Dear Rush,
Megadittos. Knowing how you pride yourself on accuracy, I want to clue you in to something you got wrong on yesterday's show.
You started out just fine:
And it reminds me that they hate Joe McCarthy, ’cause Joe McCarthy found communists everywhere in the government.
This is true. Kudos to you for noting that Sen. McCarthy did, indeed, find secret communists inside the federal government, plotting the overthrow, violent and/or stealthy, of the United States government, even as they were on the payroll of the American taxpayer. Such simple clarity is a crucial step to take if the American people are ever to visualize the mechanism of communist subversion that continues to take our constitutional republic down, instead of continuing to fight blind. Nonetheless, it is our sad state that, following that grand ideological "victory" of ours in the Cold War against communism, it is a rare soul who dares even to point out this simple fact. (Say -- that's a funny kind of ideological "victory," isn't it?)
For future reference, here is a handy table of 50 McCarthy cases compiled by the late, pre-eminent McCarthy scholar, M. Stanton Evans.
However, having accomplished the hard hard part -- daring to highlighting the basic truth that Sen. McCarthy is continually roasted alive 61 years after he died for having unmasked dozens of national security risks working to advance the policies of the Kremlin and/or global communism -- you drew exactly the wrong lesson for your listeners.
You continued:
Finally, one day, somebody said, “Senator, have you no shame? Can you not give this up?” Well, you know, we’re at about that stage with ... this whole Russia investigation. So I see the Democrats becoming what they profess to despise. They’re becoming ... the equivalent of Joe McCarthy on this stupid Russia-collusion business.
I think you were coming up on a break when you said this, so maybe we were hearing an internal needle autonomically slipping into that deep, dark groove of agit prop that is worn into every American's misunderstanding of all that Joseph Raymond McCarthy ever said and did in that short, brave, patriotic and significant life of his (he died in 1957, age 48).
Allow me to correct the record in hopes that you will, too.
That "somebody" you referred to, of course, was US Army Counsel Joseph Welch (left, in the picture above). Welch is the author of the simplest, most enduring Big Lie ever told about Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It was created on the floor of the US Senate on June 9, 1954. It began in a question that still quavers disembodied:
"Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
Welch, later observed brushing tears away, was melodramatically decrying the loss of "decency" allegedly resulting when Sen. McCarthy supposedly exposed a young lawyer in Welch's Boston firm, Frederick G. Fisher, as a past member of the National Lawyers Guild, which Attorney General Herbert Brownell had in 1953 described as the "legal mouthpiece" of the Communist Party in the United States.
I say "allegedly" and "supposedly" because the person who had earlier exposed Fisher as a former member of a Communist front organization was Welch himself!
On April 15, 1954, nearly two months before the "no decency" exchange, Welch himself told the New York Times that Fisher had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild, and for that reason Welch (the US Army counsel, after all) had relieved Fisher of his job as his Washington assistant and replaced him with another.
The New York Times story, which ran on April 16, 1954, even featured Fisher's picture.
Summing up in Blacklisted by History, M. Stanton Evans wrote: "It thus develops that Welch himself had already done the very thing for which he so fervently denounced McCarthy."
This hard, cold fact, however, doesn't fit the Big Lie that Welch stopped Evil McCarthy in his Red-baiting tracks by revealing the truth about the senator's lack of "decency," and his "cruelty" and "recklessness" before America's eyes.
A little more of Welch's peroration:
... Little did I dream that you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad ... I fear that he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you...[Y]our forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me ...
Never mind this was all a fraud -- a ham actor laying it on thick for the anti-McCarthy media in the peanut gallery . The very inconvenient fact that Welch himself had publicly outed "the lad" nearly two months before McCarthy brought the matter up had to be eliminated from our understanding of the event.
And so it has been.
Thus, when you say that America is at this same point in today's Russia investigations as McCarthy was when Welch unloaded that bald-faced lie, you (1) perpetuate the damaging falsehood, and (2) upend your own perfectly correct assessment of McCarthy's signal role in unmasking covert federal embeds working for the other side to subvert American policy-making against the national interest.
Then when you say --
So I see the Democrats becoming what they profess to despise. They’re becoming ... the equivalent of Joe McCarthy on this stupid Russia-collusion business.
-- we're really into the Land of Mixed Up History.
Given that "this stupid Russia-collusion business" counts as a real "witch-hunt" -- that is, a Democrat-concocted assault on the legitimacy of the duly elected president -- the Democrats cannot possibly become "what they profess to despise." The differences couldn't be more stark. Joe McCarthy had all the evidence on his side about Kremlin/global communism influence on the federal government, especially concerning sections of the FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations of his era. The Democrats today do not -- except insofar as the mounting piles of evidence relates to themselves, certainly in the persons of their own standard-bearers, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton.
As I'm sure you understand, none of this is "ancient" history. To this day, there are those on the Left, at least, who know in their bones that if conservatives ever bust through the Left's Big Lies about Sen. McCarthy, they might actually win back the country.
You could help.