Just Google “Peter King McCarthy” and you’ll get tons of links making that comparison.

One of the first articles that comes up is this piece by Joanna Molloy, which appeared in the NY Daily News back in December of 2010, when the King hearings were already being discussed. Its headline, not atypical of the genre, is “Pete King’s plan to grill Muslims is flashback to Joe McCarthy’s Hollywood witch hunt for Communists.”

Okay, what’s wrong with this picture? Well, Molloy may write for the Daily News and I may be just a lowly blogger, but even I know that Molloy (and, presumably, the entire editorial staff of the Daily News, which not only did not catch her error but highlighted it in the headline) is confusing McCarthy’s investigations with the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee, with which McCarthy was completely uninvolved.

It’s a common misconception among the uninformed, and a common assertion among the propagandists on the left who would make use of their ignorance. Lost in the fray, of course, is the fact that the abrasive McCarthy was often correct in the hearings with which he actually was involved: there were a great many Communists in the government who were seeking to undermine this country, and almost all of McCarthy’s accusations turned out to be true when the Soviet files were opened and confirmed them.