In 1955, my father had been a Captain in the Air Force in World War II, had passed a qualifying examination to skip undergraduate study and go right into a graduate program at the University of Chicago, and had a good chance of a job as a statistician with the Bureau of Labor Statistics in DC.
Then, his world turned upside down. He found out that he was not actually hired. He realized that his father's subscription to a magazine with socialist leanings had stood in his way. Also, his graduate thesis about the Meatpackers' Union in Chicago, and the interpretation of their policies, were used against him.
A man by the name of Joseph McCarthy had perpetrated a paranoid hoax on the American people. He began a process of marginalization of intellectuals, people of Jewish background, immigrants, people who had come up the hard way and wanted a better world. If they happened to know someone who had spoken up about the labor movement or any liberal cause, they could lose their job, or never be hired for one.
It was in this climate that my father first entered the US labor force, fresh out of the Air Force and graduate school.
Because of this guilt by association, he was reduced in a time of high employment, to sell Encyclopedia Brittanica door-to-door to support my mother and myself. From the time I was born to the time I was five years old, my father could not find a permanent job. He had served as a navigator on missions over Germany and had flown through University of Chicago, and no real job offer...for six years!!
This kind of thing, this kind of guilt by association, has got to stop.
Sarah Palin has the qualities of Joseph McCarthy. She's folksy, frantic, impressionistic and charismatic.
Let's hope that, like Joseph McCarthy, she'll have a stunning and sudden fall from grace.
In any case, she will fail to drag the Obama campaign into the mud with her. Her tactics are beyond those of Karl Rove. They are not secretive or slimy.
They are outright bombast and lies, hurled thoughtlessly. They are slander and libel with no fact.
May we be saved from the likes of Sarah Palin and Joseph McCarthy now, and forever.