Originally Posted By: whomod
 Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man
Olbermann is great. A modern Edward R. Murrow.


But Ann Coulter says Joe McCarthy was a hero.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy

  • ONGOING DEBATE

    In the view of some modern conservative authors, McCarthy's place in history should be re-evaluated. Ann Coulter's book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism is a notable example of this. Coulter, a controversial right-wing author, devotes a chapter to her defense of McCarthy, and much of the book to a defense of McCarthyism.

    She states, for example, "Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis."[77] Other authors who have voiced similar opinions include William Norman Grigg of the John Birch Society,[78] and M. Stanton Evans.[79] Another recent defense of McCarthy is William F. Buckley, Jr.'s sympathetic fictionalized biography, The Redhunter: a Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy.[80]

    These authors frequently cite new evidence, in the form of Venona decrypted Soviet messages, Soviet espionage data now opened to the West, and newly released transcripts of closed hearings before McCarthy's subcommittee, asserting that these have vindicated McCarthy, showing that many of his identifications of Communists were correct. It has also been said that Venona and the Soviet archives have revealed that the scale of Soviet espionage activity in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s was larger than many scholars suspected,[81][82] and that this too stands as a vindication of McCarthy.

    Some responses to these viewpoints have been written by Kevin Drum[83] and Johann Hari.[84] Historian John Earl Haynes has also argued against this 'rehabilitation' of McCarthy, saying that McCarthy's attempts to "make anticommunism a partisan weapon" actually "threatened [the post-War] anti-Communist consensus", thereby ultimately harming anti-Communist efforts more than helping.[85]