Terminally-dumb people have always been with us, of course. It can’t be that we’ve suddenly gone stupid.

If you shake your head and roll your eyes at the nonsense coming out of the Teabagger followers of Sarah “Africa is a country” Palin and other intellectual giants like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh…

If you have thoughts of moving abroad after the latest silly lies and fantasies like “Obama the Marxist” and “Obama the antichrist”…

Barack Obama

U.S. President Barack Obama

If you share Noam Chomsky’s feeling: “I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime”…

Keep in mind that the right wing has long been at least as stupid and as mean-spirited.  Consider some of the behavior of the same types for half a century during the Cold War with its beloved — albeit imaginary — “International Communist Conspiracy”:

* 1948: The Pittsburgh Press published the names, addresses, and places of employment of about 1,000 citizens who had signed presidential-nominating petitions for former Vice President Henry Wallace, running under the Progressive Party.  This, and a number of other lists of “Communists”, published in the mainstream media, resulted in people losing their jobs, being expelled from unions, having their children abused, being denied state welfare benefits, and suffering various other punishments.

* Around 1950: The House Committee on Un-American Activities published a pamphlet, “100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the U.S.A.” This included the following information about what a communist takeover of the United States would mean:

Q: What would happen to my insurance?

A: It would go to the Communists.

Q: Would communism give me something better than I have now?

A: Not unless you are in a penitentiary serving a life sentence at hard labor.

* 1950s: Mrs. Ada White, member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission, believed that Robin Hood was a Communist and urged the books that told the Robin Hood story be banned from Indiana schools.

* As evidence that anti-communist mania was not limited to the lunatic fringe or conservative newspaper publishers, here is Clark Kerr, president of the University of California at Berkeley in a 1959 speech: “Perhaps 2 or even 20 million people have been killed in China by the new [communist] regime.”  One person wrote to Kerr: “I am wondering how you would judge a person who estimates the age of a passerby on the street as being ‘perhaps 2 or even 20 years old.’  Or what would you think of a physician who tells you to take ‘perhaps 2 or even twenty teaspoonful of a remedy’?”

*  Throughout the cold war, traffic in phony Lenin quotes was brisk, each one passed around from one publication or speaker to another for years.  Here’s U.S. News and World Report in 1958 demonstrating communist duplicity by quoting Lenin: “Promises are like pie crusts, made to be broken.”  Secretary of State John Foster Dulles used it in a speech shortly afterward, one of many to do so during the cold war.  Lenin actually did use a very similar line, but he explicitly stated that he was quoting an English proverb (it comes from Jonathan Swift) and his purpose was to show the unreliability of the bourgeoisie, not of communists.

“First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle the United States, which will be the last bastion of capitalism.  We will not have to attack.  It will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands.”  This Lenin ‘quotation’ had the usual wide circulation, even winding up in the Congressional Record in 1962.  This was not simply a careless attribution; this was an out-and-out fabrication; an extensive search, including by the Library of Congress and the United States Information Agency, failed to find its origin.

* A favorite theme of the anti-communists was that a principal force behind drug trafficking was a communist plot to demoralize the United States.  Here’s a small sample:

Don Keller, District Attorney for San Diego County, California said in 1953: “We know that more heroin is being produced south of the border than ever before and we are beginning to hear stories of financial backing by big shot Communists operating out of Mexico City.”

In an interview to the American Legion Magazine in 1964, Henry Giordano, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, said the following when asked about the link between drugs and Communism:

Q: “I’ve been told that the communists are trying to flood our country with narcotics to weaken our moral and physical stamina. Is that true?”

Giordano: “As far as the drugs are concerned, it’s true. There’s a terrific flow of drugs coming out of Yunnan Province of China. There’s no question that in that particular area this is the aim of the Red Chinese.  It should be apparent that if you could addict a population you would degrade a nation’s moral fiber.”

Fulton Lewis, Jr., prominent conservative radio broadcaster and newspaper columnist, wrote in 1965: “Narcotics of Cuban origin — marijuana, cocaine, opium, and heroin — are now peddled in big cities and tiny hamlets throughout this country.  Several Cubans arrested by the Los Angeles police have boasted they are communists.”

We were also told that along with drugs another tool of the commies to undermine America’s spirit was fluoridation of the water.

*  Mickey Spillane was one of the most successful writers of the 1950s, selling millions of his anticommunist thriller mysteries.  Here is his hero, Mike Hammer, in “One Lonely Night”, boasting of his delight in the grisly murders he commits, all in the name of destroying a communist plot to steal atomic secrets.  After a night of carnage, the triumphant Hammer gloats, “I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it.  I pumped slugs into the nastiest bunch of bastards you ever saw. … They were Commies. … Pretty soon what’s left of Russia and the slime that breeds there won’t be worth mentioning and I’m glad because I had a part in the killing.  God, but it was fun!”

* 1952: A campaign against the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization was waged because it was tainted with “atheism and communism”, and was “subversive” because it preached internationalism. Any attempt to introduce an international point of view in the schools was seen as undermining patriotism and loyalty to the United States. A bill in the US Senate, clearly aimed at UNESCO, called for a ban on the funding of “any international agency that directly or indirectly promoted one-world government or world citizenship.”  There was also opposition to UNESCO’s association with the UN Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that it was trying to replace the American Bill of Rights with a less liberty-giving covenant of human rights.

* 1955: A US Army 6-page pamphlet, “How to Spot a Communist”, informed us that a communist could be spotted by his predisposition to discuss civil rights, racial and religious discrimination, the immigration laws, anti-subversive legislation, curbs on unions, and peace.  Good Americans were advised to keep their ears stretched for such give-away terms as “chauvinism”, “book-burning”, “colonialism”, “demagogy”, “witch hunt”, “reactionary”, “progressive”, and “exploitation”.  Another “distinguishing mark” of “Communist language” was a “preference for long sentences.”  After some ridicule, the Army rescinded the pamphlet.