Regards,
Peter H.

I think that’s the summary of the George Clooney-I-love-old-Hollywood camp and it’s just flat out wrong as a summary.

The HUAC held hearings in hundreds of locals across the US and, at least in this area of Michigan, the HUAC uncovered people who were indeed intent on harming America. Known CP-USA supporters and sympatico types were watched, their activities and networks identified. In Michigan, the HUAC uncovered and detailed the extent of CP-USA organizers and money directed into, for instance, the BigLabor movement here in Michigan. While the mob may have had its mitts on many union leaders, the CP-USA folks clearly were helping raise discontent and workplace stife on a factory plant-by-plant level… and they had been doing it for years (as early as the mid-1930s and leading up to the famous Sit Down Strike).

As a young boy, my classmates and I learned about those “heroes” of labor organizing in the early days of BigLabor… I was surprised to learn later in life how the teachers left out the influence of the communist party, the first “Red Brigade” as they called themselves, the use of autonomous cells for organizing… etc. Fancy that?

Later, these same cells were used to recruit informants who provided information back to Soviet agents in Detroit during WWII and after about weapons manufacture, tank armaments, military vehicle operating capacities, etc.

You simply can’t reduce the work of the HUAC –although some of it was over-the-top– to innocent people were railroaded. The balance of the HUAC’s work had utility, ndtovent.

Spying is real, as you correctly note. As I noted earlier this week, I was at a dinner party at an area restaurant and, it turns out, the owners of the restaurant are alleged to be significant financial supporters of Hezbollah. God only knows what else they might do given their loyalties lie with something other than America.

I think a key difference between a Left-organized mind and Right-organized mind is that the Right generally understands the threat as real… the Left see some sort of boogeyman. The threat of terrorists and spying in America IS real.

I mentioned the NYC subway backpack issue because the MSM pooh-poohed it as more threat mongering by the beleagured, put-upon WH and Bush Administration… turns out it wasn’t that far off the page. Even Left commentators here and on Left-of-center blogs made light of concern by HomeLand Security on the issue.

Turns out those who belittled the threat were operating for partisan and idelogical gain… and that’s dangerous when we use Americans’ security as a political chip to score debating points.

I think, in a large way, rewriting history to slam the HUAC from the comfort of 20-20 hindsight some 50+ years later underscores how the Left and Right differ in this country. It is a striking, fundamental and instructive difference.

Hamdan (http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-hamdan2aug02,1,3334643.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california) or Padilla (http://archives.cnn.com/2002/LAW/06/27/dirty.bomb.suspect/) are examples from today’s headlines… the Left see them as innocents villified by an unfair and excessive Justice Dept… I see them as likely terrorists who got away “between the technicalities” with the help of slick, liberal activists.

It is instructive. When I see the Left honestly embrace the terrorist threat I’ll believe it –but for now, it’s like the Left using slogans like “Support the troops, not the mission” or wanting to use dead soldiers’ families and their grief for PR attention. I don’t buy the Left is sincere in its new found sympathy for the military… TedKennedy and the bodyarmor issue is a good example on point.

And I don’t think the Left understands or appreciates the reality of spying, threats, and how deeply our enemies from abroad have infiltrated American neighborhoods, workplaces, or daily life.

I think it’s about time for a modern day HUAC effort… targeted at those terrorists who intend us harm.

That said, I think people who work in the intelligence field, and who leak classified information to the press should be investigated and fully prosecuted…. But don’t drag innocent people through the mud just because they have fringe views/oppinions. The majority may not agree with them, and may even despise them, but they have rights just like everybody else, freedom of speech included.

As far as DHS checking luggage and backpacks in subways and train stations, I’m all for it. I think they should have an x-ray machine on every turnstyle, but it’s not likely to happen anytime soon, unless some brilliant engineer comes up with a workable solution that doesn’t hold passengers up for 2-3 hours at a time. I’m also for infiltration of mosques in the U.S., and those who teach/preach the jihad doctrine of “killing all infidels” should be thoroughly investigated (while ensuring that their constitutional rights to free speech are preserved).

The HUAC did a lot of good and, despite what maybe the legacy of the Red Hollywood types in this generation, communist cells were operating, secrets were being traded, money was being laundered for in-States Russian agents, and –although it seems like a long time ago– spying was effective. It was a threat. Not imaginary. Not celluloid.

That’s why the HUAC worked. It chilled out the Red Hollywood and pro-communist State Dept types. It helped average Americans come to understand early in the Cold War that countries abroad meant us HARM and their agents in our country were here to help it happen… and some in our own country were helping.

It amazes that, in the comfort of your GayLeft world, you can contemplate that the threat of communist espionage can be easily dismissed.

The real problem is that it is STILL happening today –only with a different group and now its the WOT.

Don’t be so quick to discount news stories where HomeLand Sec Dept says it would now like to start checking backpacks on the subways in NYC… because when that story broke the Sen Dems were quick to run to the floor of the Senate to pooh-pooh the idea as unworkable paranoia meant to keep the people under Bush’s thumb of fear. And it was echoed over at the DailyKos, etc.

A few months later, we learn it wasn’t all hookum and smoke. The threat was real.

Nawh, the HUAC served a useful purpose. You stop listening to Geo Clooney for your history lesson.

BTW, I never listen to Savage or Limbaugh or Hannity or Coulter or OReilly. I despise shrill rhetoric on the Right and much as I do on the Left –it’s made us all far too uncivil. But then, I’m a Rotarian. Go figure.

