I just don’t know why he has to single out Jews in this discussion. I guess I need the context of the whole discussion

I didn’t see any connection to sinister Jews, or any such thing.

By stating Jews are a standard deviation smarter than gentiles is a myth that plays along with the old crafty, sinnister jew that you have to be really careful about because he will steal from you wirhout you knowing it. Jews are no smarter than gentiles. They may have a different work ethic and the culture values some forms of education more than others, but I do not think Jews are born with any more intellegence than gentiles.

Also, thwe idead that Jews are dispraportianately involved with conspiracies over the last 3 centuries is a baseless accusation. What conspiracy were Jews dispaportianately involved in over the last 300 years. Again Jews are being looked at to be schemers.

I think we are speaking past each other, I am not arguing that McCarthy was a great guy, only that history has been much more cruel to him than he rightly deserves. You bring up good points in what you say, and based on that, I accept that history should be somewhat cruel to him, my only point here is that the degree of cruelness is excessive to his actions.

I think based on what the Venona transcripts and ex-KGB generals alone showed, we have to remove some of the previously held negativity, maybe not all, but some. Yet history tends to keep placing the guy in the same light as if the Venona transcripts and ex-KGB generals revealed nothing, and I think that is unfair. That is my only point.

Two questions:

Do you know where such a list exists to prove your point?

When you say “Right in almost all instances,” what does “almost all instances” mean? 99 out of 100, 89 out of 100?

You said:

“Where he was wrong, while the charges were severe, the damage wasn’t too bad, certainly nothing to reverse his positives in A.”

You are still saying that the end justifies the means and that it matters little if innocents are unjustly accused as long as criminals are punished. For me since there is injustice involved, it matters little if the crime or level of being tarnished was slight or severe. Innocent people were unjustly accused.

You said:
“With that said, I don’t want to give the impression that the guy should be peoples heroes, certainly not. I am not.”

I don’t think you are. But I think it should be important to say that people with the power to prosecute others be held accountable for any injustices that they knowingly perform on other citizens.

In addition, even when you are accused of something severe, such as spying, it could have very little impact in how much your name was ‘tarnished’. Take the Democrat Senator from, was it Chicago?, that claimed to have been branded as unpatriotic by Republicans in the senate race. Unpatriotic, especially in a time of war, is certainly a severe charge, yet I wouldn’t consider that senators good name ‘tarnished’ all that much.

Now, if memory serves me correctly, that is how I saw the McCarthy matter, if I remember what I read correctly, he was A. Right in almost all instances, and B. Where he was wrong, while the charges were severe, the damage wasn’t too bad, certainly nothing to reverse his positives in A.

With that said, I don’t want to give the impression that the guy should be peoples heroes, certainly not. I am not advising people to start putting his picture up on the wall in their homes. My only point here is that I think history was much more cruel to him than he rightly deserves.

It sounds like you have a list of the persons that McCarthy accused of being Soviet spies and are weighing it against the Verona transcripts (recall that the transcripts have real and code names), Soviet official’s recollections (KGB, etc.), released Soviet documents, etc. I’d be curious to see this since how else could you say that there was only a “small amount of people who were falsely accused.”

You said:

“Sure, some people had their good name tarnished, but from what I remember reading, it was nothing like being accused of being a child molester.”

“If you balance that out with the overwhelming number of accusations that turned out to be correct, and the large threat that Russia presented, I am more inclined to believe that McCarthy deserves more credit than history gives him.”

A few points about the above two paragraphs:

First you say that while “some people had their good name tarnished… it was nothing like being accused of being a child molester.”

Then you say that the people who McCarthy accused were a serious threat to the USA.

While I don’t mind you criticizing my analogy about the child molesters, you can’t first say that the analogy was too severe and then say in the following statement that the threat created by the Soviet agents was severe.

Your comment that “Sure, some people had their good name tarnished” is very troubling.

Here you seeming to be arguing that the end justifies the means and that it doesn’t matter how evidence is gathered, whether it is tarnished or not, and that if some people were falsely accused so what, as long as the guilty are punished or reveled that is ok.

I’d say that it does matter since you are making a decision for the others who were falsely accused that their suffering (no matter how light or severe) is justified.

So I ask, what if one of those unjustly accused were you, would you be willing to have your good name tarnished so that the guilty would be punished?

If you balance that out with the overwhelming number of accusations that turned out to be correct, and the large threat that Russia presented, I am more inclined to believe that McCarthy deserves more credit than history gives him.

Just a brief analogy:

A town has a District Attorney who one day accuses a number of citizens of being child molesters. The town is shocked when the news filters out. The people accused are harassed, some lose friends, their jobs and several marriages are ruined. When their attorneys ask the DA for evidence they are told it is forthcoming. What follows are more accusations by the DA but when a grand jury is assembled and does not return any indictments, the DA resigns.

Years later, one of the accused is found out to be a child molester.

Does this mean that the DA was correct in pursuing his agenda?

But being that I am still in my twenties, I realize that I will never get to the bottom of such a contentious issue.

With that said, I do have a bone to pick with what you quote Michael, with your anti-semitism charge. I don’t know if you got offended at his staetment and didn’t continue to read further, but if you had read further, you would have seen that his next paragraph directly rebuts your claim, he writes:

(I’m sure Dr. Gelernter knows better than to conclude from the previous paragraph that I’m anti-Semitic, but third parties reading this should know that I believe Jews found their way to central roles in Communism for the same reason they have been disproportionately important in every other reform, revolutionary movement, and conspiracy of the last three centuries; to wit, on average they’re a standard deviation brighter than Gentiles. Talent will out, even if it does so in horrible ways. It’s hardly the Jews’ fault that Gentiles are, comparatively and Gaussianly speaking, dumber.)

The full article can be read here. If anything, this shows the guy is anti-Gentile, not anti-semitic.