for Speaker — more than anyone in a century. LOL!)
We don't understand why Kevin is doing this. Certain experts have speculated that he's suffering from emotional neuropathy. Why else would he sit there and endure rejection after rejection, smiling and applauding whenever somebody nominates him? It is too weird.
On the Democratic side in the 1960s, the name McCarthy is associated with qualities that are quite different — thanks to Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy's principled opposition to the Vietnam War.
We remember McCarthy most for his campaign for President in 1968. His success against LBJ in the primaries drew Bobby Kennedy into the race, but after RFK was killed, McCarthy could not stave off the Hubert Humphrey steamroller. (We well remember when "Chicago's finest" broke into his campaign headquarters and beat up his volunteers — not because they were rioting at the Democratic convention, but because they were there.)
McCarthy stumbled politically after the '60s, but nobody's perfect. He didn't try to subvert democracy, and he wasn't an anti-Semite. So we're tempted to forgive him — he became a poet, after all. (And he was admirably self-deprecating: "If any of you are secret poets," he once said, "the best way to break into print is to run for the Presidency.")
Long story short, even a flawed Eugene McCarthy is head and shoulders above Joe and Kevin. The Republicans could take a lesson from "Clean Gene." We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.
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