Bill Moyers - your fifteen minutes called, you are overdue
His interviews with Joseph Campbell were exceptional but he is not at the top of his game any more -- has not been for some time.
From
American Thinker:
Bill Moyers Sees a Ghost
Bill Moyers saw a ghost: "The specter stood there, watching the screen, a snickering smile on his stubbled face. Sure enough, it was the ghost of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin farm boy who grew up to become one of the most contemptible thugs in American politics."
I almost wish all the rest of us could see only the ghost of Bill Moyers, but he is still with us, this time lashing out to belittle Congressman Allen West of Florida. West offended Moyers by daring to say, "I believe there are 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It's called the Congressional Progressive Caucus."
This observation so enraged Moyers that he hurled the most vicious epithet in the repertoire of the left: he compared West to McCarthy, who, according to Moyers, "seized on fear and ignorance to announce his discovery of a conspiracy within: Communist subversives who had infiltrated the government."
But Moyers commits a fatal mistake by continuing to maintain that McCarthy had no evidence for his claim, the key element that the left brandishes to discredit McCarthy in the historical record. Moyers is hoisted all the more severely with his own petard in light of his framing his attacks on McCarthy and Rep. West with references to George Orwell's 1984 and the author's warning to beware, in a paraphrase Moyers uses, "the amnesia that sets in when we flush events down the memory hole, leaving us at the mercy of only what we know today."
Actually, it is Moyers who is flushing events down the memory hole to bolster his opinions. In the 1930s and '40s, the federal government was indeed infiltrated from top to bottom by Soviet-directed operatives in far greater numbers than McCarthy estimated. We know this due to the revelations in 1995 by NSA and CIA of the Venona files, over 500,000 messages sent in code from Moscow to their agents-in-place in the United States.
Time to gracefully retire from public life Bill. Allan West has more intelligence in his little pinky. Bill -- your followers may be content to believe your misstatements but there are some of us out here who read history.
Posted by DaveH at December 18, 2013 12:41 PM