Beck (!) says McCarthy was a “nightmare” because he “made cries of communism a joke”

Given Glenn Beck's one-man crusade to root out communism in the Obama administration, a crusade which most recently led him to spend a whole show attacking Anita Dunn because she once cited Mao has a “favorite political philosopher,” and which targeted Van Jones, and which led him to claim that “the president has an agenda that is radical, revolutionary, and in some cases, Marxist,” and which most amusingly has led him to look for signs of Marxism and fascism in the artwork of Rockefeller Center (which also houses Fox News)...

Given this long history fomenting fear about communism, one might expect Beck to idolize or romanticize trailblazer Joseph McCarthy.

But in his 2003 book The Real America, Beck writes:

One of the worst things that ever happened to America was Joseph McCarthy-and not for the reasons that everybody else thinks that Joseph McCarthy was a nightmare. I give you that Joseph McCarthy was an out-and-out nightmare for all the reasons everybody thinks, but it goes much deeper than that.

Joseph McCarthy made cries of communism a joke. He makes the cries of socialism a joke. Nowadays when you say, “Um, you know, So-and-So is a Socialist,” everybody laughs. It's like calling someone a witch, or a pirate. It just doesn't have any meaning anymore. “Oh no, he's a Socialist! So what?”

In the same way, Al Sharpton makes cries of racism a joke.

Keep it up, Al. You really want to hurt the cause of the African-Americans? Keep crying racism, because nobody will pay attention to you.

When they hear it, it will become a joke, and they will laugh. Quite honestly, Al, the way they're laughing at your hair now.

So Joseph McCarthy had his witch-hunt in the 1950s, and he tried to find all the Socialists, all the commies, all the pinkos, and you know what? Some of them really existed. But the lasting repercussion of this is that nobody is afraid of socialism, nobody thinks communism is a bad thing. (pp. 114-115)

Got that?

Beck is accusing McCarthy of making the “cries” of communism and socialism a “joke.”

Moreover, Beck says that the “lasting repercussion” of McCarthy's “witch-hunt” is that “nobody is afraid of socialism, nobody thinks communism is a bad thing.”

Priceless.