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posted
This one is worth seeing, IMHO, as for who looks
good, Ann Coulter (my future wife), Smiler George Bush,
veterans and their families, the Kurds, Iraqis, Democrats disillusioned with the left wing of their party such as actor Ron Silver and Mayor Koch, the Patriot Act, and for who looks very, very bad such as Michael Moore and everyone associated with him, Sadaam Hussein and everyone associated with him (such as French, German, Russian
and Chinese officials who took bribes), the Kofigate
food scam folk at the U.N.,and Americans who have not yet come out of denial and even oppose liberty.

One quote from Edmund Burke flashed on the screen:

-"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

caritas,

mm <*)))))><
 
Posts: 2559 | Registered: 14 June 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Thanks for the review, MM. I'll be sure to see it. Is it only in movie theatres or is it also out on video?
 
Posts: 5413 | Location: Washington State | Registered: 21 September 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Ann Coulter (my future wife)

You can have her after me, MM. I'm going to be her second husband. (Or, given her temperament, her third, fourth, fifth or sixth). Check out this amusing interview with Ann.
 
Posts: 5413 | Location: Washington State | Registered: 21 September 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Brad, I'd like to read Witness by Whittaker Chambers
sometime and learn more about Alger Hess and how communists infiltrated fairly high into our government at one time.

McCarthy took up the "right" position against the communists, IMHO, but as Bill Wilson, founder of AA
observed, most drunks are bankrupt idealists.(I resemble that remark) Wink As his alcoholism progressed, it seems he became dishonest in pursuit of his idealism. Perhaps he had some neurosis from trauma in his early life
and his "false self" was manifesting, but I just hate the way we perform psychohistory on everyone these days. (I think I just did.)

Coulter seems pretty sharp and on top of things, and her book is likely to be as interesting as she is, and the DVD of Farenhype 9/11 is available.

peace,

mm <*)))))><
 
Posts: 2559 | Registered: 14 June 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Brad, I'd like to read Witness by Whittaker Chambers
sometime and learn more about Alger Hess and how communists infiltrated fairly high into our government at one time.


They did, MM, and Ann Coulter makes a good case for McCarthy. As she said in that interview, people have attributed more nuance and shades-of-gray to Hitler than to McCarthy. I'm pretty sure the conventional wisdom on him is all wrong but we must be careful not to commit the sin of counter-revisionism and paint him as an angel if he, in fact, wasn't an angel. But my back-of-the-envelope calculation is the Hoover, McCarthy and others were trying to protect this country from real villains, not phantoms � and they did for the most part. In this more libertarian age where everyone is entitled to their opinion we might not look too kindly on criminalizing belonging to the Communist Party. On the other hand, let's not be coy. There were many people who were giving aid and comfort to our mortal enemy. As much as people screamed and shouted about civil rights and witch hunts they willfully associated themselves with witches and were friendly with a government that would strip us of our civil rights in an instance if given the chance.

I think most average Americans would be simply astounded if they found out just how many of the anti-war and anti-globalization movements were 100% bona fide associations of nothing more than Marxists. The same can be said of many in positions of power and influence, including teachers. The biggest mistake of McCarthy was to lose the public relations campaign. Now it's considered a major crime if one even dares to point out that so and so is an outright Marxist and hostile to capitalism, democracy and the United States. They've made it politically incorrect to point out that there are some people actively trying to subvert our freedoms. But as (Flynn?) said in one of those interviews, we've taken back much of the media and we can take back our educational system as well.

I haven't read the Coulter book yet, "Treason". Have you? If so, do you recommend it?
 
Posts: 5413 | Location: Washington State | Registered: 21 September 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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No, I haven't read Treason yet. A websearch at NR for Alger Hiss might produce some interesting results if they have archived articles of that vintage.

All that it takes sometimes is one individual who will stand up for truth. I'm into a biography of Martin Luther and he would not back down in the face
of attacks from a level of consciousness comparable
to totalitarianism.

Do you know an author named Frum who wrote The War on Terror? He was highlighted in Farenhype 911.

caritas,

mm <*)))))><
 
Posts: 2559 | Registered: 14 June 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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The U.S. Senate that censured McCarthy was not made up of communists. They recognized that McCarthyism was creating an atmosphere of hysteria, paranoia, and fear (COMMUNISTS UNDER EVERY BED!!!) way out of proportion to the actual threat. It was giving legitimate investigations a bad name. It threatened to undermine some of the most basic American values. Waving phony "lists of communists" and brow-beating people almost at random in public hearings did nothing to improve our security. We went on to do very well and win the Cold War without him. Weep not for Joseph McCarthy.

Ann Coulter is a snarling low-class pinhead, the cable TV version of a professional wrestler...and just as honest.

Markle
 
Posts: 51 | Location: Agoura Hills (Los Angeles), California | Registered: 10 November 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Do you know an author named Frum who wrote The War on Terror? He was highlighted in Farenhype 911.

Sorry, MM, I didn�t catch your question until Markle revived this thread. Yes, I�m familiar with Frum. I read him all the time over at National Review Online. I would consider him a quite serious thinker.

Markle, I�m by no means a McCarthy expert but it�s clear that there�s a much more complete and balanced view of this story then the conventional one that has been told to us. What we�re hearing is, I think, at best "folklore" spun by the left rather than hard truth. For example, from "Why the Left Hates America" by Daniel J. Flynn:

quote:
The House Committee on Un-American Activities was actually the creation of a far-left Democratic officeholder who would later become a paid agent of the Soviet Union. In 1934, Samuel Dickstein, a congressman from New York City, called for Congress to investigate the un-American activities of anti-Semites, fascists, and other assorted crypto-Nazis operating within the United States. The role of the consequent House investigative body, know as the "Dickstein Committee, " was expanded at its namesake�s request. As Texas Democrat Martin Dies gained control over the committee, he focused on increasing amount of attention on Communists. It was only then that the Communists objected to the House Committee on the Un-American Activities, the very outfit their own fellow traveler was responsible for devising.

