During the 1950s, the scariest letter you could get was a summons to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) chaired by one Joe McCarthy. 

The worst questions you could be asked was are you a Commie, a Pinko, a Red? Do you hang around with them? Do you know anyone who does? What are their names? 

If you're into the arts, you know those questions led to blacklists; good writers, musicians, painters, playwrights, screenwriters, directors, actors, and others were banished from the world of arts and entertainment. So were engineers and architects, and garbage men and school teachers. 

Thus, some 50 years later, one candidate is asking the same questions of another in an attempt to wrest the Democratic nomination from that candidates grasp. 

We all remember -- even if only played out once again on the local cineplex screen via "Goodnight and Good Luck" -- the seminal moment: "Have you no shame, sir?"

It is time to ask one candidate both of those questions, as she has sought to smear her opponent with the stain of guilt by association. 

First, Hillary Clinton, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? Have you ever been affiliated with or employed by, or maintained a friendship with a member of the Communist Party? 

To the first question, the answer is unclear. To the second question, the answer is yes. YES. 

Carl Bernstein, noted author and biographer can provide this insight:

"I told Bill about my summer plans to clerk at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a small law firm in Oakland California, and he soon said he would like to go to California with me."

That is the total verbiage expended on so formative an experience, and the lasting -- but distant friendship -- she maintained for the next twenty-some years with Bob Treuhaft and his wife, the muckraking journalist (and, like her husband) former communist party member Jessica Mitford.

"The reason she came to us," Treuhaft told me [the quotation is in my biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman In Charge] "the only reason I could think of, because none of us knew her, was because we were a so-called "Movement law firm at the time. There was no reason except politics for a girl from Yale" to intern at the firm. "She certainly... was in sympathy with all the Left causes, and there was a sharp dividing line at the time. We still weren't very far out of the McCarthy era."

Did that connection continue while you and your husband, the former President, were in the White House?

Answer: YES

Have you ever worked on behalf of any person, or group of persons committed to the violent overthrow of the government of the United States?

Answer: YES 

Let's allow Mr. Bernstein's testimony with regard to Hillary Diane Rodham's activities to continue:

In her 2003 "memoir," Living History, Hillary mentions not a word about her role in the Panther trial in New Haven--during which she directed Yale law students monitoring the proceedings for evidence of government misconduct in its prosecution of the Panthers accused of murder. "It meant going in and out of the Black Panther headquarters to obtain documentation and other information," a classmate told Donnie Radcliff of the Washington Post, quoted in Hillary Rodham Clinton: A First Lady For Our Time. "Hillary's job was to organize shifts for her classmates and make certain no proceeding went unmonitored...[for] civil rights abuses..."

So Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton has had long-standing affiliations with persons of the Commie-Pinko persuasion and persons known to advocate for the violent overthrow of the United States government.

She would seek to destroy the candidacy of one man while hiding her own connections to radical elements far worse than a pastor who preaches a brand of theology not to her liking, and a former 60s radical with whom her own alliances and affiliations suggest a natural allegiance.

Have you no shame, madam? Have your craven quest for political significance driven you to this? Have you reached such a nadir that you would lie and manipulate to hide your own trail of shame and concoct one of wholecloth lies about another? Is your secret allegiance to the Communist Party why you do not wear a flag pin next to your heart? If by some stroke of all things unholy you attain the highest office in the land, is it your intention to overthrow the government of the United States? Is your husband also a Communist? Have you ever invited American Communists to the White House?

These are the questions we musst send to George Stephanopolous and Charlie Gibson. But since they have been so instrumental in aiding and abetting her, can we trust them to be True American Patriots or are they secret communist sympathesizers as well? What do we make of Mark Penn, Geoff Garin, even Chelsea Clinton? Where does this communist taint end?

If we must question the casual acquaintances of Sen. Obama, we must demand even more scrutiny of Sen. Clinton, who has known Communist associates.

After all, she started it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-bernstein/the-shame-of-hillary-clin_b_99912.html

I had long suspected it, but couldn't be sure. Now I know.

Sidney Blumenthal.

The nexus of all that the media will speak about for any given news cycle is Sidney Blumenthal. Of the Clinton campaign.

No kidding. Rev. Wright courtesy of Sidney Blumenthal. Bill Ayers courtesy of Sidney Blumenthal. Obama is Closet Commie courtesy of Sidney Blumenthal.

