If you were doing a radio program on intelligence failures of the pre 9/11 era, would you call it "The Truthers Were Right"?

A bit of a shame, to say the least, that Aaro has decided to have a go at the William F Buckley line in McCarthy revisionism. Like trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Field-Marshall Haig (something which one historian in every single generation of right-wing farts to come out of Oxford has tried, always in the belief that they are doing something new and scandalous), McCarthy rehabilitationism is the sort of thing that wins you points in debating competitions - that is to say, you can make a sort of case, but the case has to be based on attack rather than defence, kicking a few holes in the oversimplified conventional wisdom on the subject and hoping that nobody looks too closely at the actual detail.

Basically, if you're doing McCarthy rehabilitation, you have to bang the table hard and shout that there were! communists! in the US government! and concentrate very hard on the fact that Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were actually guilty. You then basically shut up and hope that people will start arguing with you about McCarthy's methods and you've basically progressed to the next round, because you get to look all magnanimous in making concessions about the illiberal abuses of process in the prosecution of people who were, after all, basically guilty. You don't even need to wheel out the Barry Goldwater quote about extremism in the defence of liberty if you catch the judges' eye just right.

What you don't want to do if you're arguing the pro-McCarthy case, is let anyone take a look at what McCarthy actually believed. His most famous speech (the "conspiracy of infamy so black" one) is all about his assertion that Dean Acheson and General George Marshall had spent the previous twenty years undermining the USA for the benefit of Soviet Russia, and that Marshall in particular had sent tens of thousands of American troops to their deaths in this cause. In the language of 9/11 Truthers, McCarthy was a MIHOPper, who was certainly prepared to entertain theories that President Truman himself was a Soviet agent even if he disclaimed personal belief in them.

There certainly was Soviet espionage in the higher levels of the US Government in the 1950s. There certainly was a need for a thorough investigation of this. The fact that this vitally necessary investigation fell into the hands of an immoral and crazy conspiracy theorist is not something that anyone should be making any sorts of excuses for, and it wasn't a question of his "methods" - what McCarthy actually believed, was crazily wrong. There were plenty of anti-communists who were not wrong in the same way, and who hated McCarthy.

If Aaro did a documentary on the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, would he call it "George Galloway was right?". Or perhaps "Norman Baker MP was right?".

Footnote: an interesting detail from McCarthy's infamy speech:

It was Marshall, with Acheson and Vincent eagerly assisting, who created the China policy which, destroying China, robbed us of a great and friendly ally, a buffer against the Soviet imperialism with which we are now at war.

which just caught my attention, as Decent idol Henry "Scoop" Jackson was later obsessed with the possibility of an anti-Soviet alliance with China (a rich vein of embarrassing Scoop quotes, almost on a par with his colourful views on the subject of the Japanese).