Like many bamboozlers who succeed by preying on the earnest and the credulous, McCarthy was easily bamboozled. He often tied witnesses who had little to hide in knots, but the actual spies who testified (and there were one or two) completely fooled him.-- Louis Menand, "Sloppy Joe," The New Yorker, Aug 3&10, 2020, p. 73.
This, too, sounds right in retrospect. I remember lamenting to myself many times that Wife would take anybody else's side before mine. What this meant was that if I disagreed with some random stranger -- or warned her against him -- she would use her sharp critical intelligence to scrutinize and tear apart everything I said, clause by clause; and then she would go piteously soft-hearted when it came to the other guy's side. This is what happened when I tried to warn her against paying Boyfriend 5's electric bill, which in the end she did anyway. When she got an email from someone claiming to be the only living relative of a little girl in Nigeria who needed money for a cancer operation, I had to threaten her to prevent her from sending money: I forget at this point if I threatened violence or divorce, but I remember it required me to assert levels of marital authority as Husband and Head of the goddamned Household that I never once actually believed in. It wasn't just yelling ... she was used to me yelling. I somehow (and after all the years I no longer remember quite how) had to make her afraid of me before she gave in. And I wondered for years ... why does she trust these obvious shysters so easily and never trust me? I never understood it.
But according to the remark in this article, maybe that's normal. I still don't really know.
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