Tail-Gunner Joe

Sometimes people do the right thing for the wrong reasons. On this May Day, 2018, let us remember Senator Joseph McCarthy, notorious for his, frankly, partisan and self serving red hunts that, on the one hand, undermined the anti-communist consensus in postwar American politics, and, on the other, called attention to what we now know was the very real infiltration of Soviet agents in the American government and the complacency of some, but certainly not all (see Hubert Humphrey) “useful idiots” among the postwar progressive left. Whew.