Thanks to Peter Dreier, via the Huffington Post, we now know who gets these delightful morning missives from Camp Clinton and why all things sound suspiciously, um, "Clintonian." 
 
The question is how to bring this media deception, that these folks in both the traditional MSM and now blog-world (which is becoming more and more "mainstream" everyday), are perpetrating on their unsuspecting readers and viewersm to an end.

One of Blumenthal's associates scoffs at the notion that there's anything vaguely conspiratorial about these emails and that a number of the people on the list-serve are also the authors of the pieces he sends out. "They're just Sid's friends," he told me. This is, in fact, the very definition of an echo chamber. People in the opinion-shaping business also seek to influence other opinion-makers, who then bounce their ideas through their overlapping outlets -- newspapers, magazines, talk shows, websites, blogs, and social and political fundraising circles. The connections are so incestuous that it's hard to untangle where the "feedback loop" begins and ends.

Among those whose names show up as recipients of Blumenthal's emails are writers and journalists Craig Unger, Edward Jay Epstein, Thomas Edsall (Politics Editor of the Huffington Post), Joe Conason, Gene Lyons (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist and author of The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton), John Judis, Eric Alterman, Christine Ockrent, David Brock, Reza Aslan, Harold Evans, and Josh Marshall; academics and think tankers Todd Gitlin (Columbia U sociologist), Karen Greenberg (NYU law school), Sean Wilentz (Princeton historian), Michael Lind, William M. Drozdiak, and Richard Parker; and former Clinton administration officials John Ritch, James Rubin, Derek Shearer, and Joe Wilson.

You know, during the "Pastor Whose Name Used to Rhyme with 'Light,' But Now Rhymes with 'Lit'" controversy, we heard about the outlandish notion that African Americans would actually believe that the government created the HIV/AIDS virus to wipe out the black population in this country. 

We brought up the infamous (although little remembered or known outside the black community) Tuskegee Institute Syphylis Experiment, that 40-year long (1932 to 1972) nightmare of black men being purposefully and deliberately infected with syphylis without their consent to temper some of the "plausible deniability" of the government. 

The media tried hard to paint even blacker (and more dangerously "unpatriotic and stupid") the black folks who gave that theory even a passing nod at being remotely possible. Even a guy with fancy Harvard degree -- no, not Obama -- but Dr. Leonard Horowitz is a "crackpot" and "wild-eyed conspiracy theorist."
 
Just an observation here, one that I know you'll disagree with vehemently, but is there a double-standard at work? Are black Americans less entitled to "non-mainstream" ideas than our white counter-parts? 

1. Fluoridated water is a communist plot.
In the 1950s and 60s, as the benefits of fluoride in preventing tooth decay became accepted, and local governments started pushing to change water treatment to add fluoride. White politicians, the John Birch Society, anti-communists and other "leaders" promoted the idea that fluoridation was bad for Americaand fought successfully in many communities to keep it out the water supply. (The first step onto the slippery slope of "socialized medicine.")

2. Silver amalgam fillings cause "insert problem name here."
Would black people be taken seriously if they claimed these fillings cause cancer, mercury poisoning, and other illnesses; if they demanded to have the fillings removed because they created chronic health issues, and created a rather lucrative dental industry to do it?

3. Childhood vaccinations cause epilepsy and autism.
Would black people be taken seriously if they proposed that giving their children immunization to designed prevent childhood disease created learning disabilities, autism, epilepsy or worse? If they added it was control black people and keep them from getting too "intelligent" would send you over the cliff, I'm sure, but if they claimed it was the leading cause of ADHD?

4. Alar is a dangerous food additive.
No less an expert that Meryl Streep explained the dangers of alar sprayed on fruit like apples. Despite the fact that you would have to eat a box-load of apples (or have that equivalent of the compound given to you each and every day) to ingest an amount capable of causing cancer, the issue gained widespread media attention in 1989. Would the same attention have been paid if Cicely Tyson had sounded the alarm?

5. Sitting too close to the TV can make you go blind, and irradiate you, causing sterilization.
Or so we have been told by parents. CRTs were once thought to emit vast quantities of radiation, too. But reasonable folks at the FDA and NIH, say no. But would you believe it was harmless if the good news came from researchers at Howard University (an Historically Black College or University, HBCU) and not from the good folks up the road at Johns Hopkins?

