Are they standing up for our enemies or for us? That is the litmus test.
There were at one time Soviet agents sprinkled throughout the State Department and the Pentagon, and even in the president's inner circle. If you get a paycheck and directives from Stalin, you are arguably a traitor. The Democratic leadership (and the press) did everything imaginable to protect them, to keep them in their positions, and to vilify anyone who moved against them. To this day, these individuals, who have names, and the people who protected them, who also have names, have been celebrated by the Democratic party as heroes.
Anyone who spoke against them has been character-assassinated to the point of caricature. Remember, for most people, all we know about McCarthy is what we have been told by Hollywood, and in our text-books. Just think what our grandchildren would know about Bush if his biography was directed by Sean Penn, or any of today's Hollywood left. They have had the monopoly until now. They wrote the histories, they told the story. So, unless you have a long memory, or you are unusually inquisitive, if you are the average person, everything you know about McCarthy, everything you know about that era is untrue. It takes someone with some grit to speak up publicly and set the record straight. And who ever tries to do it is asking to get creamed in the public forum.
If there is another book coming that is focused directly on McCarthy, which according to Coulter there is, perhaps it is Radosh's, then I for one cannot wait to read it. I have been saying for some time that its high time that we reclaim McCarthy, warts and all. We need to get it all out on the table. We will stipulate his defects, but we will also put the whole seamy story out there, all of it. We will see who stands vindicated and whose role in American history gets seriously re-written.
And, trust me, if you deal factually with what we now know from Venona, and from the opening of the KGB archives, the histories of World War 2, of Yalta, of the fall of China, and of the Korean War must all be re-written.