There is, for some reason, a desire on the right to continuously play into the hands of the left on Joe McCarthy. Joe Biden’s son was brought into the army at age 43 and then, within a month, has been booted out because he has tested positive for cocaine. Obviously a minor scandal for this administration and representative of the moral laxity of the left. Not so fast. This is from The Weekly Standard and comes with the title, Biden Cocaine Scandal Mirrors Joe McCarthy Scandal just so you cannot miss the core point that the story is absolutely not about Biden but McCarthy. The final paras bring up this supposed parallel from the 1950s.

A more instructive parallel, however, might be to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, of all people. When one of McCarthy’s Senate aides, G. David Schine, was drafted into the Army and sent to basic training at Ft. Monmouth, N.J., Roy Cohn, another McCarthy aide and reputedly Schine’s lover, intervened persistently to obtain an officer’s commission for Schine. When the Army protested about repeated threats and interference from the senator’s office, McCarthy charged that the Army was attempting to retaliate against his investigations into communist subversion in the armed forces. The televised hearings that were held during April-June 1954 to investigate the matter — the famous Army-McCarthy hearings — not only revealed that McCarthy and his staff had repeatedly wielded their influence on behalf of Schine, but had done so despite Schine’s complete lack of qualifications for an officer’s commission.

The differences between Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Biden are self-evident, of course. But just as the effort to make G. David Schine an Army officer taught the country something about Senator McCarthy, so the brief, inglorious naval career of Hunter Biden tells us something about Vice President Biden — and the culture of entitlement in political Washington that has tarnished the Navy.

And why did I find it? Because it is one of the picks on Powerline who must themselves think this is one of the major issues of our time to give it such prominence. They don’t get it, do they? The lessons McCarthy should have taught us is how easy it is for our enemies to penetrate to the highest ranks of an Administration, which you can read about in Diana West’s American Betrayal. Harry Hopkins (who?) ought to be a lesson we can learn from but apparently the only lesson is that McCarthy may or may not have used influence to get one of his assistants an officer’s commission.

If we are looking for instructive parallels today, what McCarthy did sixty years ago would be the last last place you should look but with some people it’s never a bad time to kick a good man when he’s down.