The Communist Party actively supported the Smith Act when it was enacted in the early 1940s. The legislation criminilized political parties that sought the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. When the leadership of the Trotskyists Socialist Workers Party was put on trial for violating the Smith Act in the law�s very first case in 1941, the Communist Party prepared 14 documents for federal prosecutors, including an item called "The Fifth Column Role of the Trotskyites in the United States." Communists began to cry foul only when the Smith Act was later used against them.

Long before the major studios announced a boycott of Communists working in the film industry, Hollywood�s Left introduced its own blacklist. Writer Martin Berkeley�s work, for instance, was held back for more than a year and a half by his agnet, a Communist who sought to blackball his own client�s career. Studio giant Jack Warner testified that Hollywood Communists blocked anti-Communists from getting jobs.
And Ann Coulter is a babe, no matter what you say. Wink
 
Posts: 5413 | Location: Washington State | Registered: 21 September 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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There were undoubtedly some "useful idiots" in Hollywood and elsewhere, as real communists called them, but the U.S. was never in danger from domestic communists to warrant the extent of the dark shadow Joseph McCarthy spread over this country. McCarthy was an unknown back-bench junior senator from Wisconsin until he saw a way to make a splash and make a name for himself. I repeat--the 1950's Senate that censured him was not a left-wing body. They saw what was happening and what he was doing. He was no hero.

<< And Ann Coulter is a babe, no matter what you say. >>

To each his own. That tight face and the venom she spews don't do much for me. Of course, as I've said before elsewhere, her ability to unhinge her jaw like a snake could have its advantages.....

Markle
 
Posts: 51 | Location: Agoura Hills (Los Angeles), California | Registered: 10 November 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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The Hidden Truth About Joseph McCarthy
Daniel J. Flynn
quote:
For generations of American students, the name Joe McCarthy and not Joe Stalin has been synonymous with evil. A practitioner of �black arts,� a �demon,� �ogreish,� and a �seditionist� are a few of the descriptions of him handed down to us from his first major biographer. The passage of time hasn�t tempered these hysterical reactions.

The late senator, the story goes, created a climate of fear in the early 1950s by conducting a witchhunt that called liberals �Communists� and Communists �spies.� We now know better. The witches were real. Today, even many of McCarthy�s most extreme and ridiculed statements�alleging �a conspiracy on a scale so immense� or lambasting �twenty years of treason� in Democratic administrations�seem, if anything, to understate the pervasiveness of Communist infiltration of the U.S. government and the enormity of its damage.

Documents from the Soviet Union�s archives, USSR spy messages deciphered by the U.S. government�s Venona program, and declassified FBI files and wiretaps all prove that hundreds of U.S. officials were agents of an international Communist conspiracy. If these previously inaccessible documents shed light on only a few of McCarthy�s specific charges, they certainly vindicate his general charge that security in the U.S. government was lax and that large numbers of Communists penetrated positions of great importance.
quote:
Despite many of these new revelations, academic opinion of �tail-gunner Joe,� the central enemy of domestic subversion in the early 1950s, has remained static. This consensus had gone unchallenged within academic circles until the release of Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America�s Most Hated Senator by George Mason University History Professor Arthur Herman.

In Joseph McCarthy, Arthur Herman writes that the �standard claim that McCarthy had never exposed a real Communist in the government� is �demonstrably false.� A perusal of the major books on McCarthy reveals that this statement itself sets Herman�s work apart.

McCarthy�s �critics were right,� Rutgers Professor David Oshinsky remarks in A Conspiracy So Immense, �he never uncovered a Communist.� Thomas Reeves of the University of Wisconsin opines in The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy that �McCarthy did not have a single name.� Robert Griffith maintains in The Politics of Fear, �Each of McCarthy�s charges was fraudulent.� �It happened to be a fact,� boasted Richard Rovere in Senator Joe McCarthy, �that not one certifiable Communist had been disclosed as working for the government� as a result of the junior senator from Wisconsin�s efforts.

Herman dissents and offers up Owen Lattimore, Edward Posniak, Mary Jane Keeney, Gustavo Duran, and John Carter Vincent as among the cases in which McCarthy had things essentially right.

Among one of the first names McCarthy named was that of Mary Jane Keeney. Mrs. Keeney worked in various sensitive overseas State Department jobs during the 1940s before settling in at the United Nations. Intercepted Venona cables, as well as her own diaries, prove that Keeney and her husband were Soviet agents. In February of 1950 McCarthy understated matters by labeling this agent of a foreign power merely a Communist. By the end of that year she was forced out of her post at the United Nations.

For anti-anticommunists, McCarthy�s charges against Gustavo Duran stood as �proof of the insanity of the red scare.� Michael Straight, Duran�s brother-in-law and editor of The New Republic, would use the pages of his magazine to promote Duran�s supposed innocence and McCarthy�s assumed recklessness. Testimony by many attesting to Duran�s Stalinism and work for the Spanish Communist secret police during the Spanish Civil War�even a picture of him in a Communist uniform�was dismissed as Francoist propaganda. One would think that Straight�s later admission to being a Soviet agent should have at least sparked a second look into this McCarthy allegation by historians.
quote:
More so than any other witness, Annie Lee Moss purportedly exposed the cruelty and recklessness of Joseph McCarthy. Moss, who somehow jumped from an Army cafeteria worker to a clerk in the Pentagon code room, was labeled by McCarthy to be a loyalty risk. A middle-aged African American woman who walked to give her testimony with an elderly gait, Moss quickly gained the sympathy of Democrats on McCarthy�s committee. When asked about her knowledge of Karl Marx, Moss asked, �Who�s that?� The copies of The Daily Worker that arrived at her house were sent to the wrong address, she maintained. There were three Annie Lee Mosses in Washington, DC, her defenders intoned, so perhaps McCarthy had gotten the wrong woman.

