McCARTHY WITHOUT (too many) APOLOGIES:

McCARTHY WITHOUT (too many) APOLOGIES: In a vintage, old-school style G-File (old-school meaning, the kind of stuff he regularly wrote two or three years ago), Jonah Goldberg looks at Joe McCarthy from the vantage point of fifty years of history:

Senator Joe McCarthy was a lout, generally speaking. But he was on the right side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well. If, in some sort of parallel-universe exercise, the same number of (now proven) Soviet-Communist spies, collaborators, sympathizers, and the like were somehow switched to Nazis, and McCarthy went after them with the same vehemence as he went after Reds, Joe McCarthy might well have universities and foundations named after him today. Just imagine if a ring of Nazi party members were found to be working in Hollywood, never mind the State Department, taking money from Berlin to advance the Nazi cause. Does anyone really think “McCarthyism” would still be denounced as an unmitigated evil, often put at the front of the parade of horribles alongside Hitlerism and Stalinism?

Read the whole thing–there’s too much good stuff for me to quote here. I suspect that Jonah’s largely preaching to the choir, but I love the email that he received about this essay.