Coulter, O'Reilly and Joe McCarthy

By: Allan H. Ryskind  9/2/2003 07:00 AM

The trouble with so many of Ann Coulter‘s critics is they’re conspicuously ill-informed. Take for instance, their attacks on the late Sen. Joe McCarthy, the legendary anti-Communist she champions in her current best seller, Treason. When Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly said McCarthy “demonized people who didn’t deserve to be demonized,” Coulter shot back: “Name one.” O’Reilly balked for a moment, then boldly proclaimed: “I’ll name one. Dalton Trumbo.” O’Reilly was breathtakingly mistaken. When Coulter countered McCarthy “had nothing to do with Trumbo,” O’Reilly blithely compounded his error. “Sure, he did,” he said, and then plowed ahead, “It was a House of Un-American Activities Committee, all right, and he was overseeing that.”

How could the No-Spin-Man, normally a sensible observer of the passing scene, pack so much giddy nonsense into so few words? First off, Coulter was right: McCarthy never, ever investigated Dalton Trumbo, a famous Hollywood screenwriter. Nor did McCarthy ever serve on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA). Period. In what civics lesson did O’Reilly learn that senators run House committees? The HCUA did investigate Trumbo—over two years before McCarthy launched his anti-Red crusade—but Trumbo was well worthy of investigation. True, Trumbo was a witty and talented fellow, whose hectic life—including Communist Party activities, jail, breaking the blacklist, and scripting such movies as Exodus and Spartacus—was being celebrated at the Westside Theatre in New York this summer. But for much of his life—he died in 1976—the writer acted as an appendage to Joe Stalin....To Read More.....

My Take - As you link into this article you will find there are no paragraph separations.  I hate that and so I copied, pasted and separated them myself.  However, either way this is an important piece.  Although this goes back to 2003 it is important support to information in the series I started in January with:

What is the News Worth Knowing and Why Don't We Know It?

The History Lesson You Never Learned! The History Lesson You Were Never Taught!

Let Me Tell You About Harry Hopkins

This is also important because I think this exposes O'Reilly as a real self-aggrandizing intellectual lightweight; arrogantly childish in his emotional displays; a bully in his manners, and has not demonstrated, with a few exceptions, anything except obsequiousness when dealing with prominent heavy hitters from the left.  Quite frankly; for years I have considered him to be a phony and rarely watch him any longer.