Daily Inspiration Quote by Pat Buchanan

Calling Russ Feingold “McCarthy” is classic Buchanan: a provocation dressed up as diagnosis, meant to flip the moral polarity of a well-worn American myth. The name “McCarthy” doesn’t function here as biography; it’s a rhetorical weapon. It collapses distinctions between scrutiny and persecution, between dissent and treason-hunting, so that a senator known for civil-libertarian instincts can be cast as the avatar of a national trauma. The intent is less to describe Feingold than to warn Buchanan’s audience that the real menace isn’t the security state or wartime overreach, but the people questioning it.

The subtext is a bait-and-switch about power. Feingold, especially in the post-9/11 years, stood out for resisting the Patriot Act consensus and for challenging the reflexive sanctification of “national security.” Buchanan’s move suggests that demanding limits on government and asking uncomfortable questions about war is itself a kind of ideological inquisition. It’s an inversion that tries to put liberals on the defensive: if you investigate executive claims, you’re the paranoid; if you object to surveillance, you’re the censor.

Context matters because “McCarthy” is one of the few political labels that still triggers bipartisan recoil. Buchanan is banking on that recoil to delegitimize Feingold without litigating facts. The line is also a culture-war tell: an attempt to reframe anti-communist hysteria as a template for condemning modern liberal moralism, and to claim the mantle of the persecuted conservative even when the machinery of the state is moving the other way. The brilliance, and the toxicity, is its compression: one surname used to short-circuit argument.