Today, on Fox News Sunday, Newt Gingrich accused the Obama administration of being McCarthyites and terrorist sympathizers. Yes. Both. At the same time:
Gingrich claimed that the former firm of Attorney General Eric Holder had represented 17 alleged terrorists on a pro-bono basis. “For no fee,” he added, for good measure. “It is the largest single thing they were doing for free, defending Yemenis.”
Firms like Holder’s Covington & Burling, of course, have represented alleged terrorist under the notion that everyone deserves a legal defense, not out of some shared ideology or political sympathies. But context and clarification weren’t Gingrich’s order of business on Sunday. There was, he claimed, a “weird pattern” of Democratic administrations “defending alleged terrorists,” as opposed to Bush officials, who “defend[ed] Americans.”
“You look at the Obama administration,” he said, “the number of attorneys that have been appointed who were defending alleged terrorists. There’s this weird pattern where the Bush people wanted to defend Americans and were pretty tough on terrorists. These guys are prepared to take huge risks with Americans in order to defend terrorists.”
And yet, even as he was asking the Obama administration lawyers whether they are now or have ever been representing terrorists, Gingrich managed to make accusations of McCarthyism. On the topic of investigating the authorization of torture by the Bush administration, he claimed: “What we’re seeing now, in a very sad way, is as bitter a partisan attack on the Bush people, as much as we’ve seen since the McCarthy era. The degree that they’re putting specific people at risk for criminal prosecution is unprecedented in modern America.”
I feel a bit silly even bothering to correct this, but just for the record, there’s a difference between persecuting people for their beliefs and/or for their political, personal, and professional affiliations and associations, either real or perceived; and investigating government officials for possible violations of U.S. law and international treaties banning torture.
On the other hand, accusing attorneys who represent alleged terrorists of “coddling” terrorists or being terrorist “sympathizers” is much closer to the definition of McCarthyism.
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