Posted on 04/14/2007 11:08:02 AM PDT by wagglebee
You cannot offer friendship to tyrants and murderers ... without advancing the cause of tyranny and murder. – Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis. (circa early 1950s)
There's always a conflict of interest when people who don't really like America are called upon to defend it. – Ann Coulter
Perhaps second only Woodward and Bernstein's newspaper articles in the 1970s that exposed the Watergate scandal and forced President Nixon to resign has the liberal propaganda press been so utterly successful at destroying a single Republican – an exhilarating and heady era that predated Watergate by 20 years.
From 1950-54, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, in a series of hearings held in his House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, with irrepressible zeal and courage, sought to root out Communists, Communist sympathizers and spies in the State Department, the Treasury Department, the military and in other areas of the government, but also in Hollywood, in unions, in the academy and throughout American society.
Ironically, HUAC was a committee formed not by McCarthy, but by liberal Democrats 12 years before, in 1938, on the eve of World War II during an era before political correctness and radicalism became the norm; where being a liberal Democrat meant defending America from tyrants abroad and German spies and terrorists at home.
Sen. McCarthy wasn't the first politician to mount a crusade to bring down intrinsic corruption. The annals of American political history are filled with them. There was the Tea Pot Dome Scandal of 1922 that made a national hero out of the heretofore unremarkable Montana Democrat Sen. Thomas J. Walsh, when he exposed the land for oil deal of the Warren Harding administration. The Truman Committee investigated charges of war profiteering and shoddy materials sold to the military during World War II by U.S. corporations, which lead to numerous reforms and elevated Truman to vice president and, at the death of FDR, to the presidency.
There was Robert F. Kennedy's stentorian questioning of Mafia dons and corrupt union leaders like Jimmy Hoffa in the early 1960s; this feat lead to RFK's presidential run, which was tragically brought to an end by the assassin's bullet in June 1968. However, politics does make strange bedfellows because RFK made his bones as a staffer to none other than Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his anti-communism crusade of the early 1950s. Despite his close association with McCarthy, however, RFK's memory is kept pure by the propaganda press even until this day. Why? Two reasons – RFK was a liberal Democrat and a Kennedy. McCarthy was neither.
Finally, and who could forget Newt Gingrich who in 1989 dethroned powerful Texas Democrat Speaker Jim Wright over a fraudulent book deal scandal, only to resign six years later for literally the same bogus book deal.
Back to McCarthy. As I revisit this tragic Promethean figure of the early 1950s, let us first answer two basic questions lucidly without emotion: 1) Did McCarthy find Communists, Communist sympathizers and Soviet spies in the State Department, in Hollywood, in the academy, in the literary world, in the military, in the media during his House Un-American Committee hearings? 2) Does an unbiased account of history show that McCarthy abused his power? Yes on the first question, No, on the second.
Conservative political writer Ann Coulter said this of McCarthy and the 50 years of incessant demonization by the liberal propaganda press:
I know he got a bad rap because there are no monuments to Joe McCarthy. Liberals had to destroy McCarthy because he exposed the entire liberal establishment as having sheltered Soviet spies. ... There's always a conflict of interest when people who don't really like America are called upon to defend it.
Today, McCarthy's name has been turned into a vile epithet (McCarthyism) and is stricken from the congressional record, from the marketplace of ideas and from public memory. Ironically, neither Marx, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Pol Pot nor Hitler's names engenders such malediction from the left as does Sen. McCarthy, despite the fact that those leaders and the tyrannical ideals they propagated killed hundreds of millions of people.
In my opinion, Joseph McCarthy is the only man that can be put in the same sentence with the two other great Republican leaders of the 20th century, and they were both presidents – Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Yet McCarthy's face isn't carved into Mount Rushmore as TR's is, nor does even a statue or a $5 plaque appear of him in Washington, D.C., or in his home state of Wisconsin. Yet a few weeks ago the fine people of Amsterdam, Holland, erected a magnificent statute to one of their greatest leaders – no, not Rembrandt, not Grotius, not Spinoza, not van Gogh, but to that great ubiquitous figure … The Prostitute, and to the ancient glorious art of prostitution. Take that, Spinoza!
The craven cowardice and historical ignorance regarding this great man's contributions to America is appalling, but not surprising to me. Therefore, I also praise Ann Coulter. If it weren't for her prolific, courageous writings, and the radio and TV appearances of this bold, beautiful political commentator, McCarthy's memory would be all but totally forgotten or continually and utterly reviled by the political left without challenge. On this point, I'll let Ann Coulter speak in her own voice:
Among the most notorious Soviet spies in high-level positions in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations – now proved absolutely, beyond question by the Soviet cables – were Alger Hiss at the State Department; Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury Department, later appointed to the International Monetary Fund by President Truman; Lauchlin Currie, personal assistant to President Roosevelt and White House liaison to the State Department under both Roosevelt and Truman; Laurence Duggan, head of the Latin American Desk at the State Department; Frank Coe, U.S. representative on the International Monetary Fund; Solomon Adler, senior Treasury Department official; Klaus Fuchs, top atomic scientist; and Duncan Lee, senior aide to the head of the OSS.
Is there no man, no conservative, no Republican during this upcoming 2008 presidential election who has pledged to continue McCarthy's magnificent legacy of combating radical liberalism, Country Club Republicanism, Communism, totalitarianism and civilization's newest enemy, Islamic terrorism? From way in the back of the room, Ann Coulter stood tall like a man and didn't ask for it, but took McCarthy's mantle.
