MoveOn Does McCarthy

Gee, I wasn't the only one who saw the distinct resemblance in MoveOn's vicious smear attack on General David Petraeus and the downfall of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Boston Globe runs an op-ed today from Peter Feaver using the title "MoveOn's McCarthy Moment." Hugh Hewitt mentioned it yesterday in the LA Times, Dean Barnett saw the resemblance – but also points to a wider problem. Feaver hits MoveOn pretty hard today:

The MoveOn.org ad is vicious, and would garner comment even if it were merely one more primal scream in the coarse blogosphere debate over Iraq. But it is not an angry e-mail or blog entry. It is a deliberate attack on the senior Army commander, in a major daily newspaper, with the intention of destroying as much of his credibility as possible so that his military advice could be more easily rejected by antiwar members of Congress.

The attack was part of an elaborate effort to undermine public support for the Iraq war, and was foreshadowed by an unnamed Democratic senator who told a reporter, "No one wants to call [Petraeus] a liar on national TV . . . The expectation is that the outside groups will do this for us." The effort is funded by powerful special interests, and has all the trappings of a major political campaign.

Precisely because it is so vicious, so public, and so deliberate, the attack on Petraeus cannot be ignored by either side in the Iraq debate. Supporters of the war are duty-bound, like Joseph Welch, to rise and ask of war opponents, "Have you left no sense of decency?" Antiwar members of Congress, like Senator McCarthy's allies, are obliged to answer.

And we did – and the media took notice, too. The Democratic politicians know there is a real problem here, too. That's why they are bailing.