Would it really make it easier for you if we settle on just one number?
Rep. Allen West did his best to channel Joseph McCarthy yesterday in Palm City, Florida. In response to a question about “card-carrying Marxists” in Congress, Rep. West said there are between 78 and 81 Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party.
McCarthy in 1950 maintained that he knew of 250 Communists in the State Department, although the number continued to change, and the McCarthyite spirit is alive and well in the Tea Party and Fox News newsrooms.
West’s remarks reminded us here at Right Wing Watch of the 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate, where a conservative activist, who is secretly a Soviet spy, played by Angela Lansbury, convinces her husband, Senator John Yerkes Iselin, to go to the Senate floor announcing the number of known Communists in the Defense Department that she determined with the help of Heinz 57 ketchup.
