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The JBS was a bit before my time. I suppose that if they made the claim that Eisenhower was a communist agent, I would have to agree that they were a little flaky. HOWEVER -- if this country had gone in that direction, and seen communism as a serious threat domestically -- if we had read the Communist Party Goals into the Congressional Record in 1963 and made a serious effort to make sure none of those goals were achieved -- if we had done all that, then I think the JBS would have been happy, and I think this country would be a lot better off today.

I am not afraid of flaky right-wing extremism.

I was a huge fan of the JBS back in the 1980s as a teenager. I have a stack of 1960’s era American Opinion magazines at home. I don’t particularly care for the post-early 1990s JBS, but as far as the group in the 60s...I think they were pretty much right. Incidentally, so was Joseph McCarthy. Obama and the modern Democrat party is the culmination of everything McCarthy and the Birchers warned us about back in the day.

I was a member of the John Birch Society for a short period in the late 90’s. I didn’t agree with everything they were for and they are a bit conspiratorical, but they are very vigilant and very presicent. Their blue book (the founding speeches from 1958) is a call to Liberty like none other. And some of the articles in The New American are the best I’ve ever read on Liberty.

Buckley was a conservative and very brilliant but he was also a one-worlder. The Birch Society has wanted to get us out of the UN for fifty years.

[Article, quoting former RNC pooh-bah David Welch]
In the 1960s, Buckley, largely through his position at the helm of National Review, displayed political courage and sanity by taking on the John Birch Society, an influential anti-Communist group whose members saw conspiracies everywhere they looked.

Well, let's see -- it's been 55 years or so now, and the Venona Papers have come out, so let's turn now to a reappraisal of the Birchers and Buckley's stand against them. Who looks good now? Was Buckley right, or did the Birchers know something that we needed to do something about right away, like back in 1955? It's time for a new book, by someone like John Barron (KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents and KGB Today: The Hidden Hand), David Horowitz, Edwin Luttwak, Dmitri Simes, or even Alan Keyes: Keyes couldn't stop the Obama Express in Illinois, but at least he tried, and he can definitely write a book.

We've been paying for Republican failure to counter and purge Communist penetration and 'pwnership' of the Democratic Party for 50, 60 years, with only slight remissions of the curse under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush; but the Communists have 'pwned' our academies, schools for schoolteachers ("normal schools"), and daily media ever since the days of Alger Hiss, Owen Lattimore, C.P. Snow, and I.F. Stone.

(It's interesting that even after it's been shown that Owen Lattimore was indeed working for the Soviet KGB, Mount Holyoke College still today has an article about him on its website, on a page titled "Victims of McCarthyism".)

[Article]

Deb Fischer of Nebraska came out of nowhere in a three-way race in which the Tea Party Express, the Club for Growth, and Sarah Palin each endorsed a different candidate.

It's worth noting in passing, here, that the Tea Party Express is not the Tea Party. Rather, they're conservative Republicans, all right, and their heroes are California congressmen whom the ADA rates as zeroes and the ACU rates 100 percenters. Most of the Tea Party Express board are former campaigners for the Gray Davis recall (their names be praised), who initiated that recall petition in the hope that their man, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), would be able to win the ensuing election against, presumably, Lt. Gov. Bustamante, a Chicano nationalist whose views converged with those of L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the infamous MeChista.

The Gray Davis recall was partly successful: Davis was booted from office. But the recall election was hijacked by California's RiNO herd, who inveigled celebrity Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger to run and win.

Other board members of the Tea Party Express are either very conservative California "professional" Republicans (who are distinguishable from the typical "professional GOP'ers" by actually having principles) or former Reaganauts (as distinguished from Bushbot patronage people brought in by Poppy and James Baker) from Ronnie's California conservative base.

But they aren't exactly "Tea Party" people, never mind that some of them may go back to some of the original teabag-mailing political actions half-a-dozen years ago or more, and that distinction needs to be preserved.