Jeff Ireland and Joe McCarthy

He should be celebrating getting drafted and getting familiar with the Cowboys organization. Yet as long as this story keeps circulating, details about his past and his mom’s past will keep coming up. That’s got to be tough for him. Yeah, he’s gonna be paid millions to play football, but he’s still a kid. He’s not just an image coming thru our tvs and video games, he’s a real person. Fans and media sometimes forget about that.

This writer Silver probably thought this would make a great story and would write up a “clever” piece about it, but all he did was take turn a mole hill into a mountain with no regard for collateral damage to Ireland, Bryant, his mom, or anyone else. The quality and ethics of journalism have gone downhill in recent years and Silver is the epitome of that downward spiral.

He should probably go work for Roto-Rooter. Sounds like he’d fit right in there.

Silver seems to me to be like a typical sanctimonious “crusading” journalist in a world of “journalism” where, like politics, its purveyors refuse to understand the consequences of their actions: Bryant will have to live with this “bad mother” stuff for a while; Ireland will have to live with having a reputation for “being an A-hole,” and Silver will only encourage himself to keep on doing this BS “journalism.”

i’m laughing because my post going up tonight is about this very topic.

nice job and i like the discussion it should create.

Here are my thoughts why this is a totally legitimate question to ask any potential draft pick whether or not there is any basis for it.

1. You need to know everything you can. This player will FOREVER be associated with your franchise even if he flames out before the first rookie minicamp… The news story will always read something like this… "So-and-so, mother of former Dolphins WR, Dez Bryant, was arrested yesterday on charges of prostitution… " No matter what you think about if it is fair or not, it paints the team in a negative light and they have a right to know if they are paying this guy millions of dollars if this is going to be an issue or not.

2. They have a right to ask any outlandish question they want to ask. Odds are ANY Jets fan and possibly even the Jets coach will show less tact than this and they need to know if they are going to have a problem with their number 1 draft pick assaulting a group of fans in their own stadium because they said mean things to him…. In that case no one is going to cry for the poor mistreated millionaire who was verbally assualted and responded by beating a fan senseless, and it will again show negatively on the team.

I do not believe the guy that asked Gerald McCoy if he wore a jock strap or a g-string really wanted to know the answer to that question. You are trying to ask a question that they haven’t already rehearsed a hundred times with their agent so that they give the "correct answer"… If you find out what a guy is really made of and not how good his agent is, you have to catch them with something the agent would never think to rehearse with him…

Ask any dumb question you want Jeff…. you get paid to analyze those things and we want you to have every bit of knowledge of the player and their makeup…

You seem to be spot on.

rec’d

The person who should be saying sorry is Dez Bryants MOTHER. Yes I said it and you read it right. She is the one who made the HORRIBLE choice to sell drugs. SHE is the one who made the horrible choice to do drugs. She should stand up in front of the media and her son and say something to the effect of “Dez, I am sorry that you had to be asked questions about me in any form durring this process. I am sorry for the CHOICES I made that are now affecting you. I am sorry and not proud of who I was back then and now my sins are comming back to haunt you and again, I AM TRUELY SORRY” If she didnt chose the paths that she chose then the question would have never been asked.

Is it that far fetched to think she may have been involved in prostitution? She admits she was a crack user.. she admits she used drugs, she went to jail for being involved in this stuff. Why should someone who is looking to spend MILLIONS of dollars on a kid be pissed on because he asked a LOGICAL QUESTION?

Ms/Mrs Bryant is the only person to blame for anyone wondering if she will be an issue off field for any team looking at Dez Bryant. She created the image by the CHOICES SHE and she alone made.

I’d like to add that Dez should come off as a someone with loose lips. You don’t run to the media when you don’t like something. This was leaked before the draft and clarified as Ireland afterwords so this question sparked a result through it being leaked. It showed that it pissed him off and like it or not it worked.

It was first and foremost private. Ireland did not print any info for the public to see. And anyone could see the point, see if you could get a rise.

