It is hardly surprising that in a period when the greatest weapon of the right wing is fear of "A conspiracy so immense " Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy would again become its hero. It seems that a right-wing "journalist" has published a book (Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies) that is according to David Oshinsky, "a full-throated defense of the senator." Oshinsky himself has a dog in this fight as the author of the best critique of the senator, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy. What's at stake in this rather esoteric attempted rehabilitation of the hated senator, is that maybe even Cheney, Bush and Rove and their groupies can be similarly rehabilitated. But in this case this is a long-winded intro to the quote of the day from Oshinsky's piece in the New York Times Book Review:
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To be labeled a McCarthyite is akin to being called a liar or a fraud. His loudest current admirer is Ann Coulter, a fact I suspect, that even the senator would have found unsettling.
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2 comments:
Since Oshinsky published his book in 1983, many FBI files from the 1940s and '50s have become available via the Freedom of Information Act. After the fall of the USSR, some Soviet archives briefly became available. In 1995-97, the Venona decrypts were declassified. And in 2003, the Executive Sessions of McCarthy's own committee were made public.
Evans uses these newly-available primary sources to demonstrate numerous important errors in Oshinsky's version of McCarthy and his cases.
Given a platform in the New York Times, Oshinsky declines to answer these specific charges.
Draw your own conclusion.
And if you read Blacklisted by History, please blog your reaction. I would be interested.
Best wishes, Mark LaRochelle
Mark,
Thanks for your comment. The quote of course was about Ann Coulter not Oshinsky.
But whatever one may think of the so-called "Communist threat" the real question about McCarthy is more about extreme overreaction much like the Republican overreaction to the current so-called "terrorist threat." It's the use of fear as a cover to carry out long existing agendas.
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