OT: DemCrap just keeps unraveling...

This blaming the Russians for *everything* has gone way beyond a joke IMV.

The Dems have adopted McCarthyism to their fascist style sheet. ...Jim Thompson

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Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions.

Nobody is blaming the Rusians for everything. How much they did intervene i n the US elections is an open question, and what kind of an effect those in terventions had is even more uncertain. It does seem that the Russians favo ured Trump, and the interesting question is how effective their interventio ns were.

The indeniable fact that the Trump team were in contact with Russian intell igence during the election campaign creates a problem (though they may not have realised that they were in contact with Russian intelligence).

The rule that you never use a conspiracy to explain what can be explained b y stupidity seems particuarly relevant here.

I don't get it. An organization hired an investigator, and turned the results over to a possibly-interested FBI.

Why is this 'unraveling'? Does scatology add something to the story?

The difference is that McCarthy was right.

No one really expects you to understand.

Which McCarthy? The one that claimed that there were 205 communists in the State Department, the one that claimed 57, or the one that claimed 81?

Far-right works rather better.

Trump supporters should be grinning from ear to ear at the moment. They got their guy in and got control of the 2 houses. Why still the sour pus faces and ranting? Full control already and don't know what to do. Idiots.

But this late-onset concern about the Russians is coming from people who still aren't quite sure if Algier Hiss was a spy or not.

Communists in every country were always more concerned about party than country. When the Dems think the Russians acted against their party, then they get mad. See any similarity?

When the NY Times reported on the Venona documents and wrote that "now the left will have to re-evaluate the McCarthy period" I knew they would do no such thing. It didn't take a few months before they acted as if they never heard of Venona.

Well, they don't have W to kick around any more...

Mark L. Fergerson

Venona said that there were Russian spies in the State Department, at the t ime when McCarthy said that it was infested with Communists. In so far as R ussian spies would have had enough sense to make sure that they couldn't be identified as Communists, Venona didn't "confirm" McCarthy's claims, which seem to have been based on a paranoid misinterpretation of the results of more or less routine enquiries.

McCarthy's claim that there were Russian spies in the State Department may have been correct, but the intellectual process he used to come to that con clusion was fatally flawed, and there is no evidence that anybody that he w ent after actually was a Russian spy.

Since any rational interpretation of McCarthyism would concentrate on irrat ional witch-hunting, it wouldn't need to be redone just because it was subs equently found that there actually were a few witches who might have been f ound by a more rational search.

McCarthy accused General Marshall of being a communist. Most anti-communists never made such a claim. Of course he was crazy as well as stupid, but that's why his name should not have become the label for anti-communism.

Democrats denied that Hiss was a spy and started hating Nixon when he proved them wrong.

Anti-communists aren't crazy? Communism is an unfortunate belief system, bu t it's not the only unfortunate belief system around, and concentrating one 's attention on communism to the exclusion of all the other -isms isn't exa ctly sane.

Nixon did a lot of other stuff to make himself unpopular. His involvement i n the Hiss trial does seem to show him behaving in much the same kind of wa y he did during Watergate, so the left may have had something of lead on Co ngress in developing a justified low opinion of Nixon.

Nixon may not have known about the fake typewriter, but if he had it would have been perfectly in character.

ROTFL! Best laugh I've had today; thanks! :-D

The evidence still isn't conclusive.

It's a little difficult to see any real similarity. The Democrats are prima rily interested in the fact that the Russians seem to have intervened to in fluence a US election. The fact that there might have been collusion betwee n the Trump team and the Russians is even more worrying, granting the usual US anxieties about foreign intervention in their elections (though they se em to think that it is perfectly okay for the US to stage coups in other co untries).

Becoming a Democrat isn't exactly a life changing decision, and the party d oesn't maintain a stable of ideologues to make sure that party philosophy i s pure and self-consistent. Communism was much more like a religion - not l east in being violently opposed to established religions.

The regular Republicans are equally sloppy, but the right wing lunatic frin ge, including - but not limited to - the Tea Party, do seem to have cult-li ke features, and a collection of half-baked ideologues that James Arthur ta kes rather more seriously than they deserve.

Cursitor Doom does seem to read only the Express, and to be insensitive to comic elements of it's content. It's understandable that he finds an ancient joke recycled to be amusing, rather than tedious - his standards aren't high.

Yes, and he's shown incredible cool-headedness in the face of the deluge of provocation he's been subjected to. He is surely deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize, but as we know they only award that, like all the other NPs, to toadies who know how to play ball and do as they're told.

Or terrorists.