McCarthy-haters seized on the Moss case as a club with which to beat anti-Communists. Edward R. Murrow devoted his weekly �See It Now� program to Mrs. Moss�s plight, while Missouri Senator Stu Symington told the witness that if she lost her job with the Army she could always come work for him. Just a year after McCarthy�s death it was revealed that he had indeed got the right woman. There was only one Annie Lee Moss in Washington, DC and it was the same Annie Lee Moss whose name and address appeared on the rolls of the local Communist Party. A former FBI agent even attested to seeing her actual Communist Party membership card from years earlier. If one U.S. Senator should be destroyed for allegedly making false accusations of Communism, what should the penalty be for another who announces to the world his willingness to give a Communist a job in his office?
And here�s a link that more or less gives the standard history. Notice how it starts with an attempt at character assassination. My gosh. Senator McCarthy liked to play poker!

quote:
Of course, there were some things about the flamboyant Senator from Wisconsin that limited his effectiveness. During his storied career, he was never once able to have an accused Red be found guilty.1 He was a heavy drinker and had a soft spot for horse racing and poker games. Despite these shortcomings, he was able to become a national celebrity.

From his expensive election campaign, to his first speech on Communism, to the Army-McCarthy hearings, to his sudden death, and even to today, Senator McCarthy has been the subject of a long-lasting controversy about morality and politics. Some people feel that he was a counter-productive demagogue who aimlessly attacked innocent people. Others felt that he was bringing to the attention of America the eminent threat of Communism. He was a cold-hearted man who was a disgrace to the United States, whose anti-Communist fervor was not based upon ideology but upon his need for a headline-gaining cause.
Markle, that last part in bold coincides with your understanding of McCarthy. I just think that impression is woefully incomplete and one-sided. I don�t doubt there are some skeletons in closet in the story of McCarthy. I�d just like to know which ones are real and which are propaganda. And I�d also like to know and acknowledge the positive sides to this whole story (and they may be overwhelming).
 
Posts: 5413 | Location: Washington State | Registered: 21 September 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Brad, there are legitimate criminal investigations ...and then there are fishing expeditions, hearings for show and publicity, false accusations in hearings with no legal protections, blacklists based on rumor and secret accusations, and on and on. Innocent lives were ruined by innuendo. McCarthy's hearings were close to the kangaroo courts of the evil empire we were fighting against. Once he used up whatever real communists (or sympathizers) there were in the government, he had to dig deeper and deeper into thinner ore to keep his hearings going and keep himself in the public eye. You're forgetting how his career came to an end--when the nation saw him on television dredging up a single mistake a man had made years before, and the man's lawyer said, That's enough, "at long last, sir, have you no decency?" And the country saw McCarthy sitting there, sweating with his mouth hanging open, his slimy methods openly exposed.

This is America. We're not supposed to do things that way. McCarthy doesn't get promoted automatically just because liberals didn't like him. The majority of the Senate at the time were fed up with the embarrassment his methods reflected on them. It's way too late to rehabilitate the reputation of that monster.

When I was a freshman at the University of North Carolina in 1966, before I transferred up north, my first American History professor was a courtly Southern gentlemen, whose eyes blazed when he talked about the damage McCarthy has done to the country. He finished by saying, "And then he went home to Wisconsin, where he performed his greatest service to his country. He died."

Markle
 
Posts: 51 | Location: Agoura Hills (Los Angeles), California | Registered: 10 November 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Markle, I know what the standard party line is concerning McCarthy and you state it rather well. My question though is "Is it true? Is it someone's self-serving fabrication?" Could it be that

quote:
With the opening of the KGB archives and the release of the VENONA intercepts - decoded Soviet KGB and GRU traffic - it has been proved that McCarthy was absolutely right about the extensive Soviet penetration of the U.S. government in all the most sensitive sections and its danger to America. According to the KGB archives the NKVD had 221 agents in the Roosevelt administration in April 1941 and the Soviet military GRU probably had a like number. He was proved right that the Communist Party, U.S.A., was an arm of the Soviet intelligence apparatus and the Soviet Union considered the US as their "main enemy." His liberal critics in academe and the mainstream media, who denied there was Communist subversion and made excuses for it, were proved absolutely wrong! This should have discredited the liberal ideology and those who mouthed it. Because the left had no answer or effective reply to the challenge McCarthy posed, they engaged in personal destruction - they smeared and demonized McCarthy because he was truth.
or

quote:
Joe McCarthy's great achievement was that he helped popularize a deep public animosity toward Communism and its agents. McCarthy attacked liberalism itself, exposing its fraud by proving liberal's willingness to side with Communist infiltration and treason, to glamorize the brutality of Communist governments. Liberalism sympathizes with and protects Communism's champions and professes to find moral worth in a system of absolute evil. Liberalism and Communism are both infected with the same materialistic secular virus and have such philosophical affinity that usually they can not be distinguished. Their identical world-view creates a "strong affinity between the Communists and New Dealers; between the progressive and totalitarian visions of the maximalist state." (Professor A. Herman)
I think there's much truth to that. We've seen recently and repeatedly how successful the left has been at slandering otherwise patriotic, tolerant and upstanding people such as Ashcroft, Robert Bork or Clarence Thomas. It's not hard to imagine they did the same to McCarthy.
 
