THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

It took the Catholic Church centuries to admit that it had been wrong to persecute Galileo. He had said that the earth was not the center of the universe so the Church shut him up. Within a century every Catholic university was teaching Galileo's doctrine, but the Church refused to admit that it was wrong to persecute him until the 1800s.

Exactly the same thing is true of today's established religion, Political Correctness (PC). Its official doctrine has been that the McCarhtyite era was a "witch hunt." It was called a witch hunt because witches don't exist.

The official PC doctrine was that none of the people McCarthy went after were actually Communists.

But, when the Soviet Union failed, the KGB files were opened and guess who fell out?

Now that we are finding the KGB dossiers of one after another of these people, liberals have begun to admit, very softly, that they actually were Communists. They don't use the term "witch hunt" as much today, because somebody might remember that they used it when they said the Alger Hisses were NOT Communists.

They needn't worry about that. Respectable conservatives are paid not to have a memory.

What leaps out at me in the Quindlen column quoted above is a giant change in the PC line. A few years ago if she had described McCarthy's victims as "aligned or merely flirting with the Communist Party" she would have been denounced as a McCarthyite herself.

With the help of respectable conservatives, liberals have a media in which nobody but me even notices this enormous switch. No PC will ever have to admit that his side was just plain wrong.

So destroying Bessinger for rightist heresy is good, hurting anybody who actively supports a foreign enemy is evil. And all respectable conservatives agree. You will not see this fact pointed to anywhere but here.