Laundry's Dry, Houds are Free, Free

There isn't a better meditation on our current situation that this one, by Driftglass:

http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2012/07/independence-day.html

In this piece he quotes extensively from the late Steve Gilliard, who quotes from Joe Conason on the perfidy of Ann Coulter. It's worth requoting here, the Conason bit I mean:

Coulter discusses McCarthy's impressive high school record in considerable loving detail. But somehow she neglects to mention McCarthy's first moment in the national spotlight. That was his infamous 1949 campaign on behalf of Nazi S.S. officers who were convicted of war crimes for the massacre of American troops in the town of Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. On their orders, 83 American prisoners of war had been murdered by Waffen S.S. machine-gunners. The S.S. officers were sentenced to death, but McCarthy insisted that the entire case was a frame-up, with confessions obtained by horrific torture. He intervened in Senate hearings on the case and lied repeatedly during his defense of the Nazi murderers. His most spectacular claim was that the American investigators had crushed the testicles of German prisoners as an interrogation technique. McCarthy was later shown to have served as the pawn of neo-Nazi and communist provocateurs who were using the Malmedy case to whip up anti-American sentiment in postwar Germany. The main source for his false charges concerning Malmedy was a Germany lawyer named Rudolf Aschenauer, whose closest ties were to the postwar Nazi underground and to American right-wing isolationists, but who has also been identified as a communist agent. Aschenauer testified at U.S. Senate hearings in Germany that he had passed information about Malmedy to McCarthy. The S.S. officers were guilty, as the Senate report confirmed -- although most of them later got their death sentences commuted in a gesture to former Nazi officials who aided the West in the Cold War. But McCarthy had succeeded in his larger purpose, winning publicity for himself and casting a negative light on the war-crimes trials.

As Driftglass points out later in his piece, the question of importance now is, why do people like Ann Coulter still get endless face time on major television news shows, when it is a known and proven fact that Coulter is nothing better than a liar and blatant propagandist whose lifes work is to destroy America's historical memory and replace it with right wing mythologies. Fox simply displays its commitment to the big lies by featuring Coulter, but the rest of the networks?

I've read enough World War II history to know about Malmedy. Yet this fact--the facts about McCarthy and Malmedy--I did not know until today. This is a remarkable black hole, America suffers. It widens daily. We all suffer from its existence.

Today is July 5th. We are on the downhill to November.