Posts: 5413 | Location: Washington State | Registered: 21 September 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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THE TRUE HISTORY OF A GREAT PATRIOT
The Late Senator Joseph R McCarthy
narrated by Mrs Larry Lawrence Lent, his secretary
published by The Government Educational Foundation, 1998

quote:
It is true; when people learn that I have been secretary to Senator McCarthy, they invariably want to know, "What was he really like?" To me Senator McCarthy was a courageous American hero. His religious convictions and his deep love for his country were topmost in his mind. He believed in our Constitution and the American people. He believed that he could help preserve liberty and justice by ridding the nation of its enemies.

As for the man McCarthy, I liked and admired him tremendously. He was friendly and unassuming, the kind of a man that most people like the first time they meet him. He was generous, he was thoughtful, he had a brilliant mind and a fabulous memory. He was absolutely honest, he was kind and gentle and he loved children. He had a good sense of humor and a positive outlook. He was morally clean, and despite all the malicious attacks on him personally, he was not at all bitter.

This was really extraordinary and I can add one more thought: he was a grand person to work for. Now that is quite a list of attributes which you may doubt, but I assure you I can prove every one of them. Before I go on, let me add that the Senator loved this Nation with such devotion that he actually inspired those around him. It became a real joy working for him and with him for America; it seemed as though we were all part of his crusade.
quote:
Now to the Communist version of the word "McCarthyism," which they had just coined. It was to be a dirty, hateful, disgusting word meaning frightening attacks on innocent people, destroying their lives, character assassination, a vicious witch hunt. The first time I actually saw the word in print was in the Daily Worker newspaper. This was the Communist Party newspaper published in New York City which carried orders to American Communists from the Soviet Union. They would, of course, follow the instructions which Lenin had given them to use language to sow hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like toward anyone who disagreed with them.

Now the Communist attack on Senator McCarthy came into full swing. Following Lenin's instructions, every effort was being made to smear and discredit his life, his character, his work, and particularly his method. Because some people did not understand what the Communists called his methods and the press continued using the Communist's meaning, Senator McCarthy wrote a book explaining all that he was doing. He named it "McCarthyism, The Fight For America." I will tell you later how you can get a copy of that book, which is very, very interesting. Senator McCarthy did warn the American people to take a long look at what had happened to the Russians when the Communist Bolshevik terrorists took over their country. All of a sudden their freedom was completely gone, millions murdered and many millions of their farmers were starved to death. It was a frightening picture, and McCarthy knew the true aim of the Communists was total world domination. When you think about it, the Communists have never denied that ultimate goal. Back in 1946, one of the Soviet leaders, Dametre Namreleske, told his Communist followers to be patient. He told them that war to the hilt, between Communism and Capitalism, is inevitable. "Today," he told them, "They are too weak to strike; their day will come in thirty to forty years." But first he told them "We must lull the Capitalist countries to sleep with the greatest overtures of peace and disarmament known throughout history. And then when their guard is dropped, we shall smash them with our clenched fists."

I think we need to remember that was in 1946, and nowhere have we seen any indication that they have changed their ultimate aim. Today we can easily recognize their talk of peace and disarmament and what it really means. When the Senator's book "McCarthyism, The Fight For America" was printed, it was sent to libraries and book stores throughout America, but it was hidden and almost never displayed. The news media continued to accept and publicize the communist version of "McCarthyism" again and again. Over the years it is a fact that when a lie is repeated often enough, people tend to believe it. If people would just take time to do a little research, they would discover not McCarthy, the Evil Accuser, but McCarthy, the American Hero. The integrity of his motives, the accuracy of his charges, and the validity of his message are vindicated by the truth. Of course, the truth is now that McCarthy was right.
 
Posts: 5413 | Location: Washington State | Registered: 21 September 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Well, Brad, since my comments are nothing more than "the standard party line," what more can I say? Obviously I'm incapable of departing from my programming. I'm sure Joe McCarthy represented the highest attainment of humanity, the purest form of the human spirit, the greatest exemplar of the nobility of the human race in its neverending quest for perfection. They should erase George Washington from Mount Rushmore to make room for Saint Joseph's beatific visage. Thank you for setting me straight.

Markle

P.S. And they can blast off Lincoln's face to make room for Ann Coulter's, too. Lincoln was just another liberal believer in the federal government and a commie social engineer who deprived slaveowners of their god-given property rights.

And don't even get me started on that atheist pinko Thomas Jefferson......
 
Posts: 51 | Location: Agoura Hills (Los Angeles), California | Registered: 10 November 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Obviously I'm incapable of departing from my programming.

You may have nailed it, Markle. I haven't the time nor the inclination to become a McCarthy expert just to refute your view of things but it seems clear you're sticking to your story no matter what and any attempt to dislodge you with new information would be pointless.
 
Posts: 5413 | Location: Washington State | Registered: 21 September 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Interesting exchange! I've learned a lot about McCarthy that I didn't know. From what I've gathered as "from a distance" is that McCarthy's "charge" was to examine the extent of communist infiltration into various sectors of U.S. society, as there was (apparently legitimate) concern about this.

If you read the actual resolution of his censureby the Senate, we hear:

quote:
He and his aides, Roy Cohn and David Schine, made wild accusations, browbeat witnesses, destroyed reputations and threw mud at men like George Marshall, Adlai Stevenson, and others whom McCarthy charged were part of an effete "eastern establishment." For several years, McCarthy terrorized American public life, and even Dwight Eisenhower, who detested McCarthy, was afraid to stand up to him. Finally, however, the senator from Wisconsin over-reached himself.
They go on to spell out other problems.

This link also reviews what led up to the censure, and from what I gather, it wasn't McCarthy's patriotism that was the issue, nor, even the reality of the communist threat, but McCarthy's tactics, which had apparently over-reached the boundaries of ethical conduct, at least in the minds of his peers.
 
