... things didn't exactly end well for Joe McCarthy when he tried it last time...
But, in the end, history proved him right. The communists were trying to infiltrate the US government....kind of like this election.
The investigations of that Red Scare era did yield some disloyal citizens. It is now largely accepted, for instance, that Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet spy. But the revelations of genuine threats to national security were small next to the damage done by the Red-baiters. McCarthy and his colleagues smeared high officials and low-level government workers, dentists, teachers, writers, actors, lawyers, college presidents. They cowed others into silence with the threat of public pillory. In the words of the Supreme Court, they engaged not in legitimate inquiry but in the exercise of intimidation, yielding to the desire to
" expose for the sake of exposure.”
