<I also agree that it's a pitiful state of affairs that so many voter's decisions are based upon a single issue, such as a woman's right to choose whether or not she remains pregnant. I suspect you may even agree with me that because the two major parties have so little difference left between them, voters who care at all (as opposed to 'party lever' voters) are left nothing else which which to differentiate.

I am close to switching to Libertarian, and would have done so years ago had the Democrats not gone completely off the Marxist deep end.

It was those Deistic non-deities, the Founding Fathers, who gave us the non-establishment clause in the First Amendment; you may even recall why, from your study of Evil White Men's history. It was rightist politicians who gave America the closest thing in its history to the Inquisition: The House Unamerican Activities Committee.

While I am not defending the tactics used by the HUAC, or the broad brushes used, their abuses have been used over the past decades to rewrite history and paint over one uncomfortable fact: in the 1950s this nation actually was infested with Communists directly reporting to the Soviet Union, in the media, the unions, and the government. Information released by the KGB, including the fact that yes, the Rosenbaums did it, has shown this. McCarthy was less than effective in weeding out the real enemies, and to say he was ham-handed about it is an understatement, but it doesn't mean that the enemies weren't there.

The Venona decrypts were corroborated with intelligence sources in the Soviet Union. There were hundreds of Soviet agents in the American government, including the Head of the Office of Political Affairs of the State Department, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and the personal assistant of Bill Donovan, who directed OSS (the predecessor of the CIA). If FDR had died a few months earlier, then Vice President Henry Wallace would have become President and the Secretary of State for the United States would have been a Soviet agent.

To make it short and sweet: there actually were Communists under the bed. We got lucky.