Posted on 07/16/2003 6:37:51 AM PDT by Theodore R.
I don't believe he was advancing the cause of anti-communism. He talked about the cause of anti-communism. He reminds me of the Public Health Director Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh in the novel Arrowsmith, who had no better idea about fighting infectious disease than to hold public rallies promoting the notion of health.
Yes, Nixon nailed Alger Hiss but paid for it with the death of a thousand communist cuts climaxing with Watergate. He also enacted the EPA, OSHA, AMTRAK, did away with the draft and created an "independent" (just never any competition!) Postal Service at the behest of an activist Democrat Congress. I'm reminded that Reagan had a Democrat Congress too. Were it not for that embarrassing Hiss business Nixon would probably be a "progressive" hero.
McCarthy was the victim of the first liberal-communist Borking in my memory. It's had a tremendous impact on me. I wish you'd be specific about some of his FREQUENT incorrect allegations.
Do you think anti-McCarthy luminaries said things the "right" way" How about Drew Pearson and the press in general including "journalist" I.F. Stone (a paid Soviet agent), Senator Scott Lucas, Harold Ickes, Lillian Hellman, Sen. William Benton (whose own lawyer called his anti-McCarthy statement so scurrilous it "was the most libelous document he had ever seen;" to mention a few. If Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Buddha and Zoroaster had dared to stand up to entrenched communists in the U.S. government at that time, they'd have been Borked too.
You really should read Coulter's book.
He made it very uncomfortable to be a fellow traveler.
How many more did he get re-elected because he made anticommunists look like flaming nutcases?
Also, kindly note that he "discovered" anti-communism because he was in political hot water for defending members of Kampfgruppe Peiper. Seems that most American voters don't cotton to their Senators supporting people who massacre unarmed POWs.
Think I'll pass bothering to type it all out again. You know the story I am sure.
Liberals thought McCarthy damaged them.
Treason page 119:
( The Liberal) passion of hate for McCarthy had only one cause, candidly explained by Hubert Humphrey:" McCarthy's real threat to American democracy (was) the fact the he has immobilized the liberal movement." So they created a hobgoblin for the masses to fear. . .Read this to get a taste of what McCarthy was fighting.
No, just someone who thought defending SS troops would help him politically.
Yes, comrade, that is the official line. One which keeps being repeated no matter how many people explain what the SS story was all about.
The only defect, so far as I could tell, with the US Army's treatment of Waffen-SS troops captured after December 18th, 1944, was that we didn't just give them Tarleton's Quarter on the spot.
The public didn't care about the SS stuff anyways. That is just another liberal hit on McCarthy.
No, he just wanted them rearmed and aimed east.
Not necessarily a bad idea, but I would've been too Old Testament with SS troops to have any left in my AO.
The public didn't care about the SS stuff anyways.
Those who did care didn't like Tailgunner Joe siding with pond scum. And Tailgunner Joe was looking for an issue to make his own. Not because he actually believed it, but because he was just another political hustler in a town rife with political hustlers.
That is just another liberal hit on McCarthy.
I don't view McCarthy as anything other than another political opportunist.
The broader question that goes far beyond McCarthy is how deep political controversies and demands for orthodoxy should enter into our private lives. It may be that all of the internal security and communist hunting measures were justified in the 1940s and 1950s but just what the boundaries between dissent and disloyalty are is always a living and hotly debated question, now as well as then. I get the feeling Coulter is riding high on the emotions of the moment and not looking at the deeper problems and consequences that highly politicized ages bring with them.
In 1934, the McCormack/Dickstein committee went after conservatives by claiming those opposed to FDR were planning an armed "putsch" to undo the New Deal.
On Feb.11, 1941, Dickstein (D-NY) took to the floor of the House and declared:
One hundred and ten fascist organizations in the United States have had, and have now the key to the back door of the Un-American Activities Committee!Dickstein, by the way, was a Soviet spy.
Please provide an example.
2. Don't make up figures (the ever-shifting number of "card-carrying Communists" in the State Department, for example).
You are the one making things up. please prove McCarthys lists were false.
Have you read Ann Coulter's book?
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