"Proper" response??? That's Rich---Frank Rich, that is. Why of course---except you won't read that "proper" response anywhere but in books by "cranks," etc.
I stand by my statement concerning McCarthy's speech about Gen. Marshall. He used the same false rhetoric blaming the fall of China to the reds, on Gen.Marshall.
What exactly was "false" about his rhetoric on Marshall? Give me chapter and verse, because there're those of us who do know about Marshall's sorry involvement in what eventually became quaintly referred to as the "loss" of China (not nearly as much a loss to America as to the Chinese people---tens of millions of them have paid with their lives for that "loss"). C'mon, Auntie Em---we're gonna turn the tables and do some "fact-checking" on YOUR "rhetoric."
The same false charges that he was throwing at many people.
Like what? Go ahead---NAME NAMES!
For that reason I said he hurt the search for actual communists within the government.
Yeah, how? By daring to raise the subject? Not letting it go? Again, be specific. Cite your sources. Otherwise, go away and be dormant for 50 years: you'll be needed at that time to express the "proper" view on Ken Starr, but not before then....
Well, here: check this out. In 1974, the height of what could be called the "anti-McCarthyism era" (Nixon headed for impeachment as payback for his role in HUAC; Alger Hiss being readmitted to the Mass. Bar and otherwise rehabilitated; South Vietnam being abandoned to communist enslavement by our "non-treasonous" fellow Americans, the Democrats; and when the general "tone" of Washington Republicans was a sort of high-pitched, "bipartisan" mousy squeak), Kennedy courtier William Manchester published a history of the US from 1932 (FDR's election) to 1972 (Nixon's re-election) with the grandiose title "The Glory and the Dream" (and if you think Manchester is conservative, then your real name is Eric Alterman). He addresses specific charges made against George C. Marshall by Congressmen other than McCarthy, before McCarthy's famous Wheeling WVA speech.
Here's an excerpt from p. 491:
On February 21 [1948] Congressman John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts said that at Yalta a "sick" Roosevelt, on the advice of General Marshall and other chiefs of staff, "gave" the Kuriles and other strategic places to the USSR. The Administration [through George C. Marshall!] had tried to force Chiang into a coalition with Mao, he said. President Truman had treated Madame Chiang [on a futile visit she made to America to plead for more aid for the Nationalists in fighting the Communists] with "indifference," if not "contempt." The State Department had squandered America's wartime gains by listening to such advisers as Owen Lattimore of John Hopkins University. "This," Kennedy concluded, "is the tragic story of China, whose freedom we once fought to preserve. What our young men saved, our diplomats and our President have frittered away."
Geesh, I don't like that guy's TONE, do you? Oh, wait a minute---he's a Democrat...never mind...
Or how about this one further down the page on the subject of Gen. George C. Marshall:
[Senator] Jenner [of Indiana] called General Marshall "a front man for traitors," a "living lie" who had joined hands "with this criminal crowd of traitors and Communist appeasers who, under the continuing influence of Mr. Truman and Mr. Acheson, are still selling America down the river."
Somebody better tell that man to stop his "McCarthyite tactics," before he harms the cause of finding Communists in government!!! Didn't he know that Truman was a stalwart anti-communist?
Even liberals like Manchester could tell the truth back in 1974, the height of Watergate---why can't some putative "conservative Republicans" do so NOW?