Few things....

First, Sasquatch--
There's one small problem--the missile defense "lie" actually works--or at least has so far in 5 out of 6 tests. In this age of terrorism when we have more to worry about from truck-bombs than from ICBMs it's not nearly as useful as it was when it was us vs. the Communists, but it's up there now.

And second, the shoebomber "Richard Colson Ried" was known to French authorities as Tariq Raja, and at the time he tried to bomb a plane he answered to Abdel Rahim. Likewise, 19 out of the 20 men on the FBI's Most Wanted List are Arabic, and half answer to "Mohammed".

About McCarthy--those attacking him need to be aware of the Venona Project, which I linked to in my first post. The short version--in 1943, we were scared that there would be another Hitler-Stalin pact; Russia was suffering severely from the war, even if they were winning, and Germany was fighting a two-front war, which is nearly always bad. If such a pact had succeeded, then the Nazis may very well have taken over all of Europe and used it as a springboard to Africa and eventually the United States. Therefore, we wanted to know as much about it as we possibly could, and thus the Army Special Branch started working on breaking the Soviet Code. We haven't yet decoded them all, but what we have decoded (declassified in 1995) proves something very important: McCarthy's "innocent victims" were indeed Soviet spies.

The Hollywood Blacklisting (oh, the shame that peple wouldn't hire screenwriters supporting a Communist Empire and refusing to tell the truth in court--you wanna see some blacklisting, try being a conservative actor. Humphrey Bogart flew to Washington DC to support them and later called the trip "Ill-advised, even foolish." Lauren Bacall said "We were so naive it was ridiculous.") had nothing to do with McCarthy. Senator McCarthy took up the anti-Communist cause in his 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia--the "HollyWood Ten" were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947.

The gay-baiting of Whittaker Chambers was noted in the official deposition of Alger Hiss, Soviet spy. It can also be found in Allen Weinsten's report on the matter, Perjury.

Among the more obvious insinuations, playwright Lillian Hellman referred to McCarthy and his two assistants, Roy Cohn and David Schine (all unmarried men, at the time) as "Bonnie, Bonnie, and Clyde". Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun] called McCarthy a "disreputable pervert", and in their final payback the New York Times used Cohn's obituary to "out" him as a homosexual.

Likewise, among the most famous gay-baiting of Hoover was the musical comedy written by Harry Shearer and Tom Leopold, J. Edgar!, from the Aspen Comedy Arts Festival in 2003 (the same folks that gave their "Freedom of Speech Award" to Micheal Moore two years in a row.).


As for Reagan's defeat of communism, I'm going to put that to a new thread.