Jonah Goldberg and Joseph McCarthy

It seems that I was not the only one upset with the latest bit of neo-McCarthyism from Jonah Goldberg, which had this error:

Jonah Goldberg’s Feb. 26 column said a Che Guevara-emblazoned Cuban flag was hanging in the Houston headquarters of Barack Obama’s campaign. The flag had been in the office of some Obama volunteers, not campaign headquarters

One if the LATimes readers is a Santa Monica housing consultant named Karin Pally:

Jonah Goldberg provides us with textbook examples of the logical fallacies employed to such good effect by Joseph McCarthy and his minions in the 1950s. I thought we had driven a stake through the heart of McCarthyism, and that Red-baiting had met its well-deserved end. But Goldberg, who is as slimy as Gollum, the cave-dwelling hobbit in “Lord of the Rings,” has brought it back with a vengeance … Goldberg is really beneath contempt — he’s engaged in a smear campaign, resurrected McCarthy Red-baiting techniques such as proof by assertion and guilt by association and used a series of logical fallacies to imply that tenuous or even unsubstantiated connections between the candidates and people Goldberg accuses of violence “prove” that the candidates themselves support violence. There’s no point in wishing that Goldberg wouldn’t do this; clearly he’s being well paid for writing nasty innuendo and rehashing “scandals” circulating widely on the Web. But it’s distressing to see The Times publish this garbage.

I invite you to read Karin’s whole letter as it does a much better job of dissecting this trash from Mr. Goldberg than I did.