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[John Young]

   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.

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