Oppie Was A Commie

Accuracy In Media ^ | June 27, 2003 | Notra Trulock

[Mr. K]

McCarthy was right, so the democrap libs did their single most successful 'Bork'ing they have ever done.

[Buckeye Bomber]

Yes, alcoholic and obnoxious liars are always good for the country. What ever happened to that list he had? 250 commies? 100? 25? You know, it's really more of a theoretical list. And so on. There were better ways to stop the Communists than get drunk and call everyone you disagree with a Red.

To me, McCarthy was only good for this country if Ted Kennedy was good for this country. And I don't foresee anyone saying that murderer has been good for the US.

In the 1950's, at the height of the Red Scare, the Cincinnati Reds changed their name to the Cincinnati Red Legs. To me, that is McCarthyism. Blindly swinging at everything and everyone without regard for any type of logic for the benefit of making people scared.

[presidio9]

In the 1950's, at the height of the Red Scare, the Cincinnati Reds changed their name to the Cincinnati Red Legs. To me, that is McCarthyism. Blindly swinging at everything and everyone without regard for any type of logic for the benefit of making people scared.

But then that's my point. This sort of nonsense gets blamed on Joe McCarthy. Check your history books: He never mentioned the Reds, and since he was from Wisconsin, I'm guessing he was a Cubs fan.

But seriously, you have been indoctrinated by the liberal publicity machine. The man was not drunk all the time, and he took the brave stand of confronting Communism in this country when few had the courage to do something about it.

[Larry Lucido]

I KNEW there was somthing about that kid! LOL!

[walford]

If you have any objective sources to your assertions, I would be grateful, and here's why:

We have to watch who we align ourselves with.

They may share some values, but may advocate things that we do not. Having the same enemy is not the same thing as being an ally [review Stalin WWII]. A person may be for/against something for a completely different reason, like being against 'affirmative action' because it treats people differently on account of race or because you are a racist and are against anything that would help minorities.

Let's not do what the Lefties do and blindly support someone because they were against the same thing.

Who was McCarthy?
http://history.freeyellow.com/mccarthy.htm
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/mccarthy-bio.html
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~kemarsh/mccarthy/senator.html

[Buckeye Bomber]

I don't personally blame that on McCarthy. But he created the environment that allowed it to happen. You never saw Bob Taft make up lists in his fights. And was he therefore a Commie sympathizer?

Eisenhower and many other Republicans (such as the aforementioned Taft) considered McCarthy dangerous and unnecessarily obnoxious in making his wild claims. Are you impugning the patriotism of Dwight D. Eisenhower? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? Sorry, too easy.

And I have to say, "He was not drunk all the time" is a retort I won't soon forget. It seems like defending Clinton by saying he wasn't a liar all the time or Hitler wasn't always killing the Jews.

[Buckeye Bomber]

"While in Washington, McCarthy quickly attracted attention because of his outrageousness. His accusations of Communist infiltration in the US brought attention to an issue that sparked fear in many Americans." This quote from your third article is what I dislike most about McCarthy. I prefer logical analysis and good strategy to whipping the populace up into a patriotic fervor.

And your quotes about who we become allies with are excellent. Fighting a war against Hitler on the side of Stalin was like fighting satan on the side of the anti-Christ. But so it goes. What's done is done. The lesson I take away is that reason is better than rhetoric. You may take different lessons away.

I'll do a quick review of the books I have and search the internet to find some sites for you. But even if I can't find the objective sources you are requesting, I believe that quote from your article proves my point: McCarthy exploited fear rather than using reason or careful analysis to further his political career.

[Buckeye Bomber]

An article from U.Penn, which you also cited as a source: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schrecker-legacy.html

I forgot to mention this earlier: loyalty programs? C'mon. What do these prove? I think one of my favorite parts of Catch 22 was the character who was constantly making people take loyalty oaths to prove their loyalty. He'd taken the most, so obviously he was the most loyal.