Or:

Ok, so lets go back to the early 50’s, when ANyone, especially anyone famous, whom Hoover didn’t like, was called before the huac and verbally brutalized, and had their personal lives dragged through the mud for no other reason that Hoover/McCarthy not liking them. Let’s ruin more lives/careers for no other reason than that Karl Rove doesn’t like “your face.” They used the same tactics against those accused as the KGB did in the former soviet union. do you really want to live in a country like that??

Comments like these always bring an ironic smile to my face, considering what’s happened to GayPatriot already and the persons who perpetrated it — leftist, liberal, paid Democratic operatives all, who refuse to comment on their own personal lives or past activity.

That’s why when Raj raves about “degenerates”, we just laugh. I’ll take James Dobson over Mike Rogers and Raj any day. At least Dobson opposes pornography of women and children being bound, raped, and slashed.

More on topic — IMHO, I think that ANyone who has a security clearance has a responsibility not to leak classified information they have access to, except through the proper “whistle blower” channels. If they are sooo set against the policies of the government/intelligence agencies they work for, they can always quit. No one forces them to keeping working there. Quitting a job is one of the few freedoms we have left.

Well, I say it, because you gay republicans who so lovingly embrace the homophobia and hatred of the republican party continually refuse to acknowledge people like Cohn, Hooever [sic] and (today) Rove.

As far as I can tell, Rove isn’t gay. Thank goodness, given his girth–he would be referred to here as Karl the stupid Bovine. (Pigs aren’t stupid, but I digress.)

Rove hates Democrats because–as he acknowledged in one of his biographies–he had been beaten up by a Democrat girl when he was a young youth. She was about the same age. And, obviously, the experience of being beaten up by a Democrat girl left a mark on his delicate psyche. And that is why he hates Democrats.

That’s about the same reason that the James Dobson–of Focus on (some peoples’) Family fame, you know, the tail that wags the Republican Party dog–hates gay people. When Dobson was a child, he had been humiliated by his mother, wife to a somewhat itinerant christian preacher in Texas, and was beaten up by an effeminate youth of the same age.

I could go on and on about these people, including Gary Bauer–who hails from Newport Kentucky, across the Ohio River from where I was raised, and former head of the “Family Research Council”–but I’ll refrain. What is amusing is that the Republican apologists here and elsewhere seem to not really care what these degenerates are doing to their party.

Mir Wurst. Ask Matty for a translation.

And the former FBI Director’s name is Hoover.

I think it’s more telling that –even when called out on the practice– don’t deny the legacy of the corrupted, anti-American Red Hollywood of the 1940’s-50’s is found in today’s GayLeft.

America’s enemies abroad always have friends at home.

What do you call someone that leaks sensitive secret government programs designed to protect Americans and track down their enemies for all the world to know? Traitor? Deranged?
Well, if you are the ACLU you call them brave heroes.
The American Civ…

Being ordered to testify before a grand jury doesn’t necessarily mean the person getting the subpoena is the target of the inquiry. My Mother got a subpoena to appear before a grand jury a few years ago because she had information about the persons being targeted by the prosecutor.

Fitzgerald –the SP embraced by the liberals in DC– understood that point.

Editorial Bd after Editorial Bd at all the major news institutions –even at the LeftHavenLand of NPR– admit that Ms Plame was outed by her hubbie and even introduced at social events as a CIA agent “no longer undercover”…

It’s not surprising you can’t let it go in an honest recognition that your side lost another “smoking gun” ala the Downing St Memo, the WMD, etc etc.

Plame wasn’t hurt by the press’ disclosure. She wasn’t hurt by her husband’s earlier disclosure. She wasn’t even undercover for most of her career. She’s an analyst –not an agent.

Like with criminal investigations by DOJ vis a vis policy investigations by Congress, it’s clear you just can’t comprehend major differences.

Are you saying that the publishers of Who’s Who In America should be summoned to testify before Congress…(blather omitted).

This silliness was addressed here in a comment thread several weeks ago (I’m sure that NDXXX–that’s NuttyDogXXX, kind of like a pornographic pit-bull–can get the relevant URL, if you’re really interested–which I doubt), and I’m not going to bother rehash the issues again here on a relatively obscure web log.

One thing that I will bring up is that, if, as Shrub and his minions have been saying recently, that Plame’s identity as a presumptively undercover CIA agent was not classified, why was he and his minions running around a few years ago (after Wilson’s article was published, of course) saying that he wanted the leakers to be found and discharged? Why didn’t Shrub just say at the time that the information wasn’t classified?

Hmmmm?

The obvious implication is that the “declassification” was substantially after the fact, and that the information as, indeed, classified at the time it was disclosed.

It is so true that today’s GayLeftie is nothing more than warmed over 1940’s commie Hollywood wanna-be in search of a heritage in victimhood. Still anti-American. Still sneering at the majority. Still on the margin of society –hopelessly impotent and in deep anger, rage and illusion.

Get over the HUAC activities –it was the right thing to do, at the right time. Like nuking the Japs, kicking the VC’s ass for a dozen years, ending the WelfareState, growing our suburbs so Americans could escape the corrupt politics of Democrats in the innercities, restoring decency to the WH, American honor and respect abroad, and bringing the Free World to face the real threat of Islamofascism to the West… and not the imaginary threat of GlobalWarmUps or TradeBalances.

Nawh, Kevin… you go on embracing traitors and fellow anti-Americans… it’s a grand legacy you & the GayLeft have there.

And don’t forget to pull Cohn’s GayCard… afterall, he was somewhat conservative. And grab Hoover’s while you’re at it… you GayLefties are so pathetic.

As far as congressional hearings: Well, if you want that, then just watch the old House Un-American activities. Shots of Roy Cohn sniggering during comments about homosexuals are a particular favorite high point for me. Maybe we could Karl Rove to do the same thing.