Free Republic

....Mr. Walker’s conduct has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War. Many citizens are furious at their governor and his party, not only because of profound policy differences, but because these particular Republicans have exercised power in abusively nontransparent ways that represent such a radical break from the state’s tradition of open government. ..as a centrist and a lifelong independent — I have found myself returning...to the question posed by the lawyer Joseph N. Welch during the hearings that finally helped...

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) isn't alone in having trouble understanding how the government is organized. In a Sunday article posted on the Chicago Sun-Times's Web site, staff reporter Mary Houlihan credits the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) with running the House Committee on Un-American Activities. That would have been quite an accomplishment, given the fact McCarthy never served in the House of Representatives. Houlihan writes of photographer Milton Rogovin, who died last month. After military service during World War II, Rogovin "organized a chapter of the optometrists’ union and served as librarian for the Communist Party of Buffalo." "Then the...

It's apparent that the recent media attacks on Sarah Palin have, for the first time, actually drawn blood. Palin's negatives have shot up substantially, rising 7 points from 49% to 56%. The proximate cause is held to be the fact that she defended herself against the charge of complicity in murder in the Tucson shootings, along with engaging in some unclear variety of anti-Semitism by using the term "blood libel." It's safe to say that no other current politician would ever be held to such standards. This slump is surely temporary -- no more permanent than Obama's miniscule "leap" in...

AFL-CIO thug, Richard Trumka has compared Sarah Palin to Joseph McCarthy–and that’s supposed to be a bad thing. "AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, speaking to the Alaska AFL-CIO in Anchorage today, will take a swipe at Palin for her employment of the term ‘union thugs,’ according to prepared remarks." "Palin, he said, has come ‘close to calling for violence,” and will ‘go down in history like McCarthy.’" No she won’t. We now have the internet and citizen journalists. Palin won’t have to wait fifty years to be vindicated as the late senator did. Liberals, evidently, have not yet been brought up...

Glenn Beck has beseeched us not to compare him to McCarthy. He accused Anthony Weiner of using Joe McCarthy “tactics” when Weiner launched his unsuccessful and short lived smear campaign against Beck’s sponsor, Goldline. Beck, like too many commentators who ought to know better, has long spewed the entirely false narrative about Senator Joe McCarthy. Until his recent McCarthy Awakening. Liberals have been embarrassing themselves for decades with this McCarthy business. Point out an unsavory association, and they squeal like stuck pigs about the scourge of McCarthyism. In the mind of the liberal, Senator McCarthy was a deranged conservative finding...

Paul Krugman made a stupid argument to the effect that Republican leaders were encouraging political violence. Actually I called the argument idiotic. Krugman's evidence consisted entirely of the most ordinary sorts of political metaphors. Krugman himself was guilty of the same, and it turns out that President Obama was as well. That looks to me like self-defeating rhetoric. Now we see the same from MSNBC clown Chris Matthews. By his own argument, Matthews is worse than Joe McCarthy. What this shows, of course, is that more than one liberal intellectual has rendered himself incoherent. Liberals are searching for evidence that...

WASHINGTON -- The spirit of Christmas seems to have escaped Congress, maybe even the country. Have you ever encountered such mean spiritedness and political conniving as are now on display on Capitol Hill? In the past, we have had great philosophical divisions in the struggle for civil rights, especially when southern legislators ran the show. In praise of democracy, fortunately they lost. And of course there also was the "red scare" fomented by Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., in the 1950s when he led the commie-hunting movement that ended up victimizing government officials, academia and Hollywood. We recovered from that, too....

Our topic this week concerns enemy tactics against the United States and the urgent necessity to fight back. The occasion is the re-release of Blacklisted by History. Therein, author M. Stanton Evans — whose focus is Senator Joseph McCarthy — gives us a fascinating tutorial on the Soviet effort to undermine our country before, during, and after the "McCarthy era," and some lessons that can be learned as today we face an alliance of the hard left and the Islamofascist threat. At a private discussion late last year, the topic of internal security arose with a focus on the "political...

On the day I born, June 9th, 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy was asked the famous question; “Have you no sense of decency sir?”. Some members of the media who saw an opening, pounced on the opportunity, and never looked back. This would become the beginning of the end of the anti-communist mood in America. It would be the birth of terms like McCarthyism, Redbaiting, and Blacklisting. The heirs of this movement are much more numerous today than in 1954, and the true journalists have been replaced by mere actors, playing the part of journalists. We have gone from a nation...

