She attempts to make a hero out of a fraud. Guys like Nixon, Hoover and a lot of faceless guys in intelligence and law enforcement did all the heavy lifting where exposing the Reds in our Government was concerned, McCarthy just went along for the ride. Full of arrogance and alcohol, he suggested that General George C. Marshall was a traitor, and tried to take on the US Army because they wouldn't give notorious homosexual Roy Cohn's boy toy a commission he didn't merit. Other than that, he was probably a hell of guy.
I thought she was trying to undo the liberal's conquest of the language by torpedoing the word McCarthyism as a synonym for baseless commiephobia -- and doing it by illustrating that we were heavily infested with Marxists during McCarthy's time.
I did not see that she was trying to make a hero out of him.
Cheers!