In
PJ Lifestyle today I discuss the Left's increasingly common practice of demonizing, rather than debating, its opponents:
For standing by her putative man, the exposed Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin has for the first time received some negative press attention amid the avalanche of coverage calling her “smart,” “accomplished” and “elegant.” But still off-limits has been any discussion in the mainstream media of her numerous ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
It’s not that the evidence
is lacking. It’s that the politically correct elites have forbidden
examination or discussion of it. Even to question whether Abedin has any
connections with the Brotherhood, and whether those connections had any
influence over Hillary Clinton’s decisions as Secretary of State, is to
demonstrate that one is a bigot, a racist, an Islamophobe, and a
hatemonger, as well as a hysterical paranoiac.
Indeed, one infallible way to determine a stranger’s political
positions on just about anything is to ask if he or she thinks Huma
Abedin has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. If the stranger responds with
righteous outrage, you’re dealing with a doctrinaire, mainstream
liberal. If, on the other hand, the response is, “Yes, that is something
that should be investigated,” you’re face-to-face with a Tea Partier.
That’s why Huma Abedin is the new Alger Hiss. For decades, ever since
the former State Department official and advisor to President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt was outed as a Soviet spy in the most celebrated
espionage case of the nation’s history, the leftist establishment
stoutly insisted that Hiss was innocent. Even today, some refuse to acknowledge the “present-day consensus among historians…that Alger Hiss was in fact a Soviet spy.”
But the controversy over whether or not Hiss was a Communist and a
spy for the Soviets was (and is) not just a dispute over the evidence.
It was, for the Left, a measure of whether or not you were a decent
human being. Anna Roosevelt Halsted, the daughter of Eleanor and
Franklin, said in 1956
that Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was “contemptible” and clearly
“out to get” Hiss. Her mother said at a 1961 dinner party that Chambers
was “utterly contemptible and probably a psychopathic liar.” Adlai
Stevenson, present at the same gathering of liberal glitterati, agreed
that the prosecution of Hiss was “one of the darker chapters in U.S.
history.”
Such views were universal on the Left in those days and thereafter,
despite the fact that it was abundantly clear from the beginning that
Hiss was what Chambers said he was. But the denials began immediately,
and with Hiss himself: when Chambers produced classified State
Department documents that Hiss had given him when they were both
Communist spies and the documents were proven to have been typed on
Hiss’s typewriter, Hiss accused Chambers of “forgery by typewriter.”
Even today, some claim that military intelligence agents fabricated a
typewriter identical to Hiss’s in order to frame him, although they
lack a motive. Chambers is supposed to have falsely accused Hiss out of
rage at Hiss’s rejection of his homosexual advances, but how this
Communist spy and rejected homosexual convinced military intelligence
operatives to forge documents to frame the object of spurned affections
has never been explained.
Nonetheless, right up to the moment when material from the Soviet
archives revealed that Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy, and even after
that, if you didn’t love Hiss, you weren’t just wrong: you were a bad
person. It was reminiscent of Senator John McCain’s 2012 defense of Huma Abedin
on the Senate floor, when he thundered that “these allegations about
Huma, and the report from which they are drawn, are nothing less than an
unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable woman, a dedicated
American, and a loyal public servant.
There is more.
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