In what Jim Carrey of Kidding no doubt believed was the ultimate put-down, the actor-comedian compared Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) this week to the late Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.). Carrey created a crude painting of Cruz, and posted it and a derogatory message, superimposed over the image. “Some greasy Joe McCarthy wanna-be, who is shameless and will remain nameless, was lecturing me in the press about morality and civility after spending years in the Senate defending the rights of mass murderers to own AR-15s with which they massacre innocent children in their classrooms. I thought I must be dreaming, but I haven’t woken up yet. I guess this hypocrisy is the new American Dream.”
What caused Carrey’s shot at Cruz was Cruz’s reaction to a previous cartoon-like painting of Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama. After Ivey signed into law a bill on Tuesday that would outlaw nearly all abortions in the state and make performing one a felony unless the mother’s health is at risk, with punishment of up to life in prison (although the woman who received one will not be subject to a felony charge), Carrey portrayed Ivey as the subject of a suction abortion.
In the painting, Governor Ivey was depicted as being sucked up by a gloved hand, complete with Carrey’s comment, “If you’re going to terminate a pregnancy, it should be done sometime before the fetus becomes Governor of Alabama.”
One can only imagine if a conservative published a similar cartoon about a liberal woman politician, but while many conservatives were rightly outraged, liberals were generally either silent, or even heaped praise on Carrey.
Cruz was among those not pleased with the cartoon-like painting. “This is not OK,” Cruz tweeted. “Today’s Left: vicious, angry & consumed by hate. Instead of insults & dehumanizing rage, we should return to civility. I disagree w/ Carrey’s politics, but believe we should respect his humanity nonetheless. I wish he could reciprocate.”
Apparently, Carrey disagrees with Cruz’s call for civility in political discourse, and responded with further comments, comparing Cruz to McCarthy. It was not the first time that Carrey has made the Texas Republican a target of his vitriol. When Cruz was running for reelection last year (defeating Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke), Carrey did a painting picturing Cruz as a vampire.
One can presume that Carrey has decided that Cruz is even worse than a vampire now, opting to compare him with a favorite target of the Left, Senator Joe McCarthy, who died in 1957.
Other parts of Carrey’s tweet are rather demagogic — certainly Cruz has never spent years “defending the rights of mass murderers to own AR-15s.” Cruz has certainly defended the Second Amendment rights of American citizens to keep and bear arms, but one can safely presume that he has never come out in favor of the right of a mass murderer to own any kind of weapon, including an AR-15.
Such unsupported hyperbole is certainly typical of the Left, but what of Carrey’s comparison of Cruz to McCarthy? McCarthy is best known for his opposition to communist spies employed in the U.S. government. Imagine that — a member of Congress thinking it is a bad thing for spies from a hostile foreign power (the Soviet Union) to work in sensitive positions of the U.S. government. One would think it is a good thing to disallow spies from the Soviet Union, an “evil empire,” as President Ronald Reagan rightly described it, that had murdered millions of its own people and imposed a totalitarian system on Russia, along with most of eastern Europe.
Of course, as Carrey mischaracterized Cruz’s position on the right to keep and bear arms, it should not come as any surprise that the Left did the same to McCarthy back in the 1950s, on an even grander scale, and they have continued to unfairly smear him ever since.
The best book on McCarthy is M. Stanton Evans’ Blacklisted by History, which debunks much of the negative mythology about him. My own book, History’s Greatest Libels, devotes a chapter on the unfair portrayal of McCarthy. For those who want to know more about what actually happened with McCarthy’s career, I would strongly urge the reader to obtain a copy of Evans’ book.
It is usually asserted that McCarthy ruined the lives and careers of hundreds of “innocent” people. Actually, he did not ruin the life of any “innocent” people, unless one believes a spy for a foreign power is an “innocent” person. One grossly inaccurate charge in particular made against McCarthy is that, while chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he developed the so-called Hollywood Blacklist. First of all, McCarthy was never chairman of that committee, as senators are not even members of House committees, much less chairs of a House committee. Second, the Hollywood Blacklist was created long before McCarthy even became associated with concern over subversion by domestic communists, in his February 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia.
The truth of the matter is, while Cruz has a mostly conservative voting record, for him to be compared to the late Senator Joe McCarthy should be taken as a great compliment — to Ted Cruz.
