> Oh, and it’s fair to compare me with Joe McCarthy?
If you were being compared with Joe McCarthy, I would have written “you are just like Joe McCarthy!” rather than pointing out that Joe McCarthy was all about unfairly attacking those he felt had “socialist leanings.”
If you’ve read more into it than that, it is certainly unintentional.
McCarthy didn’t just attack those “...he felt who had socialist leanings”. The Soviet Union was not a communist country, but rather a socialist state. The state, according to Marx, was culturally and politically evolving to “pure” communism. American socialists heavily supported the Soviets, up to and including spying for them. American Democrats and liberals, who are in fact socialists, still cannot stand to see a communist having a bad day, particularly at the hands of the United States.
Despite the blacklisting, McCarthy was generally right in who he called a communist, and these data are available from recently declassified Soviet documents. (See Ann Coulter’s book, Treason. The Rosenbergs, in fact, were executed for espionage, and rightfully so. Actually, I wouldn’t mind at all being compared with Sen. McCarthy!
Since it was a direct equating, yeah, I guess I “misunderstood”. Hemingway was a socialist, and in Spain he ran with the Stalinists.