Ultra Irony Alert: Right wingers say that Wikileaks is the reason to bring back McCarthyism

[ck4829]

“This WikiLeaks disaster is proof that we are deeply infiltrated by communists just like Senator McCarthy warned us about. … It would not shock me if Julian Assange SECRETLY seeks asylum in Moscow to avoid an Interpol arrest,” wrote Steve Cooper, who on Dec. 1 became one of the first of many on the far right to fulminate about the alleged Wikileaks-Communist connection. “McCarthyism is the only thing that will save us.” Assange was arrested in England Dec. 7 on a Swedish warrant in connection with a sex crimes investigation. He was denied bail and remains in custody.

Cooper, a prolific blogger and Internet radio personality who writes and broadcasts at TheConservativeMonster.com, has been working towards a full-blown exhumation of McCarthy’s legacy for some time. During a June 2009 Internet broadcast on the topic, “Did the Soviet Union stage their collapse to lower our guard?” he declared that “global tentacles of Marxism are slowly strangling this world, and people are clueless.”

“We are faced with the problem of U.S.-based Marxists supporting our foreign enemies. These are dangerous times for America. The Congress must re-establish a House Internal Security Committee,” opined far-right columnist Cliff Kincaid on Wednesday. (The House Committee on Un-American Activities was renamed the House Internal Security Committee in 1969 in hopes that its gravitas could be salvaged after “Yippies” Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin made a mockery of HUAC hearings in 1967 and 1968.)

Right-wing attack dog and author Ann Coulter, when she’s not busy talking up hate groups, has been spreading the love for “Tail-gunner Joe” for years. “The myth of ‘McCarthyism’ is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times. … Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie,” she wrote in 2003’s Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror. She even suggests that McCarthy is the only reason there are virtually no American communists. “Sneering at McCarthy today because the only people who call themselves Communists are harmless cranks is like sneering at the Sabin vaccine because, really, almost no one gets polio anymore.”

Then there’s Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), better known to the far right for his longstanding and baseless claim that undocumented immigrants murder enormous numbers of Americans every day and similar attacks. In an interview with RightSideNews last Monday, King said he agreed with Kincaid’s call for a resurrected HUAC-type committee. “I am often quoted as saying McCarthy was a hero for America. He was. He was right far more times than he was wrong. It is a historical fact.”

America’s favorite self-proclaimed historian of the hour has also weighed in — repeatedly. “It was Republican Senator Joe McCarthy who shined the spotlight on the Communist Party again,” Glenn Beck, the Fox News host and conspiracy theorist, told his viewers in March. “McCarthy was absolutely right. He may have used bad tactics or whatever, but he was absolutely right,” he added in June.

(Ironically, McCarthy was charged with encouraging government employees to steal classified documents and turn them over to him, as well as misusing FBI documents containing top-secret national security information.)

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2010/12/14/newest-extreme-right-demand-bring-back-mccarthyism/

[tcaudilllg]

1. He can spin all he likes, but if there is a hell Joe burns in it.