The New McCarthyism

In the 1950s the right wing attacked liberals as being communists. In 2005 Karl Rove has attacked liberals as being therapists. Thus is born a kinder and gentler form of McCarthyism.

Named after the late Sen. Joe McCarthy, who never let the facts get in the way of his lust to charge liberals with sedition, McCarthyism has come to mean "guilt by association." What gave McCarthyism its power was the fact that the senator from Wisconsin did not invent the danger posed to the United States by Soviet communism. The Soviet Union was a real threat, and there were real communist spies working in America.


What made McCarthy and his allies so insidious was their eagerness to level the "soft on communism" charge against even staunchly anticommunist liberals. One of them was Secretary of State Dean Acheson, an architect of Harry Truman's tough policy of containing Soviet power. In the 1952 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon pounded Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson for earning a "PhD from Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/27/AR2005062701317.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

I've had Repubs in other forums tell me they'd like to see McCarthyism come back.

in the D.C. Nationals, and the denial of a job in Tennessee. It's getting quite scary.

I spent my lunch hour in the library the other day reading old Life magazines. If you read the old letters to the editors, the rhetoric hasn't changed a bit.

...because if anyone else had even considered it, he would have nailed them to the wall as a "communist sympathizer".

A kinder gentler form of subversion