Quote Originally Posted by Red Harvest
I'm getting an eery feeling like I'm sitting in Germany in the 30's or something.
Whoah, brother Harvest, let's take history one step at a time.

Speaking of Fatherlands, I seemed to remember McCarthy had something with Hitler, but I didn't recall exactly what (in view of his character, it couldn't have been a deep commitment anyway). So I decided to Google and the machine came up with some newer info.

One blog says Harcourt will publish a book this fall by journalist Haynes Johnson, called The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism, in which he traces 'the straight line that runs from McCarthy to Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan to Bush, which makes recasting McCarthyism in a noble, heroic light necessary to their program of creating a new, fake, right-wing history of the twentieth century'.

Oh well, apart from the hyperbole (it seems he even attributes America's 'culture wars' to McCarthy) there seems to be more than one reason why the Ann Coulters of this world insist on the man's posthumous make-over into a hero.

Oh, and the Hitler reference concerned Mein Kampf, which McCarthy apparently admired for its political tactics. Apparently the Johnson book quotes Greta van Susteren's father, McCarthy's lifelong friend judge Urban Van Susteren, as saying that Joe 'never read books with one exception: Hitler's Mein Kampf, which he regarded as a handbook of political tactics. Joe was fascinated by the strategy, that's all.'

Yeah, that's all. Joe must have been fascinated by what Hitler wrote about the way the masses could be made to swallow lies, big and small, if only you repeated them endlessly and emphatically.