She who fails to learn from history

Ends up writing for Associated Press, apparently.  

Donna Cassata, in a piece on Congressman Alan West's claim that many Democrats are members of the Communist Party USA--His Story is Bunk is agnostic about that--says;

During the Cold War, McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, claimed that communists and Soviet spies had burrowed their way into the federal government. He never produced the documentation to back up his claims.

In fact, Senator McCarthy, produced in copious quantities, just such evidence on numerous members of the FDR and Truman Administrations, including John Stewart Service, Lauchlin Currie, Sol Adler, Frank Coe, Phillip Jessup, and numerous others (including supposed martyr, Annie Lee Moss, who even George Clooney had to admit McCarthy had the goods on).


Thanks to the Venona Decrypts, access to Soviet archives after the USSR's implosion, and no longer classified FBI files, there is simply no doubt at all that McCarthy knew exactly what he was talking about.  In 2006, Jung Chang's Mao the Unknown Story even confirmed McCarthy's charges about George C. Marshall's blundering into handing China over to the communists by stopping Chiang Kai Shek from defeating Mao's then rag-tag army in 1945.


It would be difficult to find any American politician in history who was more able to produce evidence to back up his assertions than Joseph McCarthy.  Does the truth matter at AP?