The illustration was very well used and your opinion is very respectful, I however, disagree, respectfully of course.

As has been pointed out many times, we do not know the process that led up to that question. It could have been preceded by a series of questions about his past & about his mother. I highly doubt Ireland just sat him down and point-blank asked him if his mother ever prostituted herself. Fr8 mentioned that very similar questions are asked when applying for a position in a big law firm. Even on insurance applications some pretty intrusive questions are asked, and when a background check is run, if there are any hits, full explanations of any and all details of the incident are required. Depending on the manner in which the question was posed, i think it’s justifiable. entirely appropriate? maybe not, but if he & his mother are close now, and she will be a constant in his life now, i think it’s the business of those investing time & money into him & his family to get the full story.

Of course that’s just how I feel, but I can most certainly see where others are coming from in terms of disagreeance.

Also, Silver is a ignoramus.

Needed to be said.

Rec’d.

i’m not sure anyone is going to mistake silver for murrow, or ireland for mccarthy. even in black and white. but its kind of fun to set these things in dramatic context….tho wouldn’t it be great if we had more info.
my feeling after all this reading, a lot of it painful, is that nfl teams with a billion dollar market and all the coronets and trumpets that go with it, and truly about to or ready to sign someone to a 10 mil contract—ought to be able to find out on their own if the kids mom is a prostitute, regardless how the question is asked. not ask the kid himself, unless that is a test of character, and if it is, it is a terrible one.

"I’ve since been told by a source close to Bryant that Ireland was the person who asked the question during a meeting in the GM’s office. On Monday, Ireland declined to comment on the allegation. Harvey Greene, the Dolphins’ senior vice president of media relations, said: "It’s our organizational policy that we don’t discuss publicly the process we use to evaluate potential draft choices."

… but now it only says –

"The offender was Ireland, whose franchise apparently holds nothing sacred in regards to its evaluations of potential employees."

…Which, by the way, offers only a link to Armando Salguero’s post about Ireland’s apology.

My questions now are (a) Was there ever a close source or did Bryant tell him directly? (B) Did he ever contact the Dolphins for confirmation? © What kind of journalist modifies a published story by editing directly into the text?

which attempts a connection between Ireland and Joe McCarthy that is wholly without merit. While I think the Ireland brouhaha is ridiculous beyond words, it needs to be said that Senator McCarthy has been vindicated by history. This is a fact that escapes most people.

A recent book by M Stanton Evans, Blaclisted by History – The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy, and the revelations of the Venona Project clearly show that McCarthy was correct and his detractors on the wrong side of history.

From a review by a reader at Amazon:

Now with the advantage of the revelations of Venona and of the Soviet intelligence archives is an ideal time to examine anew the career of Senator McCarthy. There is no doubt now that the Soviets succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in infiltrating the US government. Recently a man named Koval died in Russia. He had been another of the Americans who spied for Stalin and stole for him US atomic secrets. He joins Ted Hall, the Rosenbergs and Klaus Fuchs as Stalin’s agents who pentrated Los Alamos. Hundreds of other Americans reported to Soviet intelligence operatives in the US. At Yalta in 1945 one of them sat next to Roosevelt across from Churchill and Stalin. He was Alger Hiss. Anyone who still believes that McCarthy invented false charges has kept his head in the sand. He should read The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein in which the author reveals what he found in the Soviet archives about Soviet esponiage in the US, and Venona, Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by Haynes and Klehr. And by all means read Blacklisted by History by M. Stanton Evans. McCarthy was no angel and he played rough but Stalin and the Americans who betrayed their country are in a class of villainy that makes the Senator from Wisconsin seem almost benign.

It should also be noted that Radulovich was reinstated and there was not direct link between McCarthy and the Air Force reservist. Despite the fact that Murrow defended Communism and had Communist friends, he was a journalist whose thong Silver is not fit to carry.

