
4-14-96. TP: "Was McCarthy Right About the Left?" Citing the Venona program decryption "revelations," Nicholas von Hoffman polemicizes about the consequences of the left's refusal to face that McCarthy may have been more truthful about communist infiltration of the USG than he knew. Von Hoffman recounts the high points of the 50-year history of left dissimulation and avenges the right with a nostalgic nukem dead red-under-bedder: As yet unexplored is the possibility that certain features in the political culture of the American left are hand-me-downs from this period. The "elitism" and didacticism that so gall its opponents may be a morphed version of the communist doctrine of vanguard leadership. The liberal penchant for government gigantism, complex bureaucracy and central planning may also have taken root in the liberal admiration of the Soviet system in the 1930s. NOS_tal