The latest McCarthyism

After FDR disgracefully rounded up Japanese-Americans during World War II, locking them up in relocation camps, Americans promised: 

We’ll never do that again.

{mosads}After the infamous House Un-American Affairs Committee destroyed lives and careers by questioning the patriotism of anybody who worked in Hollywood, Americans again promised: We’ll never do that again.

And after Sen. Joseph McCarthy disgustingly branded as a Communist agent anybody who just happened to be a liberal or worked in the State Department, Americans promised: We’ll never do that again, either.

Yet here we are. Another witch-hunt. Another roundup. Another HUAC. Another burst of McCarthyism. Led this time by Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee — who, under the guise of national security, is doing exactly what George W. Bush, to his credit, vowed after Sept. 11 never to do: launch a wholesale attack on all Muslims and accuse them of either being terrorists themselves or condoning terrorism.

Pete King doesn’t look like McCarthy, but he sure sounds like him: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a Muslim?” And, like McCarthy, King bases his hearings on a bogus set of charges: his accusation that 85 percent of American mosques are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists, and that American Muslims have refused to cooperate with law enforcement officials in combating terrorism. Neither of these is true. In fact, a recent Duke University/University of North Carolina study showed that 48 out of 120 Muslims suspected of plotting terror attacks in the U.S. since Sept. 11 were turned in by fellow Muslims.

The truth is that both the hearings and the chairman himself are a major embarrassment to the 112th Congress. It is profoundly un-American to scapegoat all members of any religion. And besides, King is a strange person to chair the hearings, since he’s one of Congress’s only open supporters of terrorism. In the 1980s, as a major supporter of the Irish Republican Army, he declared: “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the IRA for it.” 

But the real issue is not who’s leading the hearings, but why they’re being held in the first place. And the man responsible for that is not Pete King, but Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

This is the latest evidence of a House out of control. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) insists on delivering her own State of the Union response — and gets away with it. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) threatens wholesale subpoenas. Birthers continue their insane conspiracy theory. House Tea Partiers pledge to shut down the government. And what does Boehner do? Nothing. The inmates are running the asylum.

How times have changed. In 2009, when House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) considered holding hearings on whether George Bush and Dick Cheney should be tried as war criminals, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said: No, you won’t.

Pelosi demonstrated what’s been totally lacking so far from John Boehner: leadership.

Bill Press is host of the nationally syndicated “Bill Press Show.”