Senate Democrats have taken to the New York Times to express their displeasure with their uppity new colleague Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican whose robust examination of Chuck Hagel’s record they find insufficiently decorous. Warning: The “M-word” is used.

“In this country we had a terrible experience with innuendo and inference when Joe McCarthy hung out in the United States Senate, and I just think we have to be more careful,” Senator Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) told the Times. Barbara Boxer echoed the sentiment. “It was really reminiscent of a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such and such a date,’ and, of course, nothing was in the pocket. . . . It was reminiscent of some bad times.”

The senators were more circumscribed in their analysis than the Democrats’ living id, Chris Matthews, who put it more directly: “I watched him in those hearings and I saw Joe McCarthy.”
Cruz seems to have drawn the Tailgunner Joe comparisons largely for two statements selectively plucked from what was a sustained and substantive examination before the Senate Armed Services Committee of Hagel’s dubious record in advance of the vote on his nomination. Let’s take them one at a time.

It was “truly extraordinary,” Cruz remarked, that the government of Iran “formally and publicly prais[ed] the nomination of a defense secretary.” He also called it “unprecedented” that a nation like Iran was “publicly celebrating” the prospect of a Hagel-run Pentagon. Cruz may have been referring to the Iranian state-run press, who ran a “news” piece entitled “Obama expected to nominate anti-Israel Hagel as secretary of defense.” Or he may have been referring to a statement made by a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, who, when asked a question about Hagel’s views on Israel and U.S. sanctions in the context of his confirmation prospects, opaquely replied, “We hope there will be practical changes in American foreign policy and that Washington becomes respectful of the rights of nations.”