There's an interesting symposium on Ann Coulter's take on McCarthyism over at FrontPageMag. I think they miss the main point, which is that McCarthy just wasn't that big a deal and certainly wasn't the monster the Left portrays him as. He is a convenient excuse for the Leftist historians to pretend that the US and the USSR were morally comparable. They had Stalin, we had McCarthy, so goes the equation. Needless to say, this is morally and intellectually reprehensible in the extreme. Whether McCarthy was bad or not - and he was certainly not as ruthless a demagogue as, say, Teddy Kennedy - he certainly never manufactured the slaughter of 20 million people. Coulter is forcing the Left to answer for the tissue of lies they've been allowed to spin from behind the iron walls of academe. For this alone, I support her.