He allowed Senator McCarthy to respond to his charges:

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/murrowmccarthy2.html

If you would like a slice of history, read the whole McCarthy response to Murrow. He was not a shy man, to say the least. Leftist revision of history has, as usual, maintained McCarthy in the role of viscious villain and Murrow as revered journalistic icon.

It is also interesting to note that McCarthy’s SOLE role (other than defending himself against spurious charges) in the events following WWII revolved around the committee he chaired. A little search on the internet will reveal, in government archives, the ENTIRE questioning and tesstimonies before his committee. If you ignore the editorializing by the government lefty who introduces the transcripts, you will find something entirely different than portrayed by historians.

I don’t think any of you will bother, but there it is if you wish.

This break from the ridiculous brought to you by Yorke Hunt.

As Voltaire said "History is the trick the living play on the dead."

Whether it’s Left-wing revisionist history or not McCarthy has an iconic stature. He symbolizes the overzealous pursuit of a cause. His name is synonymous with “Witch-hunt.”

You might not like that, you might believe that to be completely unfair and uninformed but it is, however, the way McCarthy is perceived.

To compare, which is what I did, Joe McCarthy to Jeff Ireland is not “incorrect.” No comparison is “incorrect.” Comparisons are used to illustrate a point. My point is not that Ireland is like McCarthy, my point was that it is very tempting – as Silver did – to cast Ireland in the role of McCarthy ’- the heartless, ruthless bully convinced he can do no wrong in the service of his “cause.” ’
(Jeff Ireland and Joe McCarthy by PhrozenPhish on Apr 27, 2010 10:04 PM EDT )

I can compare Ireland to anything from Genghis Khan to a Venus Flytrap if I want to….it’s not a question of historical accuracy, only a question of whether or not the comparison adds to the discussion. Alden Nolan wrote an eight stanza poem comparing a Bull Moose to Christ and the story of the Crucifixion…it’s called metaphor.

I am wrong on my history. McCarthy was:

Chairman, Committee on Government Operations (Eighty-third Congress); used his position as chairman of the Committee on Government Operations and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to launch investigations designed to document charges of Communists in government;
- http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=m000315

and for that I apologise.

As to the charge of Plagiarism, Mr. Chairman: As in theft of another person’s writings or ideas, from Wikipedia, I’ll plead Guilty with an explanation. If this had been an essay or a piece I was trying to sell to SI or Yahoo, I would have properly documented it. In fact I wouldn’t have used Wikipedia at all.

However, seeing as it was a post on a Football fan site intended to spark some discussion about a situation where the reference was intended to serve merely as an archetypical allusion I saw it as just taking a short-cut. I didn’t consider the possibility my lack of attribution might be used to call into question the validity of my post. If I give up the names of other people on this site to don’t properly reference will you let me go with a warning?

Plagiarism is just that wherever it occurs. You suffer no consequences here, but that’s still what it is – unless it is an innocent oversight.

The entire point of my reaponse to your post (I agree with your conclusion, after all) was that McCarthy has been maligned. Just because his name is synonymous with ‘witch hunt’ does not mean that this impression needs to continue. I offered a view to counter this impression.

Your points are all well taken but why should we accept as received wisdom outright falsehoods about a famous historic character? It smacks of Soviet revisionism – which is exactly what it was.

In fact, I view Joe McCarthy as a great (and completely unappreciated) American hero. His name needs to be cleared and I’m doing my own small part. :)

when even a Democrat (the last Democrat President worth a dump) agrees with my assessment.

JFK’s feelings became abundantly clear during a reunion banquet at Harvard.
When an after-dinner speaker remarked that
he was proud Harvard had never graduated an Alger Hiss
and even prouder that it had never produced a Joe McCarthy,
JFK exploded in anger.

JFK DEFENDS PATRIOT MCCARTHY

Rising at his seat, he shouted,
“How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!”
The other diners lapsed into shocked silence,
and JFK departed without hearing the rest of the program
http://www.orwelltoday.com/jfkmccarthy.shtml.

Bryant told Ireland that his father was a pimp and that his mother worked under him… Thats why Ireland asked the question.