And that is why I praise Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Which one?
ruined thousands? Who? How? All were wrongly questioned?
The Country that I remember was not terrorized!
I'll gladly sign the loyalty oath. I took the oath along with tens of millions of Americans. What's wrong with that?
The shame is that McCarthy was made the "issue" and national security became secondary.
To the best of my knowledge the CP/USA invented the word "McCarthyism."
Thus anti-communists came under attack not just a man who meant well but lacked the charisma and skills to lead what has proven decades later to have been a true national security threat.
BUMP for excellence in posting!
First of all HUAC was used as a pejorative -- The House Committee on un-American Activities I believe is the correct name.
McCarthy was a Congressman in the late 1940s and participated in controversial hearings which his enemies used to brand him a Nazi. Then when he took on communism that was the end of him.
W.W.II was the last war that the "progressives," "leftists" whatever sided with the U.S. The U.S. helped defend their Uncle Joe.
Clarification: he was a Senator.
Yep. Frankly, it would not surprise me one bit to learn that some clever KGB agent manipulated him into his ridiculous displays in a (successful) attempt to discredit anti-Communist efforts.
The fact that a number of FReepers support the rehabilitation of this joker fifty years after he drank himself into the grave strikes me as evidence of a tragic misinterpretation of the history of the Cold War and the effectiveness of various Red Scares in combating the communist threat. President Eisenhower hated his guts, and the fact that half of his fellow Republican senators voted to censure him speaks volumes about how poorly regarded he and his efforts were in government at the time.
You need to read Ann Coulter's "Treason". She researched the original documents, and he did none of the above.
What you learned in school is incorrect.
No offense guys but could you please name one person who was not a member of the Communist Party who was named as such. I can tell you right now, the answer is zero. But since there are “THOUSANDS” of them, please educate me and list some of them.
One should not make statements of “fact” without knowing what the hell one is talking about.
Mrs. McCarthy came to him at one point and said, “Sergeant, these people from the newspapers are saying they are going to spit on my husbands’s body. Can you do something, please?” He said, “Maam, I will stand at attention with my hand on my sword.” Dad was a Guadalcanal, Pellelieu, and Inchon veteran. God rest him.
No one spat on the senator’s body or casket that day, but that was what our friends inn the press were like, even back then. They loved the wrong Joe. Stalin. Unfortunately, you saw that this writer got the wrong house of congress. The libs do that all the time.
Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers. To Captain Black, every officer who supported his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a competitor, and he planned and plotted twenty-four hours a day to keep one step ahead. He would stand second to none in his devotion to country. When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them once better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that "The Star-Spangled Banner," one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. Each time Captain Black forged ahead of his competitors, he swung upon them scornfully for their failure to follow his example. Each time they followed his example, he retreated with concern and racked his brain for some new stratagem that would enable him to turn upon them scornfully again. Without realizing how it had come about, the combat men in the squadron discovered themselves dominated by the administrators appointed to serve them. They were bullied, insulted, harassed, and shoved about all day long by one after the other. When they voiced objection, Captain Black replied that people who were loyal would not mind signing all the loyalty oaths they had to. To anyone who questioned the effectiveness of the loyalty oaths, he replied that people who really did owe allegiance to their country would be proud to pledge it as often as he forced them to. And to anyone who questioned the morality, he replied that "The Star-Spangled Banner" was the greatest piece of music ever composed. The more loyalty oaths a person signed, the more loyal he was; to Captain Black it was as simple as that, and he had Corporal Kolodny sign hundreds with his name each day so that he could always prove he was more loyal than anyone else.
"The important thing is to keep them pledging," he explained to his cohorts. "It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. That's why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what 'pledge' and 'allegiance' mean." --From "Catch-22," by Joseph Heller
Yeah, there was the black cleaning woman Cohn found for him; she didn’t even know what a communist was. Also the kid lawyer who was a fellow-traveller during the thirties; McCarthy brought up his name during the Army hearings.
By the way, Joe never found one, single, communist.
I am no big fan of Joe McCarthy but the author and some Freepers (such as myself) get a bit tired of the lies that are now accepted as fact regarding the hearings and Sen McCarthy himself. It is the same liberal crap that pratically makes it a felony for a person to wear a Nazi uniform as a costume but a Russian (USSR era) uniform or CCCP memorabilia is “kitschy”. Both should be held in equal disrepute and disgust, but they are not because liberals do not believ the Soviet Union or Communism were a bad thing.
Joe was destroyed by his own arrogance and some bad very advice from Roy Cohn and Bobby Kennedy. Joe also was sometimes so hungover during morning hearings that he could not stand to pound his own gavel. He drank himself to death.
I repeat: Joe did not find one, single, communist, ever.
Care to explain your keen interest in attacking McCarthy on this forum?
You may be thinking of Annie Lee Moss. There's some uncertainty about whether or not she was a Communist. Most likely she wasn't a spy, but if Moss worked at the Pentagon, she probably did know what one was.
Remember, this was in the 1950s, and to be Black and a cleaner didn't mean that one was stupid or uneducated (Mandatory disclaimer: to be a cleaner doesn't necessarily mean one is stupid or uneducated today either).
Here's a Human Events article on the Moss case. Here's another. Don't know if they're right or not, but the case is more complicated than it might appear at first.
I'm no fan of McCarthy. He did the country a lot of harm by making us look bad at a time when we needed all the friends we could get, but I wouldn't assume that everything said against McCarthy was true either.
Pal, I think you are full of it.
An easy, recent, read is Coulter.
Educate yourself.
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