Anne Coulter’s take:
Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis.
Just when decent, intelligent conservatives like David Brooks start to make sense, it is so reassuring to have demagogues like Anne Coulter around to reassure us liberals that we are indeed on the right track. We must be, for heaven’s sake, because the opposition sounds like they think there was nothing wrong with McCarthyism.
So which parts of the liberal “hegemony” on McCarthy were “lies”? The parts about the bullying, the lying about his war record, the drinking, the wild, undocumented, unproven allegations? The smears of decent writes, actors, and politicians?
Unfortunately, there are those who pretend to be astonished and enlightened when they discover that the Soviet Union, like the U.S., really did have spies in America in the 1950’s, and, therefore, McCarthy was “right”.
Few things in life are more depressing than the fact that it needs to be pointed out to some people that what was wrong with McCarthy was not that he thought there were communists and his opponents thought that there weren’t, which wasn’t true in any case. The problem was that his approach to dealing with communism was to behave exactly how he accused them of behaving.
As many of his contemporaries observed, McCarthy was probably the best friend the communists had– he made opponents of communism look like idiots.
Finally, if Anne Coulter had even the smallest, slightest, sliver of integrity, she would at least acknowledge that even early on in his career, McCarthy smeared as communists anyone who disagreed with him over anything. He was utterly, irredeemably self-serving.
Like Anne Coulter.
Why shouldn’t they apologize for McCarthy? They are reviving McCarthyism. Senator Peter King (Republican) of Nassau County is going to hold hearings into the radicalization of American Muslims. He claims that 80% of American mosques are run by “extremists”, and makes a number of other inflammatory accusations without offering any proof.