A Conspiracy So Vast

The Wall Street Journal | July 7, 2003 | DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

[Dave S]

So what you're saying Dorothy is that universities have always been hotbeds of assaults on freedom (truth).

That is the opposite of what she said. She may be overstating the intellectual freedom that existed in the 50's but it certainly was more than in 2003 where you cant even seduce your date without signing a contract in advance.

[PGalt]

Dorothy the Dinosaur is worth a Giggle.

[ClearCase_guy]

Re: Annie Lee Moss:

Dynamite evidence, as far as Ms. Coulter is concerned -- case closed. After all, an FBI report had identified her as a Communist.

Rabinowitz makes a huge mistake so blithely dismissing this. As Coulter documents, a Communist newspaper had been delivered to Moss's home for years. Even when she moved, the subscription moved with her. Yet she claimed to have no idea who Karl Marx was. She was lying. There can be no doubt. And remember: she worked in the Code Room!! So, you've got a subscriber to a communist newspaper, working on codes, who lies in court about her politics.

Nothing to see here? Time to move on? Rabinowitiz has it very wrong folks. And, as usual, Ann Coulter has it very right. Read the book -- it's an eye-opener.

[ClearCase_guy]

You truly need to read "Treason" by Ann Coulter. Your characterization of McCarthy is grossly unfair. I am sure that you do not realize it, but you are merely parroting the lies that the Leftists at The Nation dreamed up in an effort to make McCarthy disappear.

[MEG33]

Could you please point to a source for your Mc Carthy statements?

[MEG33]

That's not the question.There is no question that McCarthy drank too much or that Roy Cohn was homosexual.I liked Nixon better than McCarthy ,too.That's not what the statement said.You called him a lunatic and a homosexual.

[ClearCase_guy]

I shouldn't even waste my time ... Roy Cohn died of AIDS, it's true. And, as you point out, that death occurred 30 years after McCarthy's Army hearings. From THIS you deduce that Senator Joseph McCarthy was a homosexual -- and further -- that he can be ignored on all matters pertaining to national security?

You're a deep thinker, aren't you?

[visitor]

yes, you sound like a "cookie" and must look like the fruitecake in your profile, are you by chance from that "insane asylum" you mentioned? ...rto

btw, I'm on page 145 of Treason and so far everything Ann Coulter has documented in her book is exactly as I remember it!!!

[Dave S]

And the bachelor's top aide, another bachelor, ultimately died of AIDS thirty years later.

His top aid, who helped him run his hearings, was Roy (?) Cohn, a homosexual who died of AIDS during the 80's. He had a reputation for being a real bastard.

[Dave S]

Had YOU done any serious reading on political history during that era, you would know that Nixon held very similar political opinions to McCarthy.

Nixon was a junior Senator on the same Senate Committee investigating Commies in government as was McCarthy.

[Tribune7]

Dorothy Rabinowitz is a fine person and a good, principled conservative. She has a point but so does Ann -- namely that McCarthy was more right than wrong.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

The cliche about the truth lying somewhere in the middle clearly applies here.

Got your flame suit on? All connections checked? Good!

In the real world of politics, the truth is almost never "lying somewhere in the middle." The truth is usually the position the Republicans would like to take--if they didn't have to worry about the effect of journalism's PR power to get them unelected. So the Republicans trim away from the truth, partway toward the Democrat position.

The Democrat response to that tendency is, of course, to make their own positions all the more extreme to suck the Republicans as far from the truth as they can get away with.

That is the tendency in labor negotiations, too--which is why an arbitrator doesn't come in and automatically split the difference, but tells the two sides to come in with their most reasonable offer and warns that he will pick one offer or the other. So their offer had better be reasonable or it will not be compromised with but rejected. IMHO any voter who doesn't take that viewpoint is naive.

On the one hand McCarthy wasn't too scrupulous about riding the wave of hysterical overreaction to the communist threat that prevailed in the early '50s.

On the other hand a significant infiltration of government agencies, particularly The State Department, had in fact occured.

The question is, how much infiltration, and was the Truman Administration doing anything about it?

The Venona transcripts, which the Army cracked secretly and against Truman's orders made it plain that Soviet agents were not just bumping into each other in the halls in the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. They were working together, and hiring each other.

"The wave of hysterical overreaction" was actually an underreaction, compared to the actual threat revealed by Venona, which were secret from McCarthy and HUAC.

[John Robertson]

Dorothy is indeed conservative, and one of the best, most sober journalists working today. If she's saying something about anything, it bears listening to. We're all enamored of Ms. Coulter (myself included), but just because she's a born bomb-thrower for OUR side, doesn't mean everything she says, or implies, is right on. From what I see in my copy of Treason, and from what Dorothy is saying here, I'd say our Annie got a mite carried away, in tone, in approach, in language--even if her overall premise is true, that McCarthy was demonized by the left to such an extent that his very name became an epithet over the last half century.

Please remember that Rabinowitz was the reporter who came in and got a woman who was railroaded into prison by then Florida AG Janet Reno...OUT of prison, through her investigative journalism work. And, she's accomplished other such miracles--power of the pen.

[Gothmog]

"...anywhere one turned on the TV screens last week there was the author of 'Treason' happily confronting wide-eyed interviewers wanting to know how she can say the things she says..."

Meanwhile, Hillary dodges all interviews, questions, etc.

My take on why Rabinowitz takes such offense with Coulters' intellectual and moral courage is that Rabinowitz is part of the media elite. She may be conservative on some issues, but all her lib friends and coworkers are (gasp) simply aghast.

Rabinowitz needs to trash Coulter (although she does a rather poor job here) in order to keep her station in the NYC media circles.

Coulter doesn't, so she is intellectually freer to investigate and uncover lib shibboleths.

[MEG33]

Joe married his research assistant since '48,Jean Kerr in '53.adopted a child in '57.