A Guest Blog By RONALD RADOSH I noticed the controversy over the late Senator McCarthy in the comments column at NewsReal. It is a mistake for conservatives to think that just because McCarthy's targets were real, the Senator did no harm. Stan Evans has contributed mightily to this confusion in his recent book Blacklisted By History. NewsReal readers may be interested in my review.There were Communist spies, and they did infiltrate the U.S. Government at the highest levels during the New Deal years of F.D.R.’s presidency. While the U.S. treated the Soviet Union as an ally during the war against...

Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me: Part IHell on Earth: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part IIBoring From Within: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part IIITo Have And Have Not: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part IVPost-modern leftism: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VMeans and Ends One: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VIMeans and Ends Two: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI ContinuedRadicals are focused on the future – usually the distant future – the moment when they will achieve power and institute the reign of social justice. Consequently they view and evaluate the present and the past...

Somewhere, Joe McCarthy is smiling . . . On today's Meet The Press, Rachel Maddow demanded to know whether Dick Armey was a member of a coalition with the Tea Party Patriots, a group she alleges to promote "violence." Moderator David Gregory joined in the cross-examination of Armey, head of Freedom Works.

Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign during the post-war era in the US remain one of the great totemic events in liberal-Left mythology. Every time there is a revival of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, solemn words are trotted out about how this metaphor for the appalling witch-hunts which ruined careers is a devastating indictment of irrational fear, blah blah blah. Well, not exactly. The point of The Crucible is that there were no witches. But back in the real world, there certainly were spies. A new book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by John Earl Haynes,...

Appearing today on the Toledo Blade's Web site is the article "Candide: Toledo Opera production offers the liveliest aspects of opera, musical theater, and operetta." Author Sally Vallongo writes: In the 1950s, as then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R., Wis.) and his House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated liberal and progressive artists in search of Communist-oriented dissidents, Hellman and Bernstein collaborated on what would become one of several major works fomented by government activities: the play and film Cradle Will Rock, and Arthur Miller’s play and opera The Crucible are others. Sometimes, readers must wonder if newspaper correspondents ever passed a class...

Today is the 100th Birthday of Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, a great American patriot who was vilified and condemned for his warnings of Communist infiltration of our government. Today, his warnings ring just as true.

My NewsBusters colleague Noel Sheppard, in the course of detailing how the New York Times devoted four items and over 6,000 words today to attacking Sarah Palin, cited Frank Rich's column and its malicious message. Rich's column is such a treasure trove for chroniclers of Palin Derangement Syndrome that I'd like to devote a bit more time to deconstructing it. For sheer paranoid fantasy, it will be hard to outdo the scenario Rich sketches. In having mentioned Harry Truman in her convention speech, Rich sees nothing less than a "creepy" clue to what Palin has in mind. Truman, you see...

Perhaps the most reviled figure in American history is Senator Joseph McCarthy. "McCarthyism" has become the term of choice for false, destructive accusations. Yet a new book shows that Senator McCarthy was right in his allegations. Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joseph McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies by M. Stanton Evans, chairman of the Education and Research Institute, shows that McCarthy was right about there being significant communist infiltration in government, his investigative methods were careful, thorough and of the highest standard, and his adversaries were the ones who practiced so-called "McCarthyism." It is McCarthy,...

History Shows Joe McCarthy's Reputation is Undeserved By Phyllis Schlafly Monday, January 28, 2008 Ronald Reagan was dismissed by the intelligentsia as just an actor who read speeches written by others until Kiron K. Skinner discovered a box of Reagan's original radio scripts written in his own hand on ruled yellow paper from 1975 to 1979. Since he had no staff to research and write for him in those years, the scripts prove that Reagan was a one-man think tank, well versed in political philosophy and history, fully capable of writing his own speeches. Skinner is the W. Glenn Campbell...

Ron Radosh & NR by: Malcolm A. Kline, January 25, 2008 We have tried to point out some of the many errors in Ron Radosh’s critique of Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies by M. Stanton Evans that appeared in National Review last month. Now, esteemed Elizabethtown College political scientist W. Wesley McDonald weighs in at Takimag.com. “Nothing I have read in National Review during my over 30 years as a subscriber shocked and angered me more than Ron Radosh’s nasty review (Dec. 17) of M. Stanton Evans’s Blacklisted by...

The October 2007 Vanity Fair had a long, gaseous article explaining how the pro-Bush bias of the mainstream media cost Al Gore the 2000 presidential election. (For you kids out there too young to remember, Al Gore is a vaguely gay, morbidly obese former Clinton administration official who raised campaign cash from Buddhist monks and claimed he invented the Internet.) Meanwhile, Republicans can barely remember that just a few years ago, former Clinton crony and current Hillary adviser Sandy Berger stuffed top-secret national security documents in his pants, snuck them out of the National Archives and destroyed them. But liberals...