Listen here for my interview with Frank and here with Audrey. 

Audrey and I also discuss PBS's agit prop attack on Joseph McCarthy.   

I have finally developed an axiom about Sen. Joseph McCarthy: The more one learns about McCarthy -- facts, not the catechism of lies continuously recited like some demonic liturgy -- the more one despises the mindset that reviles him.

If that sounds harsh, it is not a hasty formulation. In fact, after many years of thinking about McCarthy matters, it strikes me as the most natural reaction to the thinking of writers and educators who don't want to know better, and the politicians who echo them. This mindset -- "conventional wisdom" -- fills the atmosphere with so much static, and gives cover to "experts" whose specialty is strangling the life out of truth. 

So widespread is this mindset, however, that it is widely shared by notable American conservatives. These are McCarthy's latter-day allies and supporters --  that is, were they ever wake up from a chronic case of brainwashing (inspired by Stalin's Kremlin) and realize it. Until then, they wander the public square, participating in communist-inspired rituals  of anti-communist revilement. McCarthy destroyed innocent lives ... bullied free-thinkers ... didn't have a list ... never found a communist ... unleashed "McCarthyism."  From the anti-communist perspective, the spectacle of "lost" allies, marching in step with the opposition while chanting its disinformation, is a strategic disaster.    

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Nicolae Ceausescu and Robert Maxwell in happier days

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"Who were Armand Hammer and Robert Maxwell? Agents who became businessmen or businessmen who became agents?"

So asks the late Vladimir Bukovsky in his capstone work, Judgment in Moscow. 

Bukovsky's question arose as he considered the documentation he had before him on the Soviet Union's secret financial dealings with Western communists, both in cold cash (since 1969 "something to the tune of $400 million"), and, more intriguing,...

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