McCarthy and his "Ism"

Last week when I wrote about the idiot Michele Bachmann, who would be just a sad joke if she didn't influence significant numbers of voters (not to mention occupying a seat in our hallowed House of Representatives), I said I would post something about McCarthyism. 

The other day, the wondrous Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" showed Bachmann pronouncing to the world, on fair-and-balanced Fox News of course, “Literally, the decisions of our life and death, may very well be in the hands of the IRS.”

What can one say, except "WTF?"?  "Literally", Michele, the IRS doesn't have hands!  As for "our life and death", I'd be far more concerned about the Tea Party's Congress-Members endangering us, than I would the IRS.

So - back to McCarthyism....

Here's what I wrote in my Book Proposal, "The War On The 60s" about a man who is an eternal stain on the honor of the United States:

"The justifiable fear of the nuclear Bomb provided an opening for one of the world's great charlatans. In 1950 Joseph McCarthy, a little-known Senator from Wisconsin, gave a speech to a Republican Women's Club. He produced a piece of paper which he claimed was a list of 205 known Communists working for the State Department. He never proved the guilt of these “spies”, indeed he never made the list public. But before he was done he had ruined hundreds of lives and careers.

His House Un-American Activities Committee (“Hewack”) with its blackmailing inquisitors, rampaged through industry, Universities, even Hollywood, trampling on the Constitution and terrorising people, mainly innocent, into choosing between “naming” their friends or going to jail for Contempt of Congress. A favorite “crime” invented by the McCarthy-ites was being “prematurely anti-Fascist”, that is having opposed Hitler before the Government did! McCarthy's antics goaded playwright Arthur Miller to write “The Crucible”, about the Puritan witch trials in 17th-century Massachusetts – and the name “Witch-Hunt” is still synonymous with McCarthyism."