Do you actually know any history at all?
The right did not walk into any "public relations trap" during the "McCarthy Era"--whatever that was, and the fact that you parrot this leftist revisionism of what happened in the 1950's calls into question the quality of all of your arguments.
During the "McCarthy Era" we discovered that there were as many as a dozen highly placed moles within the OSS. We discovered that the OSS director didn't particularly care that this was true. We learned that the Secretary of the Treasury and several senior officials in the White House were spies. We learned that the Vice President of the United States was a Fellow Traveler, and may have been more. We learned that many of our labor unions--particularly those in the CIO--were not much more than communist front organizations.
During the "McCarthy Era" we discovered the Rosenbergs' Implosion Conspiracy, several members of the Philby-Burgess ring, the Silvermaster ring, and the fact that our so-called "ally" in the late war had, throughout the course of the conflict, already been setting the stage for the confrontation with "the Main Enemy." And that enemy was not Nazi Germany.
During that time, the newsweeklies (except Time which was still conservative) and the "Papers of Record" trashed anticommunists mercilessly and lied unceasingly. HUAC was attacked as itself un-American. Elizabeth Bentley, whose Soviet husband died leaving her in control of several extensive networks was denounced, after she turned, as "delusional." Alger Hiss--a man who betrayed his country and should have gone to the gallows--was lionized, and incredibly has defenders to this day, while Whittaker Chambers was vilified as a fantasist and backstabber by the same people who manufactured an idiotic revision of events called "the Red Scare," or the "McCarthy Era" which you now casually toss in as if it had some resemblance to actual history.
All this, while millions of people were being imprisoned, tortured and murdered on literally every continent on the planet, and the enablers in the press you so apparently adore ridiculed anticommunists as paranoiacs, and heaped adulation on this diabolical philosophy as the "logical conclusion of history."
Only problem is, the (now) declassified Venona intercepts, testimonials by former NKVD, GRU and KGB officers, and the official record of RztKhdny in the Russian Archives proved that the anticommunists were right, and the leftists, who supposedly "set a trap" for us were breathtakingly wrong. The CPUSA was a front organization for Soviet espionage. The anticommunists were right in broad terms and in nearly all of the particulars. For people who've actually lived through those times and followed events, probably no historical position has been as thoroughly vindicated by subsequent events as anticommunism. Probably no group of murderers has been as successful at escaping justice, and no group of propagandists has been more successful at enlisting "well-meaning" people like yourself to casually propagate their lies as the International Left.
And all this, by the way, occurred during a time when no one in the United States of America was deprived of their civil liberties or Constitutional rights, and indeed, our understanding of those rights--for the most part-- expanded. Oh, what an incredible period of darkness that "McCarthy Era" was.
Buy a clue. The Left didn't set any trap for conservatives--Conservatism as we now know it, did not even exist--but history set a trap for them. Leftists attacked everyone, and because McCarthy had his own character deficiencies, the Left has been able to use him over and over as their quintessential straw man. Only problem is, he was a minor actor on the stage of the "McCarthy Era" and more problematically for your thesis, he was right.
Why, no. I was born yesterday. Sheesh! The inability of some folks to grasp context is just amazing.
She deliberately walks right into the public relations trap set by the Left during the McCarthy era.
Yep. The trap of which I speak has nothing to do with McCarthy, other than the fact that the Left was able to turn his name into an epithet. The epithet is the trap of which I speak. The Left can and does get away with saying the most outrageous, irresponsible things, but people on the Right are instantly stereotyped with all sorts of labels when they say or do comparable things.
As a conservative, I am sick to death of seeing us stereotyped like that, and I resent people like Coulter, Buchanan, Keyes, Savage, and others like them who make it all-too-easy for the Left and its MSM shills to do so.
We have made a great deal of progress since 1980 of shedding the extremist image the Left painted conservatives with between the HUAC hearings in the 1940's and the Nixon era. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and others who knew how to fight hard, but effectively, many of our ideas have moved into the mainstream. I do not want to see us go backwards, and I believe Coulter and her polemics serve only to alienate many apolitical voters.
I much prefer the style of someone like Rush Limbaugh, who has been one of THE strongest, most popular conservative voices for a long time. Rush never descends into the gutter. He is hard-hitting and effective without being cruel and acidic.
If you like Coulter, fine. I don't -- and am amused by the fact that some people seem hell-bent on forcing folks with my opinion of her to either join the club or go away and shut up.