Posts: 7539 | Location: Wichita, KS | Registered: 09 August 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Exactly, Phil! Precisely my point.

Tactics. Methods. The devil is in the details. People can't do whatever comes into their heads just because they say their cause is right. McCarthy's methods are not validated because communism is bad. One of the very reasons anti-communism became suspect among some circles is because it became associated with the actions of that thug. McCarthy, in fact, hurt the cause of anti-communism in this way. "McCarthyism" became a dirty word. If the choice was communism on the one hand and a McCarthyite witch-hunting police state on the other hand, that choice started not to be so clear.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Markle
 
Posts: 51 | Location: Agoura Hills (Los Angeles), California | Registered: 10 November 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Happy Thankgiving to you, markle. Smiler What's your take on Oliver North? Just curious.

caritas,

mm <*)))))><
 
Posts: 2559 | Registered: 14 June 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Here's another traditional take on McCarthy and I think it's rather a nice summary that includes the House's Un-American Activities Committee's dealings with Hollywood (which often gets smooshed together with McCarthy in the minds of people). It's gets quite ugly at times with base accusations made against McCarthy. If McCarthy is guilty of McCarthyism then it's clear he wasn't alone�and probably didn't start the practice�and that practice still goes on today.

Here's another rebuttal of the standard view of McCarthy. It's in Q&A format and I thought was rather thorough:

The Real McCarthy Record
by James J. Drummey

quote:
Q. Was it fair for McCarthy to make all those names public and ruin reputations?

A. That is precisely why McCarthy did not make the names public. Four times during McCarthy's February 20th speech, Senator Scott Lucas demanded that McCarthy make the 81 names public, but McCarthy refused to do so, responding that "if I were to give all the names involved, it might leave a wrong impression. If we should label one man a communist when he is not a communist, I think it would be too bad." What McCarthy did was to identify the individuals only by case numbers, not by their names.

By the way, it took McCarthy some six hours to make that February 20th speech because of harassment by hostile senators, four of whom - Scott Lucas, Brien McMahon, Garrett Withers, and Herbert Lehman - interrupted him a total of 123 times. It should also be noted that McCarthy was not indicting the entire State Department. He said that "the vast majority of the employees of the State Department are loyal" and that he was only after the ones who had demonstrated a loyalty to the Soviet Union or to the Communist Party.
quote:
Q. What was the purpose of the Tydings Committee?

A. The Tydings Committee was a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was set up in February 1950 to conduct "a full and complete study and investigation as to whether persons who are disloyal to the United States are, or have been, employed by the Department of State." The chairman of the subcommittee, Senator Millard Tydings, a Democrat, set the tone for the hearings on the first day when he told McCarthy: "You are in the position of being the man who occasioned this hearing, and so far as I am concerned in this committee you are going to get one of the most complete investigations ever given in the history of this Republic, so far as my abilities will permit."

After 31 days of hearings, during which McCarthy presented public evidence on nine persons (Dorothy Kenyon, Haldore Hanson, Philip Jessup, Esther Brunauer, Frederick Schuman, Harlow Shapley, Gustavo Duran, John Stewart Service, and Owen Lattimore), the Tydings Committee labeled McCarthy's charges a "fraud" and a "hoax," said that the individuals on his list were neither communist nor pro-communist, and concluded that the State Department had an effective security program.

Q. Did the Tydings Committee carry out its mandate?

A. Not by a long shot. The Tydings Committee never investigated State Department security at all and did not come close to conducting the "full and complete study and investigation" it was supposed to conduct. Tydings and his Democratic colleagues, Brien McMahon and Theodore Green, subjected McCarthy to considerable interruptions and heckling, prompting Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to protest that McCarthy "never gets a fair shake" in trying to present his evidence in an orderly fashion. So persistent were the interruptions and statements of the Democratic trio during the first two days of the hearings that McCarthy was allowed only a total of 17 and one-half minutes of direct testimony.

While the Democrats were hostile to McCarthy and to any witnesses who could confirm his charges, they fawned over the six individuals who appeared before the committee to deny McCarthy's accusations. Tydings, McMahon, and Green not only treated Philip Jessup like a hero, for one example, but refused to let McCarthy present his full case against Jessup or to cross-examine him. Furthermore, the committee majority declined to call more than 20 witnesses whom Senator Bourke Hickenlooper thought were important to the investigation.

And when Senator Lodge read into the record 19 questions that he thought should be answered before the committee exonerated the State Department's security system, not only did the Democrats ignore the questions, but some member of the committee or the staff deleted from the official transcript of the hearings the 19 questions, as well as other testimony that made the committee look bad. The deleted material amounted to 35 typewritten pages.

It is clear then that the Tydings Committee did not carry out its mandate and that the words "fraud" and "hoax" more accurately describe the Tydings Report than they do McCarthy's charges.
quote:
Q. Even if McCarthy was right about Service, Jessup, and Lattimore, weren't there hundreds of others who were publicly smeared by him?

A. This is one of the most enduring myths about McCarthy, and it is completely false. It is a fact, wrote William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell in McCarthy and His Enemies, that from February 9, 1950 until January 1, 1953, Joe McCarthy publicly questioned the loyalty or reliability of a grand total of 46 persons, and particularly dramatized the cases of only 24 of the 46. We have discussed three of the senator's major targets, and Buckley and Bozell pointed out that McCarthy "never said anything more damaging about Lauchlin Currie, Gustavo Duran, Theodore Geiger, Mary Jane Keeney, Edward Posniak, Haldore Hanson, and John Carter Vincent, than that they are known to one or more responsible persons as having been members of the Communist Party, which is in each of these instances true."

