The refusal of many on the left to look at the new facts and drop the old propaganda of the cold war left is sad. Their image of the McCarthy era is so calcified that the revalations of the Stalinist nature of American Communist Party is to painful for them to consider so they continue to promote the myth of the Stalinist sympathizers as noble, maybe misguided, liberals. This makes it easier for them to slag America as imperliastic thugs. If they cop to the fact that a Stalin style revolution was the goal of many of the “victims” it makes it very hard to paint the other side as evil.

McCarthy was a drunk and a demagogue and he set back the anti-communist cause with his tactics more then he helped it by shining a light on the nature and tactics of the Communists in America. The Radosh’s have no problem stating this. But the Clooney’s of the world will not take the same honest look at the people they try to lionize. In their zeal to point out the undemocratic nature of McCarthy they ignore the fact that many of the people they try to portray as commited “liberals” would have both shot McCarthy and put protesting liberals in a America Gulag if their vision of a Stalinist America had come true. They had less love and respect for the Democratic principles of America then McCarthy did. They saw Stalin’s U.S.S.R. as the ideal and they knew about the prison’s and the Show Trials. They believed those were some of the required steps to bring about a revolution in America.

Get the book, it’s great. Spain Betrayed is very good also. Both books are mythbusters A suprisingly fair( for them) review in the L.A. Times. The Book review section is normaly farther left then the New’s section, I mean Mother Jones left. I can’t wait for the angry letters.

I read a pretty good review of the book earlier, and I appreciate the reminder.

Anne Revere playing the role of Louise Soubirous in “The Song of Bernadette” is one of my favorite Hollywood ironies. The then-pregnant Linda Darnell as the film’s “The Lady” is a close (very close) runner-up.