Joseph McCarthy

Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was a Republican US senator who is best know for prosecuting communists within America during the Cold War.

McCarthy is known to liberals as a mad man. This is due to the argument that, although McCarthy was right about Communist spies in the US, he could not have known about them at the time that he claimed he did.

"McCarthyism" is a term thrown around to describe an anti-Communist hysteria in the US during the cold war. While there were really communist spies in the US at the time, liberals defend them on the grounds that they think McCarthy and US intelligence were lying when they said they knew about the communist spies. This is because the evidence against the communists wasn't made public until later. Liberals sometimes talk about McCarthyism in refrence to the terrorists being held in Guantanamo Bay. They say that the government needs to extend the writ of habeus corpus to the terrorists even though they were known terrorists because they were caught in the Middle East.

McCarthy revealed in a famous speech that he had a list of known communists that had jobs in government. McCarthy did not want to disclose any names, but Democrats demanded furiously that he did. When McCarthy did give in and disclose the names, the Democrats were further upset that he did so.