While McCarthy may have exaggerated the significance of the evidence against some other individuals, his record on the whole is extremely good. (This is also true of the 1953-54 period when he was chairman of a Senate committee and publicly exposed 114 persons, most of whom refused to answer questions about communist or espionage activities on the ground that their answers might tend to incriminate them.) There were no innocent victims of McCarthyism. Those whom McCarthy accused had indeed collaborated in varying degrees with communists, had shown no remorse for their actions, and thoroughly deserved whatever scorn was directed at them.
quote:
Q. What about McCarthy's attack on General George Marshall? Wasn't that a smear of a great man?

A. This is a reference to the 60,000-word speech McCarthy delivered on the Senate floor on June 14, 1951 (later published as a book entitled America's Retreat From Victory). One interesting thing about the speech is that McCarthy drew almost entirely from sources friendly to Marshall in discussing nearly a score of Marshall's actions and policies that had helped the communists in the USSR, Europe, China, and Korea. "I do not propose to go into his motives," said McCarthy. "Unless one has all the tangled and often complicated circumstances contributing to a man's decisions, an inquiry into his motives is often fruitless. I do not pretend to understand General Marshall's nature and character, and I shall leave that subject to subtler analysts of human personality."

One may agree or disagree with McCarthy's statement that America's steady retreat from victory "must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men." That statement was very controversial in 1951, but after no-win wars in Korea and Vietnam, decades of Soviet expansionism throughout the world, the weakening of America's military, and its increasing subservience to United Nations authority, it doesn't seem so controversial anymore.
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Q. Granted that congressional investigating committees can serve an important purpose, weren't McCarthy's methods terrible and didn't he subject witnesses to awful harassment?

A. Now we're into an entirely different phase of McCarthy's career. For three years, he had been one lone senator crying in the wilderness. With the Republicans taking control of the Senate in January 1953, however, Joe McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. No longer did he have to rely solely upon public speeches to inform the American people of the communist threat to America. He was now chairman of a Senate committee with a mandate to search out graft, incompetence, and disloyalty inside the vast reaches of the American government.

McCarthy's methods were no different from those of other senators who were generally applauded for vigorous cross-examination of organized crime figures, for instance. The question of methods seemed to come up only when subversives or spies were on the witness stand. And those who most loudly deplored McCarthy's methods often resorted to the foulest methods themselves, including the use of lies, half-truths, and innuendos designed to stir up hysteria against him. What some people seemingly do not understand is that communists are evildoers and that those who give aid and comfort to communists - whether they are called dupes, fellow travelers, liberals, or progressives - are complicit in the evil and should be exposed and removed from positions of influence.

Traitors and spies in high places are not easy to identify. They do not wear sweatshirts with the hammer and sickle emblazoned on the front. Only painstaking investigation and exhaustive questioning can reveal them as enemies. So why all the condemnation for those who expose spies and none for the spies themselves? Why didn't McCarthy's critics expose a traitor now and then and show everyone how much better they could do it? No, it was much easier to hound out of public life such determined enemies of the Reds as Martin Dies, Parnell Thomas, and Joe McCarthy than to muster the courage to face the howling communist wolfpack themselves.
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Q. Weren't McCarthy and some members of his staff guilty of "bookburning" and causing a ruckus in Europe in 1953?

A. This accusation was made in reference to the committee's inquiry into communist influences in State Department libraries overseas. In his book McCarthy, Roy Cohn, the committee's chief counsel, conceded that he and committee staffer David Schine "unwittingly handed Joe McCarthy's enemies a perfect opportunity to spread the tale that a couple of young, inexperienced clowns were bustling about Europe, ordering State Department officials around, burning books, creating chaos wherever they went, and disrupting foreign relations." In point of fact, however, the trip and subsequent hearings by the committee provided information that led to the removal of more than 30,000 communist and pro-communist books from U.S. Information Service libraries in foreign countries. The presence of such books was in obvious conflict with the stated purpose of those libraries "to promote better understanding of America abroad" and "to combat and expose Soviet communistic propaganda."
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Q. Didn't the Senate finally censure McCarthy for his conduct during the Army-McCarthy Hearings?

A. No! McCarthy was not censured for his conduct in the Army-McCarthy Hearings or for anything he had ever said or done in any hearings in which he had participated. Here are the facts: After McCarthy emerged unscathed from his bout with the Army, the Left launched a new campaign to discredit and destroy him. The campaign began on July 30, 1954, when Senator Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution accusing McCarthy of conduct "unbecoming a member of the United States Senate." Flanders, who two months earlier had told the Senate that McCarthy's "anti-Communism so completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to strike fear into the hearts of any defenseless minority," had gotten his list of charges against McCarthy from a left-wing group called the National Committee for an Effective Congress.

McCarthy's enemies ultimately accused him of 46 different counts of allegedly improper conduct and another special committee was set up, under the chairmanship of Senator Arthur Watkins, to study and evaluate the charges. Thus began the fifth investigation of Joe McCarthy in five years! After two months of hearings and deliberations, the Watkins Committee recommended that McCarthy be censured on only two of the 46 counts.

So when a special session of the Senate convened on November 8, 1954, these were the two charges to be debated and voted on: 1) That Senator McCarthy had "failed to cooperate" in 1952 with the Senate Subcommitee on Privileges and Elections that was looking into certain aspects of his private and political life in connection with a resolution for his expulsion from the Senate; and 2) That in conducting a senatorial inquiry, Senator McCarthy had "intemperately abused" General Ralph Zwicker.

Many senators were uneasy about the Zwicker count, particularly since the Army had shown contempt for committee chairman McCarthy by disregarding his letter of February 1, 1954 and honorably discharging Irving Peress the next day. For this reason, these senators felt that McCarthy's conduct toward Zwicker on February 18th was at least partially justified. So the Zwicker count was dropped at the last minute and was replaced with this substitute charge: 2) That Senator McCarthy, by characterizing the Watkins Committee as the "unwitting handmaiden" of the Communist Party and by describing the special Senate session as a "lynch party" and a "lynch bee," had "acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity."

