There are only two men serving in Congress today who were in office when Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was still carrying on his crusade against those he determined (through methods McCarthy never quite made clear) to be communists or communist sympathizers: Rep. John Dingell of Michigan and Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia.  Dingell caught the tail end of McCarthy's career; the firebrand communist hunter would die from hepatitis in 1957, less than two years after Dingell took office.  But Byrd was in Washington far earlier, before McCarthy had run afoul of enough of his fellow Senators to earn himself a censure in 1954, only the sixth time in history the Senate had voted to officially rebuke one of its own.  Of McCarthy, Byrd said, "There was never quite anyone like McCarthy in the Senate, before or after; nor has this chamber ever gone through a more painful period."

But more than 50 years after McCarthy died in office, his tactic of combating political enemies with explicit accusations of socialist tendencies persists.  For the most part, however, the mud-slinging has become largely decentralized, with dozens of GOP Congressmen and conservative pundits taking aim collectively.

Alaska Governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin made headlines this week by warning from the bully pulpit that we're "on the road to socialism," but she has only been the most recent to utter the dreaded s-word.  Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) branded the government loan and restructuring of American auto giant General Motors "akin to socialism."  Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) called Barack Obama "the world's best salesman of socialism."  House Minority Leader John Boehner chimed in as well, calling the economic stimulus package "a down payment on a new American socialist experiment."  And let's not forget Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), who boldly declared back in April that there are exactly 17 socialists in Congress.  He refused to specify any further.

The list doesn't stop there.  Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-MI), Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Rep. Mike Pence (R-OH), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) have all- at one point or another- used the word "socialist" to describe either Obama or his policies.  And if we were really to go through picking out absolutely every Republican elected official who'd either used McCarthy-like phraseology or at the very least hinted at it, well...let's just say the article might get a bit long.

Then there's the conservative punditry.  Bowtie enthusiast Tucker Carlson, the gang over at Fox and Friends, Rush Limbaugh, Neal Boortz, Sean Hannity, Jonah Goldberg, Ann Coulter, Bill Sammon, Michelle Malkin, Mike Huckabee, and others have formed a veritable chorus of "Socialst! Socialist!" calls.  Perhaps no one, however, has been more brazen than FOX News Channel's Glenn Beck:

In fact, FOX News itself got in on the action, commissioning a poll that asked whether certain policies "felt like" America moving toward socialism.  Not surprisingly, the blatantly framed question returned a 50% "yes" response.  This, of course, in a country where more than 60% approve of Barack Obama, the very man conservatives say is spearheading the socialist movement.  (An interesting side-note:  Rasmussen Reports ran a little poll of its own back in April, finding that 20%- a full 1/5th of those surveyed- actually preferred socialism to capitalism.  The ratio grows to almost 1/2 when limited to individuals under the age of 30.)

There was also, of course, the Republican National Committee's push at its annual convention for a resolution rebranding the Democratic Party as "the Democrat Socialist Party."  So many Republican party leaders thought that was a enough of a bad idea that the vote failed miserably, with the GOP ultimately optin for the much more watered down plea for Democrats not to "pursue socialist policies."

The collective GOP wailing about socialism is puzzling, considering it comes on the heels of the greatest eight years of expansion of government in decades.  In just two terms in office, George W. Bush took government spending to new heights, running a $500 billion surplus in 2001 into a deficit of the same amount.  He federalized the education system with No Child Left Behind.  And let's not forget, TARP and the rest of the efforts to bail out ailing Wall Street financial firms were Bush policies- not Obama.

New York Times columnist Mark Liebovitch produced a stirring indictment of the new GOP tactic back in March, in which he wrote:

It seems that “socialist” has supplanted “liberal” as the go-to slur among much of a conservative world confronting a one-two-three punch of bank bailouts, budget blowouts and stimulus bills. Right-leaning bloggers and talk radio hosts are wearing out the brickbat. Senate and House Republicans have been tripping over their podiums to invoke it. The S-bomb has become as surefire a red-meat line at conservative gatherings as “Clinton” was in the 1990s and “Pelosi” is today.

Senator J. William Fulbright said of Joseph McCarthy, "The junior senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatreds and prejudices of the American people that he has started a prairie fire which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control."  It's too bad that sentiment appears to be lost on conservatives today.  They could always rally behind the man who said of McCarthy, "I'm glad somebody is doing it."  But then again, that was J. Edgar Hoover. 

How appropriate.