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 p...