THE SCANDAL I: Sexual Addiction Who is really "obsessed by sex"?

The Left takes it farther. If The Crucible is now about sex, so is the original "witch-hunt" from which it was born. No joke: when the Left says this scandal is McCarthyite, they don't simply mean that Starr's tactics are somehow similar to Tailgunner Joe's. No, they mean that Ken Starr is just like McCarthy because McCarthy too was interested only in sex.

One of the first writers to make this argument was none other than Sidney Blumenthal. One of his last pieces for the New Yorker-before he was upgraded to a paid position in the White House-was a review of Sam Tanenhaus's magisterial biography of Whittaker Chambers. Blumenthal barely mentioned the book or Tanenhaus, except to criticize the author for not answering "the question of what motivated the drama's principal characters, and especially its lonely and tormented witness." Tanenhaus, wrote Blumenthal, "made no effort to explain how Chambers's homosexuality informed his Communism or his conservatism. That context is crucial to understanding both Chambers and the evolution of Cold War conservatism."

Blumenthal wrote of Chambers's "true legacy," that "he helped to transmute an external threat into a moral panic, and to encourage a new generation of Cold War conservatives to do the same." For "a pantheon of anti-Communists . . . conservatism was the ultimate closet," a way of disguising their latent homosexuality. "Conservative anti-Communism," Blumenthal lamented, is "an anachronism. What endures is the fear of the enemy within: the homosexual menace." So, he goes farther even than Sullivan. For Blumenthal, there is nothing to conservatism except homophobia.

Nor is Blumenthal alone. On October 17, the Times ran a fawning profile of a leading light in academia, Ann Douglas. According to the Times, she argues in her forthcoming book that "Starr has picked up where Senator Joseph R. McCarthy left off." For Douglas, the criminalization of sexual behavior began in the 1950s, "[w]hen you had senators saying that basically homosexuality was an indicator that someone was a Communist." According to Douglas, Starr's investigation reflects "the victory of Cold War aims revamped for the 21st century."

Diane McWhorter, writing in Newsday, pushes this line as well: "Perhaps the most striking theme connecting the witch-hunts-including the original 17th-century depredations in Salem-is masculine insecurity. McCarthy railed against 'Communists and queers' in the State Department. Yet, he also doted on his subcommittee counsel, the young homosexual Roy Cohn . . ." McWhorter continues, "the Army-McCarthy set-to fairly bristled with phallic tension, punctuated uncannily by the senator's trademark giggle." She then ties the knot: "Today's McCarthyism is also about embattled manhood. Starr's constituency is the Christian right. . . . His supporters smugly cast the blame for the witch-hunts on 'radical feminists'-an updated version of the Cold War's stereotypical female Communists . . ."