This article appeared in my Google news feed.  I read it.  It may be the worse political article ever written.

Keep calling him #MoscowMitch: McConnell is finally running scared
Are Trump and his traitorous enablers modern-day McCarthyists?

Excuse me?  Is not calling Trump and his supporters traitors the real McCarthyism?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t like it when you call him #MoscowMitch. He hates it so much that he’ll accuse you of being a McCarthyist for doing so. If the accusation was untrue — that is, if McConnell, President Donald Trump and other Republicans weren’t empowering Russia at the expense of America for their personal benefit — then #MoscowMitch and talk of collusion in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign would be unfair, even unjust. As the facts currently stand, however, it is a perfectly fair label.

So Salon’s position is that every accusation about Trump and McConnell being Russian assets is true?

They still are not McCarthyist, though, because McCarthyism wasn’t really about hating Russia — it was about hating liberals.

No, it was about hating liberals that sided with the Socialists.

A quick history lesson. Joseph McCarthy was a United States senator from Wisconsin who served between 1947 and 1957. His political heyday, however, lasted from 1950 to 1954. On February 9, 1950, he delivered an infamous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he claimed without evidence that he had “a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” Notice that he did not say “Russians” or “traitors to Russia.” This isn’t because the Soviet Union (the empire controlled by Russia during the bulk of the 20th century) wasn’t America’s primary geopolitical enemy at the time, or that there wasn’t a valid and widespread fear of that nation. Rather it is because the assumption wasn’t simply that people would betray America to Russia, but that they would do so because the Soviet Union’s authoritarian left-wing ideology was being conflated with all forms of liberalism. When McCarthy warned of “Communists,” he was using a dog whistle to vilify anyone whose beliefs were to the left of what he and his supporters deemed acceptable.

This is historical drivel.

It turns out that after 60 years of maturation, Joseph McCarthy was spot-on correct.  The threat wasn’t that we’d become a Soviet state.  It was that Liberals would adopt Socialist or Communist policies and create a Communist United States.

Which, considering the popularity and power of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and the way Bernie gained momentum in 2016 and 2020, the risk of a Socialist United States is real.

This isn’t to say that his tactics aren’t still used, of course. They are — but by conservatives. Whenever you hear liberals described as “communists” or “socialists,” or liberal policy proposals denounced as preemptively authoritarian, it is because men and women are following McCarthyist tactics. Their goal isn’t to protect America from possible treason, but to intimidate liberals by forcing them to fend off false accusations about their ideology. It is a classic example of a straw man fallacy but made worse by the facts that (a) it can be used to scare people into silence and (b) it means that policy proposals which might help innocent people won’t be implemented.

Bernie is a Socialist.  He calls himself that.  AOC is a member of the Democratic Socialist of America.  Many Left-wing politicians have adopted policies or rhetoric straight from the DSA.  Calling them Socialist is not McCarthyism.  It’s dead-on accurate.

Where does McConnell factor into all of this?

Well, considering that the intelligence community unanimously agrees that Russia is still actively interfering in America’s elections, it stands to reason that patriots on both sides of the aisle should want to beef up our election security so that our democracy will remain intact. Yet McConnell has obstructed legislation that would do precisely this, and the only logical explanation for him doing so is that he knows Russian meddling is likely to benefit Republican candidates. When he was called out on this with the insulting but deserved epithet “Moscow Mitch,” he responded with a Senate speech in which he whined, “Keeping our republic means we can’t let modern-day McCarthyism win. So here is my commitment: No matter how much they lie, no matter how much they bully, I will not be intimidated.”

What they are talking about is HR1.  This is what HR1 will do:

• Offer online voter registration
• Establish automatic voter registration
• Allow voter registration on the day of a federal election
• Allow voters to correct their registration information at the polls
• Restore voting rights to felons after they leave prison
• Offer at least 15 days of early voting
• States must follow new rules before purging voters from registration lists.
• The bill also has several measures related to campaign finance or ethics
• Require super PACs to disclose donors who give more than $10,000
• Require major online platforms to maintain an online public record of people who buy at least $500 worth of political ads
• Use public financing to match small-dollar donations to House and presidential candidates.

WOW…  It seems like the purpose of this bill is to guarantee election fraud.  Not just that, after the whole Joaquin Castro Trump donors Tweet, making donors public is just going to be an intimidation tactic used to prevent donations to GOP campaigns.  This bill will do nothing to secure our elections from the Russians.  It will turn the US into California or Chicago will total Democrat domination through fraud and abuse.

Also, no one has ever made the argument that the Russians changed a single vote.  So this is the equivalent of the push to “close the gunshow loophole” after Parkland or Sandy Hook.  Totally irrelevant to what actually happened.

But Salon is making the argument that McConnell blocking this bill to enable Democrat voter fraud makes him agent of Moscow.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat who has actually been accused of being a traitor simply because of her politics, responded to an analogous McConnell tweet by writing on Twitter: “McCarthyism is the practice of baselessly accusing political opponents of being communists as unjust grounds for targeting & harassment. You are blocking action to protect US elections despite official DoJ pleas. That doesn’t make you a communist. It just makes you a bad leader.”

Ocasio-Cortez is absolutely correct, of course. McConnell isn’t being accused of sympathy to Moscow because his opponents lack valid grounds for criticism and are resorting to a straw man fallacy. He is being accused of this because his political actions are inscrutable except as those of a man who so badly wants his party to win that he doesn’t care if Russia needs to be empowered for that to happen.

The Russians didn’t guarantee a Trump win.  The Russian collusion argument has been the greatest act of McCarthyism since, and maybe including, McCarthy.

Salon doesn’t call bullshit on itself because it just assumes that every accusation is true.

In other words: We need a culture where people stop throwing stones at each other, but if rocks are going to be pelted regardless, anyone aligned with Trump needs to think very carefully about whether their house is made of glass.

This, like everything the Left-does is pure projection.  Russia did not turn a single vote.  That was the DOJ’s conclusion.

McConnell has very good reasons to block a vote on a bill that would turn US elections into Chicago elections.

The Democrats have adopted the policy of pushing a lie that everyone who is not a Democrat is a stooge of Russia, which is the real McCarthyism.  But as to not let that ugly label stick to themselves, they call denial of that charge McCarthyism.

This article is upside-down and wrong on everything, and calling the Senate Majority Leader Moscow Mitch is about the ugliest slur I can imagine.