a strain of thinking made famous by the eventually disgraced senator from wisconsin, joe mccarthy, whotly accusing people in government and others of being disloyal to and being a danger to the united states of america. joining me another former senator of wisconsin, russ feingold author of "while america sleeps: a wake-up call for the post-9/11 era." thank you for joining me tonight, senator. >> good to be on your show, lawrence. >> can you believe in 2012 we're hearing that kind of mccarthy talk from someone who was a former speaker of the house, disgraced, himself, on the way out the door like joe mccarthy, in a different kind of way? but to say the president of the united states is a danger to this country? >> you know, the only good news is it's going to make sure that barack obama gets re-elected. in the meantime, these republican candidates are dumbing down our foreign policy at a time when we really need to reach out to the rest of the word and understand it. to me, that was the lesson of 9/11. that's what my book is about. these guys talk about pretending the president is alwa

there is a large literature on joe mccarthy in the press. he would put out an outrageous story and people would deny it and would you get both accounts without really time or the capacity to investigate the truth of his claims, but he would continue to maintain the media spotlight. this is not something that is just a failing of individual journalists today, but an inherent occupational aspiratio. on a similar point, i wanted to ask about the notion of consensual narrative of existing today. particularly rick's example of wmds in iraq which turned out not to be true. i would challenge the notion that those were consensual narratives in the way that anti-communism was. i read lots of people who take that perspective. reporters put this in their reporting for the good papers. maybe not so much in the broadcast sphere, but i would say the difference is those arguments, which i think we tend to support. that is a more economic perspective and the skeptic on the claims of iraq in the administration. it did not carry the day. partly because the le

it was the date of joe mccarthy and i have in my pocket the name of 200 communists in the state department. hollywood writers were being black lifted, soviet military equipment was going to third world countries. senate hearings were prolific about not only mccarthy but what was happening to us. the soviets had taken latvia, lithuania, parts of poland, finland, romania. they controlled east germany, hungry, poland, romania and north korea. there were local communist governments that had taken over in yugoslavia, albania and north vietnam. there were strong communist parties in france and italy. china had gone communist before in 1949 with 20% of the human race. lest we doubted their sincerity about what they were trying to do, the soviets crushed revolts in east germany in '53 and hung garry in '56. we had considered ourselves to be a leader in the world in science and technology and recognized for those areas. now the soviets claimed it was their technical superiority and the world should follow their and taking students by the thousands to russia, moscow and training them and bringing th

rick santorum is more fundamentalists, we have seen it in our history, joe mccarthy, the -- these aret we saw -- saw in the tea party. the tea party was about debt and deficits, it's interesting how it switched out and you do not see the leaders of that movement, like paul ryan playing center stage. >> you do not see any of the establishment, eleskted gop talking about it. john heileman has a story and jonathan said as conservative ls tell you there are now more than "them" than us, obama lost the over 45-year-old voters, and -- >> this is an important point because in 2008, you had more people under 30 voting than seniors voting that, was the first time in our history, actually, despite the knocks that they get, the youth vote has been increasing and they are a much more tolerant, even though that consider themselves republicans and independent, they are more tolerant and diverse, they are browner, and the way they think of their lives is different. they do not say, why do i care who you marry? this dog whistle politics does not appeal to them. the republican party, i guess i put it