On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to "condemn" Senator Joseph McCarthy on both counts by a vote of 67 to 22, with the Democrats unanimously in favor of condemnation and the Republicans split evenly.

Q. Was the Senate justified in condemning McCarthy on these counts?

A. No, it was not. Regarding the first count, failure to cooperate with the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, the subcommittee never subpoenaed McCarthy, but only "invited" him to testify. One senator and two staff members resigned from the subcommittee because of its dishonesty towards McCarthy, and the subcommittee, in its final report, dated January 2, 1953, said that the matters under consideration "have become moot by reason of the 1952 election." No senator had ever been punished for something that had happened in a previous Congress or for declining an "invitation" to testify.

As for the second count, criticism of the Watkins Committee and the special Senate session, McCarthy was condemned for opinions he had expressed outside the Senate. As David Lawrence pointed out in an editorial in the June 7, 1957 issue of U.S. News & World Report, other senators had accused McCarthy of lying under oath, accepting influence money, engaging in election fraud, making libelous and false statements, practicing blackmail, doing the work of the communists for them, and engaging in a questionable "personal relationship" with Roy Cohn and David Schine, but they were not censured for acting "contrary to senatorial ethics" or for impairing the "dignity" of the Senate.

The chief beneficiary of the Senate destruction of Joe McCarthy was the communist conspiracy. Former communist Louis Budenz, who knew the inner workings of that conspiracy as well as anyone, said that the condemnation of McCarthy left the way open "to intimidate any person of consequence who moves against the conspiracy. The communists made him their chief target because they wanted to make him a symbol to remind political leaders in America not to harm the conspiracy or its world conquest designs."
quote:
Q. Did Joseph McCarthy become a recluse in the 29 months between his condemnation and his death?

A. No, he did not. He worked hard at his senatorial duties. "To insist, as some have, that McCarthy was a shattered man after the censure is sheer nonsense," said Brent Bozell, one of his aides at the time. "His intellect was as sharp as ever. When he addressed himself to a problem, he was perfectly capable of dealing with it."

A member of the minority party in the Senate again, McCarthy had to rely on public speeches to alert the American people to the menace of communism. This he did in a number of important addresses during those two and a half years. He warned against attendance at summit conferences with the Reds, saying that "you cannot offer friendship to tyrants and murderers � without advancing the cause of tyranny and murder." He declared that "coexistence with communists is neither possible nor honorable nor desirable. Our longterm objective must be the eradication of communism from the face of the earth."

Senator McCarthy was virtually alone in warning that the Soviet Union was winning the missile race "because well-concealed communists in the United States government are putting the brakes on our own guided-missile program." He was prophetic in urging the Eisenhower Administration to let "the free Asiatic peoples" fight to free their countrymen from communist slavery in Red China, North Korea, and North Vietnam. "In justice to them, and in justice to the millions of American boys who will otherwise be called upon to sacrifice their lives in a total war against communism," said McCarthy, "we must permit our fighting allies, with our material and technical assistance, to carry the fight to the enemy." This was not permitted and, a decade later, more than half a million American servicemen were fighting in South Vietnam.
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Q. Did Joe McCarthy drink himself to death?

A. His enemies would like to have you think that. If McCarthy drank as much as his foes allege, for as many years as they allege, he would have had to be carried from speech to speech and from hearing to hearing, and he would have been unable to string two coherent sentences together. Did McCarthy look or act like a drunk during the 36 days of televised Army-McCarthy Hearings? No alcoholic could have accomplished all that McCarthy did, especially in so few years. Yes, Joseph McCarthy drank, and he probably drank too much sometimes, but he did not drink during working hours, and any drinking he did do did not detract one iota from his fight against communism or from the accuracy of his charges.
quote:
Q. Did McCarthy conduct a "reign of terror" in the 1950s?

A. This is one of the big lies the left continues to spread about McCarthy. The average American did not fear McCarthy; in fact, the Gallup Poll reported in 1954 that the senator was fourth on its list of most admired men. The only people terrorized by McCarthy were those who had something subversive to hide in their past and were afraid that they might eventually be exposed.

Oh, there was a "reign of terror" in the early '50s, but it was conducted against Joe McCarthy, not by him. Those who denounced McCarthy week in and week out included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Life, Walter Lippmann, the Alsop brothers, Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson, the cartoonist Herblock, Edward R. Murrow, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, and liberals from all walks of life. Reign of terror? During one 18-month period, the University of Wisconsin invited Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Cousins, Owen Lattimore, and James Carey - all bitter anti-McCarthyites - to warn the students of McCarthy's reign of terror.
Gee, that last bit sounds strangely familiar. It sounds like the job that was done on Bush in the last election. He *is*, after all, worse than Hitler.
 
Posts: 5413 | Location: Washington State | Registered: 21 September 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Paul Harvey reminds us of "The other side of the story." I was under the impression that he was a tad bit paranoid. Wonder where I got the misinformed view of him. Maybe from the liberal press?