6. Getting a transfusion or organs donated by a black person will turn a white person "black."
A 2002 PBS documentary looked at the history of blood in current society and its cultural and historical significance. In the second part of a four-part series, it examines blood during war times and demonstrates how, through the necessity of providing soldiers with blood on battlefronts, the logistics of storing and transporting blood were improved. The second hour also details the dark side of blood, including the Nazis’ use of blood-type to further their racist policies and the segregation of the US blood supply by race. Charles Drew, MD, a prominent African-American expert in blood, who ran the very successful Plasma for Britain campaign but was barred from donating his own blood, is an example of how blood policy can be intricately connected to social policies of the times.

So, are black Americans really that different than our white counterparts when it comes believing outlandish, conspiracy-based and irrational theories? Or are you (the dominant culture) more likely to give yourselves a pass when it comes to the crackpot calling the kettle black?

Over the past few days, unlike a number of you, I was mightily impressed with the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. late of Trinity United Church of Christ. And coming from me, that is a pretty big compliment. After all, you're reading words keyed by the most marginal black Catholic around.

Full confession -- heck, I haven't been to confession since I was a teenager, haven't taken communion since then as well. Being taught in the tradition that you have actually to go into the confessional and say it  out loud, not this new-fangled stuff I've heard where you just silently pray for forgiveness while making your way up to the altar and then stick out your hands to receive your piece of the Lord and Savior. And I rarely get all "I'm Catholic!" unless we're electing a new Pope (and like everyone else I'm suddenly an expert Catholic theologian and historian.) What has kept me even marginally in the fold, is I like the history and pomp and circumstance of the Church. I liked it better in Latin. Like most Catholics, I'm not literate in Latin. I know "In nomine de Patri, et Fili et Spiritus Sancti ." Once upon a time I could recite the Lord's Prayer and Hail Mary in Latin. (But at the time, I was a child performing what amounted to rote memorization tricks.)

As I grew up, I also grew away from the Church. Somehow being told I was supposed to be angry and disapproving of women who used birth control, or wanted out of abusive marriages by way of divorce just didn't sit well with me. I grew wary, and weary, of solutions to problems whose answers always seemed to be more passive than I was willing to be. And I believed then and still do in evolution. The seven-day theory just never added up for me, not in comparison to what I could see with my own eyes.

During the war -- you know the "big" one (at least for my generation) Vietnam, seeing persons of faith make big -- and sometimes very scary sacrifices -- like self-immolation -- helped me frame my growing dissolution with a war we should not have been fighting. (But mind you, I am one of those "military brats" people joke about.) Watching the Berrigan brothers and other priests and priestly types gave me reason to not abandon the Church entirely.

Later, there were the nuns and padres who were killed in Central and South America. By then I had moved further from the Church but still felt a kinship with some of the more radical of the clergy. (I never felt the same thing for Mother Teresa. It wasn't where she ministered, but something about the "why" that didn't jibe with me.)

Along the rocky, switchbacks we take to adulthood, I knew of people who became "born-again" and embraced religions and sects I disapproved of. I had friends who suddenly started muttering "PTL" any time any thing happened. The diner had one last cheese danish ("PTL") or a streetlight changed just in time so they wouldn't have to idle for three minutes longer in traffic ("PTL") or Reagan got re-elected ("Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!").

These once-tolerant friends became inflexible and intolerant of the mistakes of others. They became unrecognizable. They didn't go out  dancing with the rest of the gang. Their FM radios got tuned down to the low end of the dial where non-stop sermons played, and driving out the demons -- which suddenly appeared everywhere (look! there goes one now!) -- was a 24-hour, seven day a week job.

It was easier to stay a marginal Catholic than to deal with the impending doom and gloom and Second Coming and plagues and locusts. What did not change through the years was an interest in the historical aspect of religion. How were various beliefs and various belief systems intertwined and why did this or that group develop, revise and then abandon their faiths. The rich stories and songs and tales that found their counterparts in branches of that religious tree -- though taken now as fiction and not fact -- sometimes play out on our secular stage.
 
All of that exposition is for your contextual map of what I am about to say. (Context, we are told has no place in this election year.) Praise for religion or the religious is not something that comes easy for me.

Today, we watched a man of faith step away from a man who brought him  to faith. But what most of us missed (and I admit I didn't get it until early this morning as the sun was rising -- well before the rest of the drama played out) was what we witnessed yesterday.

Jeremiah Wright did not "throw Barack Obama under the bus" nor did Obama push Wright down a flight of stairs. "Father" Wright sacrficed himself to let his "son" Obama go free.

