“For a long time it’s seemed as if some people stick their fingers in their ears and yell ‘I can’t hear you’ over and over. If you just deny it then it goes away. That’s bad enough, bordering on insanity.”

Tell me about it.

Didn’t this start with me bringing up liberal hypocrisy on “war crimes?”

I’ve stood up to furious abuse that makes you seem like a fart in a hurricane.

The term McCarthyism, properly used, means using McCarthy’s techniques. It means “accusing someone of something without evidence.” Smearing. Making accusations without revealing sources.

The Left apparently defines it as “mentioning the word ‘communist’ in public.”

The idea is to hurl the word at the person bringing up uncomfortable facts, and silence them. Good luck on that.

That McCarthy existed does not mean that American communists did not, or still don’t.

And “secret documents” completely aside, all the dirt-scratching in the world isn’t going to hide the long sordid open history of the Left in America.

I listened to McCarthy occasionally. I was young enough to sympathize with his cause, could not understand why he had to behave the way he did.

I’ve since grown up.

It’s like saying the Holocaust was a Jewish conspiracy. Exactly like that. McCarthy was the foulest of the foul and his tactics are universally condemned in civilized societies. Watch the tapes of his hearings on Youtube or Netflix. Exactly like the trials Hitler or Stalin staged. Yelling at helpless people, hollaring at anyone who tried to speak for themselves, screaming at people who tried to remind the audience this is America.

And you defend that. You declare there is “no actual connection to what McCarthy did.”

TB, this is really beyond the bend. Distorting history so obviously, being blinded by some distorted obligation to an ideology, that’s not thinking properly.

It’s one thing to have a differing view. It’s another to distort a well documented reality and apparently believe the distortion.

I’m serious. You’re too good a guy to let this happen.

“McCarthyism” is another word that has no objective meaning to a liberal. It has no actual connection to what McCarthy did, or was. Its sole function is to simply silence the opposition. Your definition shows that. The Left has a lot of words like that.

During the Cold War, leftist celebrities, political leaders, and pundits were not “accused” of running off to communist nations to gush over their anti-aircraft guns, the leader’s cool sunglasses, the wonderful education and health care systems, the “societies of the future,” and how wonderful it was that they nationalized all the industries for The People.

These weren’t baseless accusations. These people just did it right in front of everybody, and they did it for years.

And now we have people in our government whose principles are exactly the same, in writing no less, as those of the American Communist Party. Of course, they’re not communist. No way, no how. The word has been destroyed, leaving just the free-floating ideology behind.

You’re too young to remember Joseph McCarthy. Well, McCarthy fed off people like you, and your ilk fed McCarthy. You would have been right at home in those days. Wallowing in all the accusations, browbeating, yelling and hollering at anyone with whom they disagreed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy

“The term McCarthyism, coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy’s practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today the term is used more generally in reference to demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character and/or patriotism of political opponents.”

These days it’s considered to be rather sick. The country has been through that and hopefully came out the wiser. Except for the Tea Party, who remain vindictive, hateful and paranoid as all hell.

Most of the same leftists who were in high indignation mode over these issues when Bush was president suddenly went dead silent when Obama continued the same policies.

Renditions, Guantanamo, military tribunals, indefinite detention…it’s quite a list. About the only thing that actually got crossed off was waterboarding. At least as far as we know.

To their credit, some people on the far left are making some noise about this continuation (I’ve seen examples in “The Nation” and elsewhere), but for the vast majority of Good Liberals now it’s “Guantanamo? Isn’t that something made out of avocados?”

Moral indignation just isn’t that politically useful right now. Wait until Romney is president.

I never said it was the same people protesting now that trotted off to Nicaragua or North Vietnam to show their support. The Iron Curtain fell over twenty years ago. I said it was the same political ideology.

To see all who protest America’s war crimes and other abuses as ugly, illegal, immoral and reprehensible as promoters of the former Soviet Union is simply crazy.

America is our country. We expect a lot of it. America is a reflection of Americans, including me. I don’t appreciate being implicated in those crimes, and I am. I resent that.

Let other countries take the moral low road. That’s their problem, and look where it got them. Don’t let America follow, and then take the lead.

And, so help me, there are meds for those delusions. Because delusions they are, of a virulent and progressive type. They will only get worse without help.

From the guy who used to talk about the secret prison camps in our country that nobody knows about? Whatever.

For most of my adult life the American Left could be counted on to take the Soviet or communist side in any foreign policy issue. Most of us here are old enough to have watched it happen.

If the government of a nation was communist (usually a Soviet ally), fighting against an anti-communist revolutionary movement, the Left sided with the government. If the revolutionaries were communists against an anti-communist government, they sided with the revolutionaries.

There were no exceptions to this. Not in Asia, not in Africa, not in Central or South America, not anywhere.

Whether any of these revolutionaries or governments were murderous thugs made no difference. Often they both were. They would pick the side that was communist, and support them.

This was accompanied by complete blindness to the abuses of communist regimes. This may be where “progressives” first learned to obliterate their own minds.

When I think about it, this blind support goes back further than my lifetime. Before WWII, the American Left was antiwar until the precise moment that Hitler and Stalin broke up their alliance and ended up on opposite sides. Then they became pro-war.

I have an awful lot of evidence for my position that this true. What have you got for yours besides the usual debate technique around here of calling me names?