Moving along to one of Ann Coulter's favorite topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittaker-Chambers

http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/C/ChambersW1.asp

http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplo.../sempa_chambers.html

See why Witness made Coulter's favorite book list and why next to Castro was Buckley's big obsession.

caritas,

mm <*)))))><
 
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That's was interesting stuff regarding Chambers, MM. Most was news to me. So little time, so many Commie pinkos to uncover. Wink (By the way, I couldn't get your Wikipedia link to work so I supplied another one.) Speaking of Wikipedia, and I have no particular bones to pick with that particular article, but it's interesting and quite good sport to see the current culture's view of things play out in things like dictionaries, encyclopedias and text books (even fictional novels � sci-fi used to be my favorite genre but it has become so liberally and politically correct obnoxious that the stories are mostly ruined.)

quote:
In 1925, Chambers joined the American Communist Party and wrote and edited for communist periodicals, including The Daily Worker and The New Massess. He broke with the Communist party after he grew alienated by the Soviet labor camps and mass murders under Josef Stalin, leaving in 1938.
It is true that many (but by no means all) in the left became disillusioned with Communism when Nikita Kruschev revealed the scope of terror under Stalin (not sure if he also exposed Lenin). That didn't deter the capitalist and America haters. They found new ways to hate our system and new methods and techniques to undermine it. But it is to Chambers' credit that he switched sides. It's interesting how people who have seen the other side (whether it's Michael Medved or David Horowitz, both leftist radicals at one time, just to name two) can put the situation into perspective so well. But I suppose that should really come as no surprise. And it's one reason I don't expect and don't want any politician to be "pure". We can learn much from our mistakes. The "McCarthyism" we have today in the rabid press and (particularly towards Republican candidates) and Jesse-Jackson-Democrats is not healthy. We ought to put into perspective mistakes done, say, 20 years ago, with what a person now believes (which certainly doesn't get Kerry out of his swift boat problem as he's been anti-military all his life). But on the other hand, we can't flinch from investigating and uncovering real problems. The technique today, of course, is for the left and liberals to shout "McCarthyism" at the drop of the critical or investigative hat. I believe this disingenuousness and double standard that is the real lesson of the McCarthy era.
 
Posts: 5413 | Location: Washington State | Registered: 21 September 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Re. McCarthy -- I'm sure that historians with a liberal slant have tarred and feathered him unjustly, but, OTOH, one does not receive an official censure from the Senate for just any old thing. Some of these writers attempting to rehabilitate McCarthy's reputation do seem to be glossing over this part, unless they're insinuating that some kind of vast left-wing conspiracy was at work even through the Senate. When I hear that Eisenhower (hardly a commie) feared the man and his methods, something's rotten in Denmark.

Take this Q/A from the Drummey article, cited above:

quote:
Q. Who were the 22 Republican senators who voted against the condemnation of Joe McCarthy?

A. More than a dozen senators told McCarthy that they did not want to vote against him but had to because of the tremendous pressure being put on them by the White House and by leaders of both political parties. The 22 men who did put principle above politics were Senators Frank Barrett (Wyoming), Styles Bridges (New Hampshire), Ernest Brown (Nevada), John Marshall Butler (Maryland), Guy Cordon (Oregon), Everett Dirksen (Illinois), Henry Dworshak (Idaho), Barry Goldwater (Arizona), Bourke Hickenlooper (Iowa), Roman Hruska (Nebraska), William Jenner (Indiana), William Knowland (California), Thomas Kuchel (California), William Langer (North Dakota), George Malone (Nevada), Edward Martin (Pennsylvania), Eugene Millikin (Colorado), Karl Mundt (South Dakota), William Purtell (Connecticut), Andrew Schoeppel (Kansas), Herman Welker (Idaho), and Milton Young (North Dakota).
It seems rather gratuitous to imply that the 74 Senators who voted for censure did so because of "politics" and those who voted against were "principled." And, geez, this was the Eisenhower White House supposedly trying to play down the communist threat? Roll Eyes

We also read:

quote:
McCarthy's enemies ultimately accused him of 46 different counts of allegedly improper conduct and another special committee was set up, under the chairmanship of Senator Arthur Watkins, to study and evaluate the charges. Thus began the fifth investigation of Joe McCarthy in five years! After two months of hearings and deliberations, the Watkins Committee recommended that McCarthy be censured on only two of the 46 counts.
Why is some of this starting to look like what happened to Bill Clinton? Wink My point, here, is that unless one alleges "vast left-wing conspiracy" (as the Clintons did about the Right), it becomes pretty difficult to understand why all these people are so upset with this man as to have all these investigations and ultimately a formal censure. As is the case, more often than not, where there's smoke, there's usually fire, even if you can't prove it legally beyond a shadow of a doubt. Again, Bill Clinton comes to mind, here. . .
 
Posts: 7539 | Location: Wichita, KS | Registered: 09 August 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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<< The only people terrorized by McCarthy were those who had something subversive to hide in their past and were afraid that they might eventually be exposed. >>

Man, how many times have we heard this one?

"The only people arrested who need to speak to a lawyer are those who are guilty."

"The only people who mention that the Constitution forbids making people be witnesses against themselves are those with something to hide."

"The only people who don't want John Ashcroft going through their library records are those with something to hide."

"You never have to fear the police if you're innocent."

And on and on........

Asserting your rights as an American is automatically proof of guilt.

Persecuting and terrorizing innocent people was EXACTLY one of McCarthy's biggest sins.

I'm sure there's any number of books out there that tell us how unfairly Hitler and Stalin were maligned, too.

Markle
 
Posts: 51 | Location: Agoura Hills (Los Angeles), California | Registered: 10 November 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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"Asserting your rights as an American is automatically proof of guilt."

Markle:

That smacks of just what you're criticizing. Is this statement meant in the context of McCarthyism, or a summary dismissal of U.S. jurisprudence?
 
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I'm saying that "you have nothing to complain about if you don't have anything to hide" is a sleazy argument that has been used before in the ways that I mentioned. We have rights in America. The line that you quoted was my representation of the attitude of those who say that if you stand up for your rights it must mean that you have something to hide. The framers of our Constitution were VERY sophisticated guys, and they were far too aware of abuses of power to believe that. That's why the Bill of Rights says what it does.

Markle
 
Posts: 51 | Location: Agoura Hills (Los Angeles), California | Registered: 10 November 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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