A Denunciation of John McCain's McCarthyism

It is a stunning development that John McCain has decided to channel Joseph McCarthy and revive a shameful chapter in American history with his accusations that Barak Obama is a socialist or a Marxist! Is Joseph McCarthy an American hero? Has McCarthy not been sufficiently discredited as a demagogue and a cretin whose venomous accusations on a national stage made a mockery of American values and justice? Does it not reveal John McCain and Sarah Palin as contemptuous Joseph McCarthy wannabes that they would embrace McCarthyism as a campaign strategy? Isn't it time that somebody ask John McCain and Sarah Palin -- as Joseph McCarthy was asked by Special Counsel for the Army Joseph Welch -- if, at long last, they have no sense of decency left?

McCain's argument that Obama is a socialist or a Marxist because Obama wants to cut taxes for Americans making less than $200,000 and rollback Bush's tax cuts for Americans making over $250,000 is, further, extraordinarily deceitful and hypocritical since McCain opposed Bush's tax cuts in the first place! Does that mean that McCain was a Marxist or a socialist when he opposed Bush's tax cuts? Or is Obama being called a socialist or a Marxist because he supports greater tax cuts for the middle class than McCain? If that is the criteria, then every Republican who has supported tax cuts for the middle class is a socialist or a Marxist! Nor should it be forgotten that while Republican hero Ronald Reagan pushed through tax cuts that predominantly benefitted the wealthy, he hypocritically made unemployment benefits taxable, thereby "redistributing wealth" from the unemployed to the rich! The bottom line is that for Republicans raising taxes on the recently unemployed and the middle class to pay for tax cuts for the rich is not a problem, but cutting taxes on the middle class and the recently unemployed while raising them on the rich is unthinkable!