THE MOTH AND THE FLAME

Peggy Noonan’s purported review was hardly that at all. It was, indeed, an archconservative polemic set out to rewrite history.

She quotes Joe McCarthy, who she agrees was “vulgar and demagogic,” for the purpose of attributing “common sense” to his campaign of fear and intimidation. Does she think that events have no context, that words may be cut and pasted irrespective of their initial intent? Perhaps she wishes that the public had a memory as faulty as one of her former employers.

Is “the left” to be thankful that McCarthy and his cohorts nearly, but not quite, reduced the Bill of Rights to a scrap of paper?

DAVID HOPP, TARZANA