Wow, Talk About Passing The Buck

Found via Mark Steyn, the New Republic’s longtime publisher Martin Peretz writes:

The American Left and even the mainstream of American liberalism (which includes TNR) has never gotten over its dalliance with Stalinism and its guileful romance with revolution. This is one of the costs of McCarthyism. But it is sadly true that some of the things Joe McCarthy believed and said were not false.

Peretz is typically a very smart writer, so maybe I’m misconstruing his point. But it sounds–at least at first glance–like he’s blaming McCarthy on some level for nearly ninety years of the left’s love of all things Radical Chic, and an eagerness to ally themselves with any tin-pot tyrant with a thick-enough moustache. That seems like an awfully heavy burden for a man dead 50 years who had already done a pretty good job on his own destroying much of his credibility long before the left turned into (a) a punchline and (b) an evil thought far worse in Hollywood and academia than Stalin himself.