I then read some of the comments, which is a mistake, I know (never, ever, read the comments!), but there were two gems to be found, one sad, one happy.
Sad: People still think that McCarthy was wrong? Really? How many times must a guy be vindicated by history for people to know he's been vindicated by history?
Happy: later, this guy ("Big Leo") shows up with all kinds of knowledge about Cuba and Eastern Bloc Communism and he says this, among other things:
"I read all the works on the great Red Scare of the fifties voraciously when I got serious in my history around 1961. History, especially American history, was my passion and what I took my first degree in. Oddly enough, while one or two books mentioned how busy Nixon was on the red scare committee, I only learned how busy the Kennedy brothers were a decade later. Odd, dontcha think? Like all casual intellectualoids, I thought Hiss was the victim in the case, but had occasional misgivings because the proof was very hard to refute. The academic atmosphere was steamy with rhetoric about Fascism and persecution of the innocent and the martyr Hiss and so on that there were no respectable alternatives given. Only "Witness" stood out as a serious work saying otherwise, and the hatred and hysteria about that work and Chambers was a major industry for the Left. As I grew older and more and more real evidence came out, I realized that most of the people McCarthy targeted were in fact, guilty as hell. The government knew it, too, because of the Venona intercepts and our own intelligence systems. The problem was that proving it would have destroyed our intelligence system. The critical turning point was in the eighties when increasing evidence led even the NYT editors to conclude that Hiss was almost certainly a Soviet agent. For the first twenty years of my studies, I went with the flow and thought it was a shameful incident in our history. Since then, I have learned from further study, what was shameful about it was how the Communists managed to escape being identified and punished for their treason."
It can happen, folks, people can learn and change. Leo did, and gets all kinds of grief on Yahoo from the progs.
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