Don't Know Much About History

Since Harry Reid's odious claim that Mitt Romney hasn't paid any taxes in the past ten years, conservatives have rightly been up in arms and have called out Reid on his falsehood.  Ann Coulter notes that in the midst of this, some conservative commentators have been likening Reid's statements to those made by Sen. Joe McCarthy during his supposed witch hunt in the late 50's concerning communist infiltration in the State Department.  But this is all wrong.  McCarthy did find communists in the State Department and was only taking Democrats to task for not following through with their own investigations:

McCarthy said he had the names of 57 communists or communist sympathizers working in the State Department who needed to be investigated. Separately, he cited a 1946 letter from former Secretary of State James Byrnes to Congress stating that there were 205 known security risks still working there.

His point, misconstrued by Democrats at the time and since, was not to accuse specific individuals, but rather to indict the Democrats for turning a blind eye to ridiculous security risks in important government jobs, even after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. (Sorry, Nation magazine, they’re still guilty.)

McCarthy gave his Wheeling, W.Va., speech two weeks after Secretary of State Dean Acheson had defended celebrity communist spy Hiss on Jan. 25, 1950 — the day of Hiss’ criminal conviction for denying under oath that he was a Soviet spy.

Even after Whittaker Chambers had produced documents proving that Hiss was working for the Soviet Union while advising President Roosevelt, the Democrats were still defending a traitor. Chambers said of Acheson’s disgusting defense of Hiss, “You will look in vain in history for anything comparable to it.”

It's interesting how people are remembered as opposed to what they actually did.