Good night and get lost! Chris Matthews exhumes McCarthy

From Attytood courtesy of Eschaton:

Ironically, the topic was the Oscars. Smerconish and Matthews -- whose brother is a GOP candidate for lieutenant governor here in Pennsylvania -- were running down the list, and they came to "Good Night and Good Luck." A casual listener might expect broadcaster Matthews -- who has pretty much the same job, if not the same gravitas, as Edward R. Murrow some fifty years later -- to praise the flick -- but think again. Here -- with an assist from Smerconish's producer, the fabulous T.C. Scornavacchi -- is what he really said (and you can listen to the actual clip here):

You know, one-sided, to some extent liberal propaganda. Because you know there Communists – I’m sorry…there were Communists in the government…I could go through the whole list – Elizabeth Bentley, Harry Dexter White, and of course Alger Hiss – there’s a whole gaggle of them.

And the biggest nonsense of this sort of revisionist history is that there wasn’t a Communist threat and that McCarthy was just a drunken fool. Well, he may have been a drunk – he certainly was – and he may have been unable to shoot straight, but there were lots of targets there. He just didn’t hit any.

Click here for the rest.

Yesterday's communist is today's terrorist. That is, the potential presence of Soviet spies in the US didn't even come close to justifying the vicious witch hunt Senator Joseph McCarthy unleashed in the in the early 1950s, just as the potential presence of terrorists in the US doesn't justify depriving tens of thousands of their civil rights today. I'm sick of this right-wing attempt to turn McCarthy into a force for good: along with new support for the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, this whitewash of McCarthyism serves only to create a bogus historical narrative in support of some of the more psychotic manifestations of Bush's "war on terror." The Senator from Wisconsin was a force for evil, destroying the careers of some of America's best and brightest artists for their perfectly legal political views and associations, while at the same time turning Cold War fears into a national hysteria. And here's the kicker. McCarthy didn't really know whether our nation was overrun by communists or not; he simply took advantage of the times in order to advance his own political power. Pretty much like a lot of politicians do today. The bottom line here is that anybody who in any way asserts that McCarthy was good for this country is a total lunatic, automatically disqualifying himself from any serious discussion about the welfare and direction of America.

Like I said, I'm sick of this shit.

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