Hoover and McCarthy: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~mcnicholas/E309-Spring98/assign2/military/mcarthy.html

I'd think the fact that McCarthy worked with Hoover would be frightening to those of us who are scared of the Federal government, but obviously it is less of a red flag (ha!) to some.

http://staff.bath.ac.uk/hssbpn/populism.htm

I don't begrudge McCarthy his alcoholism, since obviously that's a personal characteristic beyond his public service record. I don't like political opportunism, however, and I believe that's what he was doing when he made his inflammatory claims of lists and accused every Democrat (even though he once was a Democrat) of being a Commie. He found an issue people had real fears about, and there were obviously Communists in this country, so he played it up, and won a few elections with it. You mught say McCarthy was a master of politics. I still say he was a jerk who played on fears to win elections at the cost of logic.

[walford]

Well actually the sources that I posted were just a spectrum of what is out there, not necessarilly ones that I endorse. The blurb that you quoted is high on adjectives and low on supporting facts [like direct quotes and attributed sources].

McCarthy seems to have had a bit of an abrasive personality. No problem, I'm not exactly Mr. Charming either. He seems to arouse extreme emotions, either for or against. Consequently it is difficult to find truly dispassionate scholarly info on the man. So many people seem to have an ax to grind.

[Buckeye Bomber]

That is true. There is a shortage of scholarly study on McCarthyism. I searched the databases of journals I can access, and not one dealt with McCarthy or McCarthyism. Not like many people on FR would believe scholarly reports on such a subject, but that's alright. Scholars haven't always been fair to our side.

Do you believe McCarthy did what he did for purely selfless and patriotic reasons? Do you believe he exaggerated at all? And last, do you believe his means accomplished anything more than what would have been done by more rational and less abrasive means?

[steve8714]

Opie is a Comie?

[Salman]

Grand Ole Oppy

[quietolong]

Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies,.....Or... Joe McCarthy was more right than he ever knew

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/622675/posts

[Common Tator]

I don't personally blame that on McCarthy. But he created the environment that allowed it to happen. You never saw Bob Taft make up lists in his fights. And was he therefore a Commie sympathizer?

Dick Nixon made up lists of Communists. Did that make him a Joe McCarthy in your mind? Bob Taft was the most ineffective Republican leader in the history of the Republican party. Truman used to joke, "You don't think God loves me? He gave me Bob Taft, didn't he?" Taft and his performance in the special session of congress held in late summer of 1948 elected Harry Truman. That set the stage for the Red Dean and Alger Hiss to extend the cold war for 25 years. Senator Bob Taft was about as effective as the current Governor of Ohio and about as wrong on most issues. I hear they have very similar DNA.

There were three people the leftists wanted to destroy for their stand on Communism.. and did. ... They were Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and General George Patton... It just took them longer to get Nixon.

It was the leftists that gave Communist lover Drew Pearson the means to remove Patton as a military leader. Only when it looked like Hitler was going to kick our butt after D Day, did Ike get permission to give Patton a commmand.

When it looked like he might make West Germany a force against the Russians they had to take Patton down again.

The Communists went after Dick Nixon the day he defeated leftist Helen Douglas in California. Nixon won his first national office by pointing out how Helen was pro communist. Helen never denied it. She just claimed that it was very unfair for Nixon to point it out.

When the votes in that election were counted, Nixon was a marked man..

Joe McCarthy drank a lot less than President Harry Truman. Truman consumed more than a fifth of whiskey every day of his life. Often after 7 in the evening ole Harry was incoherent. He never got tagged as a drunk. Harry even bragged about his drinking habits in the Senate in the books he wrote after he left office. Harry tended to sometimes tell the truth when drunk...Sometimes he was drunk when he wrote his books. Harry bragged about getting 60 thousand dollars from Howard Hughes in cash money. HOward and Harry met on a staff stairway landing at the Ambassador Hotel in LA in 48. Howard apparently did not want to be seen with Harry. Harry needed money to pay for his whistle stop train trip back to Washington. His campaign was broke. So Howard was called and showed up with the needed 60 grand in untraceable cash. Harry never mentioned that Howard's aircraft factory got a fat contract from the DOD for his 60 grand....but he did.

