Oh, you're serious. Sorry -- I've never heard anyone attempt to defend Joe McCarthy before... You're a special guy! Wanna tackle the Salem witch trials next?

In the early 1950's in Hawaii, the organizers of the sugar plantation workers were arrested as "communist" and charged under the Smith Act as attempting to overthrow the goverment by means of violence and force. With the overturning of guilty verdicts by the federal appeals court, it became clear that this was nothing more than union "busting" than any legitimate concern over subversion. The penultimate result was the rise of political leaders from the labor movement and a leveling of the playing field between workers and the major landowners/business community in Hawaii.

Consider what the McCarthy-Army hearings did for television news, especially CBS. It forged the shape of the so-called "liberal media" to this day.

Simple lesson, love your country but be suspicious of your leaders.

While the AFL was grappling with the problem of gangster-dominated affiliates, the CIO decided in 1948 to bar Communists from holding office in the organization, and in 1949–50 it expelled 11 of its affiliated unions, which were said to be Communist-dominated.


There were Communist influences in labor throughout the years, especially in the CIO. Read your history.

Not interested in religious fanaticism compounded by ergot in the bread supply. More interested in defending my country against a group that wants to destroy it. Any person who would allow an organization to destroy America is a fool and an idiot.

...yup, I have read my history, that's why I ain't too concerned about a communist presence in this or any country.

Jake, read whose history? Here in Hawaii we lived it, so reading about it is somewhat anti-climatic. For a country founded by revolutionaries and armed with a Declaration that gives the right of the people to alter or abolish the government, your position seems somewhat at odds with what this country is all about. How about you read the Federalist Papers first?

...an excellent argument for throwing the Neo-Cons out of office.

Yes, witches are bad.

there were no witches idiot, just a bunch of hallucinating zealots, kind of like the Democratic Convention.

From 1950 to 1954, Joseph McCarthy was on the top. A simple sentence of his could be enough to ruin a man's career; a few kind words to the voters helped many fellow Republicans into office.

In May 1954, he got into a confrontation with the United States Army and its secretary, Robert Stevens, and the famous Army-McCarthy hearings started soon after. With a television audience of twenty million Americans, the flamboyant senator randomly fired accusations of Communism toward certain Army officers. With the assistance of his faithful aide Roy Cohn, he was able to put together enough evidence to give him at least slight credibility.

But McCarthy went too far. President Eisenhower helped the Army, his former employer, mount an impressive counter-attack. They recounted how McCarthy's former assistant and Cohn's sidekick, David Schine, had the senator gain him soft military assignments after being drafted. The press revolted as well, with Edward Murrow of early television fame showing plain, unedited clips from the hearings to show the fraud in McCarthy.

Over the span of thirty-six days, there were thirty-two witnesses, 71 half-day sessions, 187 hours of TV air time, 100,000 live observers, and two million words of testimony.19 Joe kept up his attacks, which gradually weakened. Every day, millions of TV sets showed McCarthy pointing his finger yet again at another man. McCarthy was obviously slipping, but he didn't give up. Then, when he was attacking an associate of Joseph N. Welch, chief attorney for the Army, Welch stood up, faced the senator, and said:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?

And with that, the hearings ended, and so did McCarthy's witch hunting career. On December 2, 1954, the senate voted 67-22 to condemn him for "conduct contrary to Senatorial traditions." The condemnation—only the third one in 165 years—noted the abuse of his Senatorial powers.21 After the condemnation, he tried to pass a few of bills written by him, but most senators didn't approve these, probably to avoid association with the "worst senator". He had lost his honor, and rightly so.

As a result of his lower status, he began drinking heavily. Sometimes he would be drunk for days on end. He was frequently hospitalized, and although McCarthy and his doctors claimed reasons such as abrasions or broken bones, he was really dying from alcohol-induced cirrhosis. He died on May 2, 1957, at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland of peripheral neuritis. At his family's request, there was a funeral for him in the Senate chamber, and he was buried in Appleton, Wisconsin, seven miles from his birthplace.

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Joseph McCarthy was a sleazy bully. He ruined the careers of hundreds of innocent men and women to advance his own. Yet for all of the suffering he directly caused, not to mention the pervasive fear in liberal circles of being unfairly associated with Communism which he indirectly gave birth to, throughout his entire senatorial career, he never once was able to directly convict a single suspected Communist of a crime.

He was probably the most talked about senator of his time. A great many arguments have been had over this man from Wisconsin. Even today, he is still potent in the minds of America; when Alger Hiss died at age 92 on Friday, November 15, 1996, the next day the San Francisco Chronicle used an entire paragraph to describe how McCarthy used the anti-Red atmosphere created by the Hiss case to begin his infamous run.

Wrongdoings aside, he had an amazing but swift career. He went from everyday senator, to national prominence, to humiliation, and to death, all in seven years.

McCarthy played on people's fears. "The Fight For America" was nothing more than a cleverly thought-out plan that took advantage of America's hysteria about Communism during the Cold War.

Then what were the Salem witch trials about? I'm confused....

"I can't imagine anyone who lives in this country would ever think that here was one good thing about communism."

Me neither. So what. They can advocate communism, the anarchist can advocate anarchy, the polygimists can advocate multiple, you can advocate fascism. It don't give a f*ck. Its a free country, at least it was.

uhh, thats what the trials were about, but there were no witches...only people accused of being witches.

what is so hard to understand about that?

Jake, people who advocate denying people a right to the non-violent expression of political beliefs should all be arrested, burned at the stake, blacklisted,etc. How do you feel about that?

Exactly -- do you see the analogy now?