Washington gone crazy

"Nevada senator Pat McCarran was a force of nature in American politics, one of the most shrewd and powerful - and vindictive - lawmakers ever to sit in Congress. Joe McCarthy gave his name to the cause of zealous anti-Communism, but it was McCarran, a lifelong Democrat, who actually wrote the laws, held the hearings, and cowed the State and Justice Departments into doing his bidding. "An earth-shaker," Lyndon Johnson once called McCarran, "who impressed his personality deeply and indelibly upon the institution of the Senate and upon the history of the nation." It was McCarran's law that…