The media, hyperbolic bloggers, the "vast right wing conspiracy", Republicans, Hillary Clinton and some Democrats believed that the "father" and the "son" were one and the same. What Wright said, so said Obama. What Wright wrote, so wrote Obama. What Wright thought, so thought Obama.

Obama did not want to cast out his  "father." But after not the Moyers interview (where the calm and reasonable Wright appeared -- and we all were impressed), not the NAACP dinner (where the entertainer and educator appeared -- and we all were impressed) and not even after the speech portion of the National Press Club breakfast (where Daniel appeared in the lion's den) was Obama ready to cast him out, but only after his self-sacrifice (where the defiant Wright appeared ready to be burned at the stake, taunting his audience and encouraging us to "hate" him, hate Wright) was Obama able to cast him off. 

As I said, it took me awhile to see what Wright was doing, putting daylight between him and his "son." Re-defining "son" in an image so different than "father" that the lazy media would have no excuse any more to confuse or conflate Wright and Obama into the singular Jekyll/Hyde (as Chris Matthews did, only to be confounded when reminded by Howard Fineman of Newsweek, that the analogy didn't work  because they (Wright and Obama) are two separate people.)

Thus we come to this afternoon. Obama, visibly both pained and angry, resigned to do what is most difficult (for the second time in his young life) -- cast off a father (or father figure) to be able to achieve his own goals.

The unsung hero -- yes, hero, not villain -- in this drama is Jeremiah Wright. His motives are misunderstood by most. His mind is far too complex and brilliant to be pigeon-holed into someone who was only thinking of himself, or book deals to come. As long as he was a millstone around the neck of Barack Obama, Barack could not be free. Jeremiah made it possible for Barack to cleanly cut the ties.

(Apologies if this double-posts.)

3:50 p.m ET.: Who the hell is she to disrespect the Rev. Soares who came on MSNBC to discuss Rev. Wright's speech and Q&A today?  

Excuse me but, I am effing livid!

Her "Oh come on!!!" was effing disingenuous at best, and goddamn rude. MSNBC is now FOX.

From the Boston Globe Editorial Page:

 

AMERICANS have learned to take with a grain of salt much of the rhetoric in a campaign like the current Democratic donnybrook between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Still, there are some red lines that should never be crossed. Clinton did so Tuesday morning, the day of the Pennsylvania primary, when she told ABC's "Good Morning America" that, if she were president, she would "totally obliterate" Iran if Iran attacked Israel.

This foolish and dangerous threat was muted in domestic media coverage. But it reverberated in headlines around the world.

Responding with understatement to a question in the British House of Lords, the foreign minister responsible for Asia, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, said of Clinton's implication of a mushroom cloud over Iran: "While it is reasonable to warn Iran of the consequences of it continuing to develop nuclear weapons and what those real consequences bring to its security, it is probably not prudent in today's world to threaten to obliterate any other country and in many cases civilians resident in such a country."

A less restrained reaction came from an editorial in the Saudi-based paper Arab News. Being neighbors of Iran, the Saudis and the other Gulf Arabs have the most to fear from Iran's nuclear program and its drive to become the dominant power in the Gulf.

But precisely because they are most at risk from Iran's regional ambitions, the Saudis want a carefully considered American approach to Iran, one that balances firmness and diplomatic engagement.

The Saudi paper called Clinton's nuclear threat "the foreign politics of the madhouse," saying, "it demonstrates the same doltish ignorance that has distinguished Bush's foreign relations."

The Saudis are not always sound advisers on American foreign policy. But they understand that Rambo rhetoric like Clinton's only plays into the hands of Iranian hard-liners who want to plow ahead with efforts to attain a nuclear weapons capability. They argue that Iran must have that capability in order to deter the United States from doing what Clinton threatened to do.

While Clinton has hammered Obama for supporting military strikes in Pakistan, her comments on Iran are much more far-reaching. She seems not to realize that she undermined Iranian reformists and pragmatists. The Iranian people have been more favorable to America than any other in the Gulf region or the Middle East.

A presidential candidate who lightly commits to obliterating Iran - and, presumably, all the children, parents, and grandparents in Iran - should not be answering the White House phone at any time of day or night.

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

There really is very little I can add. Foolish, dangerous, doltish ignorance and Rambo rhetoric. Hillary Rodham Clinton in a nutshell. Perhaps we would be better served if it was in the "nuthouse."