What, did the commercial need to have Andy McCarthy stand up and allege to be holding a list of several dozen Al Qa’ida-allied lawyers serving at the behest of the DOJ?

Equating the outing of SEVEN lawyers for something they volunteered to do with “McCarthyism” and that sorry episode in our nation’s history is the very essence of demagoguery.

Your almost the equivalent of a parody of the lunatic fringe left.

I actually agree with a lot of what you are saying. A lot of bullshit did get justified in the name of fighting Communism, just as a lot of bullshit is being justified in the name of fighting terrorism. I just don’t think minimizing Stalin is necessary to make your point.

I never mentioned Stalin. Or any other dictator.

Bullshit.

@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:

Stalin was just one of many. . . Pimping Stalin as uberbadguy who justified our nutty Cold War stance is about as realistic as justifying the Iraq war because “the world is better off without Saddam.” Maybe the world is better off without Saddam,but it is not better off with the situation we created by getting rid of him the way we did, fucking his country and also fucking our own politics at the same time.

I never mentioned Stalin. Or any other dictator. I was talking in rather broad terms about the Cold War as a tool of manipulation of the American Public and our politics and policies.

When I think Cold War, I think “Gulf of Tonkin” and Unitary Executive, and abandonment of the constitutional declaration of war, and I wonder if we didn’t fuck the American Experiment badly enough that we can’t fix it. Because the jury on that is still out unless I am missing something.

My reply was to Redshirt; s/he was talking about god’s love for local sports teams; if god loves the KC Royals and Chiefs, s/he is indulging in (pretty typical) inscrutability. No intent or expectation that you or anyone would gain any knowledge; sorry for the confusion.

I’m not defending everything that was done in the name of combating Communism. I’m objecting to the characterization of Stalin as nothing more than a petty tyrant who posed as little threat to American interests as Saddam Hussein.

Creating puppet states in Europe justified the grotesque 40 year Cold War and its hideous arms race and even more hideous policies?

Not to me. Nor did it justify McCarthyism, or the Vietnam war, or the sellout of our national defense to the military-industrial complex, or the obese defense budget, or the saddling of our government and politics with bellicose policies and overblown expenditures on defense and neglect of domestic issues in order to serve a fucked foreign policy, or the election of Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan, or the Contras or the bombing of Cambodia or the stockpiling of nuclear materials or the advance of Duck and Cover in the public schools, or sucking up to monsters like Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran to prop up our warped policies in their region of the world, or the zillion other stupid and destructive things we did in response to the big hairy “threat.”

Not even close. Ummm, where was I supposed to gain the knowledge that we were talking about KC anyway?

Creating a bunch of puppet states in Eastern Europe was just fine and dandy, wasn’t it? We shouldn’t have been upset at all by that?

You’re not from Kansas City, I take it.

Define “local”. ;)