by George Rasley, ConservativeHQ.com Editor
In 1948, conflicting testimony offered to the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) by former Democratic State Department official Alger Hiss and Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers began a dramatic two-year long investigation into which one of the two was lying about his Communist associations and espionage for the Soviet Union.
In the end, after two trials and an extensive investigation by HUAC, Alger Hiss, the Phi Beta Kappa Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law graduate, clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, temporary secretary-general of the United Nations Charter Conference, Director of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs, and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was convicted of perjury and sentenced to prison.
However, Hiss, even in the face of damning physical evidence produced by Whittaker Chambers – the famous “Pumpkin Papers” – never admitted that he perjured himself or that he had been a Communist infiltrator and spy.
In maintaining his innocence Alger Hiss was supported by generations of prominent liberals who adamantly refused to accept that Hiss was guilty.
Indeed, despite the overwhelming evidence produced by Whittaker Chambers and others in the HUAC hearings, in FBI investigations, in Hiss’s two trials and in Whittaker Chambers’ great testimonial autobiography Witness, there are still prominent liberals who refuse to accept that Hiss was a Soviet spy.
The refusal to accept that Hiss was guilty is the proximate cause of what editor Patrick A. Swan called “the schism in the American soul” in his collection of essays and articles Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and the Schism in the American Soul, ISI Books, Wilmington, Delaware (2003).*
Among the Left-leaning political class this refusal to accept objective truth as the standard by which all matters must be judged did not begin with the Hiss – Chambers conflict and the Hiss trials.
As our friend Diana West documented in her must-read book American Betrayal it may be traced to the pre-World War II penetration of America by Soviet Communism and a body of lies perpetrated by our government that influence international relations and public policy to this day.
Today, we see much the same dynamic – only much worse – in the Democrats’ refusal to look objectively at the actions of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
In the Hiss case, Democrats were at least able to police their own, and when Hiss first came under suspicion (well before he was outed as a Communist by Whittaker Chambers) there was a quiet effort to ease him out of his sensitive position at the State Department.
Today, as the public evidence of the Clintons’ perfidy and avarice piles up it is impossible to find anyone on the Left or in the Democratic Party who will admit that the Uranium One deal was not in the national interest of the United States, that the donations to the Clinton Foundation that accompanied it were at best ill-advised and at worst pay-to-play payments, and that the “dirty dossier” that was pedaled to the media to discredit Donald Trump is phony and was a hit piece paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
Perhaps one of the most egregious public examples of the “death of truth” phenomenon among Democrats occurred on Tucker Carlson’s program on Fox News when California Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA-30) joined Carlson for a discussion of the latest news about Hillary Clinton, but instead challenged the host on the Trump tax plan when asked about new revelations about Hillary Clinton, the DNC and alleged Russia collusion.
“You only have me on to talk about nonsense,” Sherman claimed, Carlson pressed again on the new reports that the Clinton camp and DNC paid for the Trump Dossier, which in turn sourced information from Russians.
“You’ve got no defense for a Trump impeachment,” Sherman said, adding that Carlson shouldn’t debate “impeaching a private citizen.”
Sherman said examining the Clinton campaign after she lost is like the folks investigating President Richard Nixon for Watergate turning their attention to defeated opponent Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.).
Carlson asked if Sherman had ever been lobbied by the Podesta Group, whose name has come up in the Russia reports.
Sherman said he had, but that questions like that were “irrelevant.”
The same dynamic applies to Democrats when asked about Fusion GPS – the source of the phony “dirty dossier.”
According to the Washington Post, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid more than $9 million to a law firm that, in turn, retained political consulting firm Fusion GPS, which commissioned the dossier.
“We now know that the DNC and the Clinton campaign, through a series of middle men, essentially paid a foreign agent to gin up accusations from Russia, which got injected into our election,” the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel explained on Fox Business Network.
She said many in the media have pushed the narrative that it was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambition to help Trump win the 2016 election, but the only fact that the intelligence community unanimously agrees on is that Putin wanted to sow distrust and turmoil in American democracy.
“If that was the goal, how much better could it be than potentially having a dossier that the FBI ended up using to start an entire investigation into a sitting U.S. president?” Strassel said. “It certainly has caused a lot of turmoil.”
She noted that Democrats, such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA-28), have spent months trying to stymie Republican efforts to find out who financed the dossier.
Strassel concluded by observing that Democrats have been trying to protect Fusion GPS from having to answer any questions, which makes one wonder if some Democratic members of Congress were aware of who funded the dossier and tried to prevent that information from coming out.
Indeed.
Just as in the late 1940s and 1950s the American Left and the Democratic Party did their best to try to convince their fellow citizens that the objective truth of Communist penetration of American governmental and cultural institutions did not exist, and that Alger Hiss was not a spy – and they maintain that lie to this day, so Democrats and their Leftist allies in the media maintain the lie that Hillary and Bill Clinton did nothing worth investigating in the Uranium One deal and that the funding and sources of the “dirty dossier” are irrelevant, as Congressman Sherman put it.
Millions of Americans believe otherwise, and the schism in the American soul is only growing wider and deeper as Democrats refuse to participate in anything that smacks of applying standards of objective truth and the rule of law to the Clintons.
As the conduct of Representatives Sherman and Schiff demonstrates, Democrats have become so corrupted by Hillary and Bill Clinton that the ability to seek and speak for the truth and reject what Diana West calls “normalizing the abnormal” has died completely. Until Democrats rid themselves of the Clintons, and stop covering for them, the Democratic Party cannot be considered a legitimate political party; it is merely one cog in a vast conspiracy to justify and cover up the Clinton’s crimes.
*The Left’s attempts to exonerate Alger Hiss continue to this day. Alger Hiss: Framed: A New Look at the Case That Made Nixon Famous by ex-pat novelist Joan Brady was recently released in America.
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George Rasley is editor of Richard Viguerie’s ConservativeHQ.com. A veteran of over 300 political campaigns, he served on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle, as Director of Policy and Communication for Congressman Adam Putnam (FL-12) then Vice Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, and as spokesman for Rep. Mac Thornberry now-Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
Reprinted with permission from ConservativeHQ.com.
Mr Rasley,
I have to wonder now how you feel about Trump and Russia. In this article, you compare Hiss and Clinton. Couldn’t you now rewrite this article and simply change Clinton to Trump?
Allow me to help:
As the conduct of Representatives Nunes and Gaetz demonstrates, Republicans have become so corrupted by Donald Trump that the ability to seek and speak for the truth and reject what Diana West calls “normalizing the abnormal” has died completely. Until Republicans rid themselves of the Trumps, and stop covering for them, the Republican Party cannot be considered a legitimate political party; it is merely one cog in a vast conspiracy to justify and cover up the Trump’s crimes.