[Buckeye Bomber]

So making up lists is ok as long as you win elections? The ends justify the means? I'd rather have my principles than win elections. Bob Taft was a good man, and possibly one of the best Senators the United States has ever seen. He would have won the 1952 presidential election had it not been for Eisenhower deciding to run, and he very well might have beaten Truman in 1948. And comparing him to the current governor of my great state of Ohio is rather unfair. The current Taft is unable to pick the principles he stands by from day to day.

This going to get me flamed I'm sure, but Nixon deserved what he got. He was far too paranoid for his own good. Why did he try and cover-up a break-in that really didn't involve his office? He would have won in 72 without the break-in anyway. Odds are, if he hadn't gone down to impeachment, he would have gone down in history as a great president. Instead, his paranoia and secretive nature tarnished his legacy forever. Democrats and Republicans had turned against him when he resigned. He was a liability at that point, and a blight on the nation.

[CyberAnt]

"they were living in this country enjoying the prosperity that freedom brings"

Powerfull statement!!

[BADROTOFINGER]

Are you familiar with the Venona Project? Many suspected communists were positively identified as such. The whole "Have you no decency...blah, blah, blah..." crack was directed at a bozo who was denigrating a certain member of McCarthy's staff, sarcastically asking him to out the communists within 24 hours. McCarthy told him that he could start in his own law office with someone who worked there, then produced evidence that he was a commie. Trapped by his own associations to take the sort of action that his own obnoxiousness was literally begging for, he fell back on that old liberal stand by; he started crying like a little girl, because he had no witty, snide or sacarstic retort to the facts.

As for McCarthy's drinking being separate from his performance as a public servant, many people would take up drinking if they were consistently slandered by virtually all press outlets (many times by other Soviet agents, like I. F. Stone) 24 hours a day, by reporters who did not care for facts (just like today, go figure...).

The facts are out there to be found, but dont count on history professors or the major news media to help you find them...JFK

[dark_lord]

Ann Coulter, in her most recent book "Treason", makes the point that the vast majority of citations in books and studies on McCarthy are from secondary sources. Yes, academics quoting each other. Most quoted sources are from liberal media reports and statements made by people who actually were Communists and Soviet agents and their pals. And yes there was an orchestrated smear campaign against McCarthy. Two examples she cites are:

1st, McCarthy was a Senator. The investigations of the House UnAmerican Committee (HUAC) are lumped in with "McCarthyism" -- yet the House is of course not the Senate.

2ndly, the "Hollywood Blacklisting" had nothing to do with McCarthy. He focused only on Soviet and Communist infiltration into the US Government. Period.

Yet the media smears McCarthy with somehow being responsible for all this "bad stuff" (which in fact was not bad, since there really were hundreds of Soviet agents infiltrating government.) IMO, the KBG funded thousands of people to infiltrate academia, legal foundations, nonprofits, and the media. Legally, too. Someone goes and makes a speech for some "foundation" and gets a nice $5K or $10K fee for the speech. Absolutely legal. But this kind of thing permitted people to become "agents of influence" when they weren't actually spies. They didn't have to give up a livelyhood to become subversives. They were paid.

I had hoped that after the demise of the USSR and the decline of the KGB funding this would die out, but I think these people are too infiltrated into the NGO's (UN), government agencies (civil servant salaries), and foundations (which tap into government grants).

[ThomasMore]

McCarthyism is a word engineered to the liberal agenda. While liberalism's mentors and high priests and priestesses were all covertly supporting Marxism/Socialism, they were all playing the "McCarthy is a bigoted fascist" game, trying to hide their true identity.

Remember, McCarthy was right about the "Ten". (and probably a lot more)