With all due respect, it doesn’t just “point that way”.
Joe McCarthy did what he had to do to uncover a REAL and GRAVE danger to our government. He was hounded by his enemies who were in collusion either actively through their outright assistance or passively through their focused ennui towards communist infiltration at all levels of the government.
Nobody should have “called” McCarthy on ANYTHING.
What should have been happening was that people like Alger Hiss, Owen Lattimore and John Stewart Service should have been shown the door at at worst (Which in the case of Lattimore and Service was what McCarthy was suggesting) and at best, should have been hanged for treason, particularly Alger Hiss. People seem to forget that Alger Hiss and people like him were passing military information to the Soviet Union.
Joseph McCarthy was an American hero. He was slandered and defamed by the same type of people who practice the same types of tactics on their enemies today.
I was one of those people who unthinkingly believed about McCarthy what my teachers taught me in school, and what I saw in the newpapers, magazines and on television over the years.
When I read Ann Coulter’s book “Treason”, I was perplexed. I was puzzled why her account of the famous encounter between Joseph Welch and Joseph McCarthy was so completely and diametrically different from the accounts I had grown up with and been taught.
Those accounts weren’t just a little different, They were COMPLETELY different. So I did what the Internet allows you to do these days: I researched. I obtained the transcripts of the actual hearings, and read them.
Ann Coulter was spot on in her characterization of that hearing, and the others as well. After I read that, I began to read everything that didn’t appear to be completely slanted against McCarthy. I read three separate books on Venona, and then capped it off with the book that was, for me, the most important political book I have read in my life.
“Witness”, by Whittaker Chambers.
I was completely astounded by that book, and it explained a lot of things for me. It explained why the Left viewed Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy the way they did, and why all three of them, Chambers, Nixon, and McCarthy were villified and slandered by a poisonous and biased media.
I have a web page on my site devoted to this issue at:
http://web.mac.com/rlmorel/iWeb/Site/Whittaker%20Chambers.html
What is perhaps most disturbing of all is to see that the Left practices the exact same form of character assassination warfare today that it practiced fifty years ago against Whittaker Chambers. Exactly.
So, nothing personal against you (and thank you for that very civil response on your part) but you should think twice when you express viewpoints that reinforce and propagate the liberal viewpoint about who McCarthy was and how he ran his meetings. It is false.
Point remains however... McCarthy was taken to task for the way he ran his hearings. He was publicly humilated and driven from office (rightly, as we have been told for two generations, or wrongly as you point out). On point, Conyers appears just as obsessed but no one is paying any attention... I personally think someone should ask Patrick Fitzgerald... Sir, have you no shame?