Re-examining McCarthyism While Watching the Manchurian Candidate: I'm a McCarthyist!

In a strange, almost "karmic" co-incidence, I started reading Ann Coulter's latest column, "McCarthyism: The Rosetta Stone of Liberal Lies," at the same time that PBS was broadcasting "The Manchurian Candidate," Friday morning. I had never seen the movie, and was shocked to witness the very same historical liberal smears of Sen. Joe McCarthy that Ms. Coulter was writing about!

In the movie, released in 1962 (which was long after McCarthy's "fall from grace"), a fictional version of the senator is portrayed as totally subservient to his domineering wife, who is also a Communist agent (Angela Lansbury, in an outstanding performance). Here's an excerpt from Coulter's column that explains this in political terms:

Rather than own up to their moral blindness to Soviet espionage, Democrats fired up the liberal slander machine, which would be deployed again and again over the next half century to the present day. In hiding their own perfidy, liberals were guilty of every sin they lyingly imputed to McCarthy. There were no "McCarthyites" until liberals came along.

McCarthy was the target of Hollywood for obvious reasons, but there are parallels to the treatment given to the current administration, conservatives, and Republicans in general by our political opponents. In the movie, a "good guy" liberal senator calls the McCarthy character a "facist." That does sound familiar, doesn't it?

Watching the conclusion of the movie, as the "McCarthy"- modeled character gets shot in the head (though not before the liberal senator does), I finally finished reading the column. The movie is an intricate conspiracy theory, which brings me back to another relevant Coulter excerpt:

Ironically, for all of their love of conspiracy theories -- the rigging of the 2000 election, vote suppression in Ohio in 2004, 9/11 being an inside job, oil companies covering up miracle technology that would allow cars to run on dirt, Britney Spears' career, etc., etc. -- when presented with an actual conspiracy of Soviet spies infiltrating the U.S. government, they laughed it off like world-weary skeptics and dedicated themselves to slandering Joe McCarthy.

Here we are, decades later, and "right wingers" are still being slandered as facists, or racists, or "the real terrorists," by a new crop of liberal idiots. Hollywood is having a revival of the "counter-culture" days, and the world is being told how awful we are by our own media.

The war on islamofascism is real, though somewhat more amorphous than the war on communism was, in several ways. The locus of islamofacism is spread among many nations; some are "our staunch allies," and some are "the axis of evil," to quote our President. The truth is that we know where this evil is coming from, and it includes some of our erstwhile "allies" in this war, as well as our obvious opponents.

It is an internal conflict for many of them, as it is for us. I stand as a McCartheist, opposed to the infiltration of our culture, and government, by those who sympathize with people who would destroy the very freedoms that make our way of life possible. I cite a movie from 45 years ago, to show how similar these "useful idiot" liberals of today are to the ones from the peak of the cold war. Don't let history repeat itself.