McCarthy: From Budding Tyrant to Disgruntled Prepubescent Girl

I want to dissent. I want to dissent oh-so-very badly. ...But since I'm not dissenting, I'm going to just agree with everything I liked and ignore the lack of evidence pointing to his major argument and the fact a lot of his evidence is in fact contradictory to his claim that TV in the Cold War also uttered defiance and encouraged resistance against a hyperconformist culture.

Now considering all I did in high school and college was study the Cold War and make fun of McCarthy, I have to say chapter 5 was a delightfully good time and all I'm going to talk about. McCarthy being a moronic psychopath wasn't very flattering on TV. Still, there was a good 4 year period where McCarthy was on TV, making noise, and getting everything he demanded to the point of being treated even better than former president Truman by the media. A whole fifteen minutes better!

Without a doubt McCarthy being so widely publicized on TV when he blindly attacked the wrong people (Army vs. McCarthy hearings in 1954, for example) with improperly quoted excerpts (like no politician has ever done and never will do again) damaged him. However, a large credit to McCarthy's defamation would better be associated with him taking it too far: attacking the republicans just the same was he did the democrats (pp. 102-3). Props to McCarthy for being an nondiscriminatory brainless moron, but still it's not the best move politically.

While the sudden turn of the media denying McCarthy's air time was significant, and the FCC not forcing it on them was an excellent point (p. 95), I still don't see this as being a sudden change from conformity. There was still a strong sense of conformity: communist imperialism: evil, capitalist imperialism: heavenly. Just McCarthy took his momentary power trip too far by calling everyone everywhere who ever slighted him and made his testicles wither a communist. To make matters worse, once he stopped getting his way he just got more reckless and whinier. That's not exactly the most flattering combination. Consequently he landed face first in a pile of the president and the media's collective vomit.

So long rant short: Doherty's evidence is excellent. The only problem is it tells a story not reflective of his main argument, which I'm going to guess is why he often fails to draw any conclusions and instead creates a running cultural and historical dialogue rather than any strong argument. ...That counts as assenting, yes?