I hope no one will feel ill toward me if I copy and paste an excerpt from McCarthy:
Now, ordinarily--ordinarily--I would not take time out from the important work at hand to answer Murrow. However, in this case, I feel justified in doing so because Murrow is a symbol,a leader and the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual Communists and traitors. And I am compelled by the facts to say to you that Mr. Edward R. Murrow, as far back as twenty years ago, was engaged in propaganda for Communist causes. For example, the Institute of International Education, of which he was the Acting Director, was chosen to act as a representative by a Soviet agency to do a job which would normally be done by the Russian secret police. Mr. Murrow sponsored a Communist school in Moscow. In the selection of American students and teachers who were to attend, Mr. Murrow's organization acted for the Russian espionage and propaganda organization known as Voks (V-O-K-S) and many of those selected were later exposed as Communists. Murrow's organization selected such notorious Communists as Isadore Begun, David Zablodowsky. (Incidentally, Zablodowsky was forced out of the United Nations, when my chief counsel presented his case to the grand jury and gave a picture of his Communist activities).
Now, Mr. Murrow, by his own admission, was a member of the IWW (that's the Industrial Workers of the World), a terrorist organization cited as subversive by an attorney general of the United States, who stated that it was an organization which seeks--and I quote--"to alter the government of the United States by unconstitutional means." Now, other government committees have had before them actors, screen writers, motion picture producers, and others, who admitted Communist affiliations but pleaded youth or ignorance. Now, Mr. Murrow can hardly make the same plea.
On March nine of this year, Mr. Murrow, a trained reporter, who had traveled all over the world, who was the Educational Director of CBS, followed implicitly the Communist line, as laid down in the last six months, laid down not only by the Communist Daily Worker, but by the Communist magazine Political Affairs and by the National Conference of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
The tactics, tone, and institutions are all familiar. If one replaces "Communist" with "terrorist", one might have a transcript that resembles a McCain/Palin stump speech, or RedRightRadical media apologist's talking points. Association with the "other". Demonization. Assault intellectualism, promote ignorance, glorify plain old Joes. Like Tailgunner Joe.
Who are John McCain and Sarah Palin, really? Demagogues, in the tradition of their party. America falls prey to these type periodically, and after much pain, usually dismisses them to their shame. Let's hope November 4 represents not just the end of this quadrennial campaign, but also to this period's American flirtation with demagogues.
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