What Shirek supported – and I’m sure there is more complicated story behind this – was Abu-Jamal’s release. For whatever reasons, I don’t know – so I couldn’t say why anyone did or did not engage that topic in the context.

The red-baiting comment did elicit a reference to McCarthy from Rep. Lee. Starting it? Well, I don’t think so, but you’re absolutely free to interpret the dialogue from your own perspective. What struck me as most important is that anyone, even on the right, could view McCarthy as an American hero. He didn’t further the cause of actually investigating people who were involved with soviet espionage/intelligence. Rather, his witchhunt was a method of controlling and silencing any dissent at all – such is neither American nor heroic. I don’t think there is much ambivalence at alll; rather, the tools of McCarthy have simply been picked up, much like the tools of Goebbels.

Well, wasn’t it the left that made the first claim of McCarthyism? Didn’t that start the argument?

From reading the sources you cited, it seems as though Shirek’s connection to Marxism, let alone her support of Communism, is rather tenuous, and it seems like a weak excuse to keep her name off of the post office. Nevertheless, I’d like to think that one can still consider Communism to be unacceptable without being labeled McCarthyist. Note, however, that we’re still having these discussions about Tailgunner Joe decades after the height of the Red Scare; clearly, there’s still some ambivalence about his legacy.

What I found most interesting was that nobody defended Ms. Shirek’s support of Mumia Abu-Jamal, or even tried to.