I know that JBS had their share of crackpots. But go back a couple of decades, and see them in context in their time.
There was no internet. There was no talk radio. There was only the news outlets who refused to cover the soviet penetration of the government, the universities, the entertainment and news media, it was going on but no one would cover it.
Anyone who tried was dismissed as a “McCarthyite”. Keep in mind that since the Venona papers we know that McCarthy was telling the truth... but you wouldn’t know that even to this day if all you had was the straight press.
That was the void that JBS tried to fill, and that frustration at seeing what was happening, and being unable to draw any attention to it, all you could do was scream and no one hears.
They had their share of crazies, they attacked some stalwarts in the conservative movement who refused to take on some of their causes. Sound familiar? We do the same thing ourselves, we go after conservatives who won’t move on the birth certificate issue, we go after the rinos, and with good reason, but not everyone is going to agree with anyone on everything.
They were an embarrassment partly because some of the things they said were over the top, but they were also an embarrassment because they were out there largely all alone in calling attention to communist penetration of every one of our institutions. We see it now, and we see the communists reaping the harvest they have prepared for all these decades. The interlocking networks that put O in the White House and sustain him there, ACORN, the unions, Tides Foundation, all Soros’s fake foundations, JBS called it. Sometimes they were jerks about it, but they called it.
We need to relearn history. McCarthy was right. They destroyed him just the way they will try to destroy any of us if we get too outspoken. They tried to do the same thing to Judge Thomas, and Bork, look what they did to GW for eight years and he’s not even a conservative. If you get your news from the straight press you haven’t got a clue what is happening. Now we’ve got FR and Limbaugh. In the fifties and sixties, all we had was Buckley for the high brows and JBS digging dirt on the baddies.
They were doing in the fifties what basically FR and Beck are doing in the new millenium. Some of them were crazy but look around you. Some of us are crazy too. That doesn’t make the other side right.
Marron: Your comment suggesting that the Venona papers confirmed Sen. McCarthy’s hallucinations is completely false.
One of our nation’s foremost scholars about the McCarthy period (Dr. John Earl Haynes) has written several articles which compare McCarthy’s assertions to newly available data including, for example, the Venona papers and material in KGB archives.
See for example:
(1) Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Lists and Venona
http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page62.html
(2) Exchange with Arthur Herman and Venona book talk
http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page58.html
With respect to Joe McCarthy:
Whittaker Chambers summed it up pretty well in his 1/14/54 letter about McCarthy to conservative book publisher Henry Regnery, when Chambers observed that....
“All of us, to one degree or another, have slowly come to question his judgment and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions, his tendency to sacrifice the greater objective for the momentary effect, will lead him and us into trouble. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder which will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come.”
FBI security informant Herbert Philbrick told a Boston newspaper reporter that:
“He [McCarthy] harmed the cause of anti-communism more than anybody I know.”
And in 1952, Philbrick observed:
“According to the Communist leaders, McCarthy has helped them a great deal. McCarthy’s kind of attacks add greatly to the confusion, putting up a smokescreen for the Party and making it more difficult than ever for people to discern who is a communist and who is not.”
FBI Supervisor, Robert J. Lamphere, supervised the investigations of some of the biggest espionage cases of the cold war, including those of the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs and Kim Philby plus he was intimately involved, in conjunction with Meredith Knox Gardner of the Army Security Agency, in using deciphered Soviet cables to build espionage cases.
Lamphere wrote on pages 136-137 of his 1968 book “The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story” that:
“Senator McCarthy’s crusade which was to last for the next several years, was always anathema to me. McCarthy’s approach and tactics hurt the anti-Communist cause and turned many liberals against legitimate efforts to curtail Communist activities in the United States, particularly in regard to government employment of known Communists…McCarthy’s star chamber proceedings, his lies and overstatements hurt our counterintelligence efforts.”