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| Fifth Column | |
| McCarthy was a Bully! (Why is this even news today?) | |
| 2003-05-05 | |
| Senate Releases 50-Year-Old McCarthy Transcripts Edited for Brevity. I have to question why this story is getting such big play today? Is it being pushed because it buttresses the liberal arguments that conservatives are using McCarthy-like tactics to impugn and punish Hollywood liberals and assorted leftists? (A charge which is untrue by the way. Accusing one of using McCarthy-like tactics is, itself, McCarthy-like.) Note that the Venona decrypts, released several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, shed the bright light on the truth. America was being subsumed by communist infiltrators in the State Department and Hollywood and many of McCarthy's allegations were indeed correct. Pushing an anti-communist crusade that riveted America a half century ago, Joseph McCarthy manipulated his Senate hearings by calling witnesses he could intimidate and ignoring those likely to oppose him, newly released transcripts show. Among the nearly 500 witnesses covered in transcripts of closed door meetings, made public Monday by the Senate, are composer Aaron Copland, New York Times journalist James Reston and Eslanda Goode Robeson, the wife of blacklisted singer-actor Paul Robeson. Some 4,000 pages of newly released documents also show that McCarthy was convinced that many writers, government officials and secretaries had access to classified information. McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, chaired the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953 and 1954 at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. His investigation into communists in the U.S. government, denounced by critics as a witch hunt, spawned the term "McCarthyism" to describe smear attacks. The senators who oversaw the project, Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Carl Levin, D-Mich., unveiled the transcripts Monday in the very room that McCarthy used to hold some of his hearings. Susan Collins is starting to piss me off. Why doesn't she just cross the aisle and join the Democrats? "We hope that the excesses of McCarthyism will serve as a cautionary tale for future generations," Collins said.
Ah, so this is where Clinton got his parsing skills. Copland was not only a sypathizer, he WAS a Communist. Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, a freshman Republican who chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said in a statement that McCarthy had "an obligation to use his authority in a way to make America safer, and determine the influence of communism, if it existed, in American policy." Oshinsky said communists had indeed infiltrated the government during the 1930s and 1940s, but by the time McCarthy launched his investigation that had pretty much been stamped out. No, this last phrase is not true. The Communists were still quite active. | |
| Posted by:ColoradoConservative |
| #3 --America was being subsumed by communist infiltrators in the State Department and Hollywood-- Was????? |
| Posted by: Anonymous 2003-05-05 23:32:52 |
| #2 Remember, when one of those Hollywood communists go broke because we all get sick of hearing about how much they care about the common man from the comfort of Bel Aire or the Hamptons, it will be the fault of 'McCarthism.' that devastating ideology, where the truth is demanded and alliegence to the country that put them in their sumptuous comforts is required. |
| Posted by: badanov 2003-05-05 18:45:56 |
| #1 "Were" still active? I do believe there are still democrats holding public office . . . |
| Posted by: FormerLiberal 2003-05-05 12:50:45 |