If you've been following recent statements by Rep. Allen West (R-FL) to the effect that "there are 78 to 81" socialists in the U.S. House, and that President Obama is a "low-level socialist agitator," you may be getting a strange feeling of deja vú. West's remarks seem to be an intentional callback to the life and career of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), the most infamous investigator of alleged socialism in congressional history--and a man whose image has been, in the eyes of the Tea Party movement, completely rehabilitated over the past ten years.

Ann Coulter was the first major Republican pundit to advocate McCarthyism in the public sphere, arguing in 2003 that:

[During the McCarthy era], half the country realized liberals were lying. But after a half century of liberal myth-making, even the disgorging of Soviet and American archives half a century later could not overcome their lies. In 1995, the U.S. government released its cache of Soviet cables that had been decoded during the Cold War in a top-secret undertaking known as the Venona Project. The cables proved the overwhelming truth of McCarthy's charges. Naturally, therefore, the release of decrypted Soviet cables was barely mentioned by the New York Times. It might have detracted from stories of proud and unbowed victims of "McCarthyism." They were not so innocent after all, it turns out.

These two points have formed the basis of McCarthy's rehabilitation, so it makes sense to examine them separately:

• "half the country realized liberals were lying": False. This does not line up with McCarthy's contemporaneous 35% approval rating.
• "The cables proved the overwhelming truth of McCarthy's charges": False. While the Venona cables do point to Soviet attempts to infiltrate the U.S. government, they do not reinforce the majority of McCarthy's accusations.

What made McCarthy unique was not that he believed there were Soviet spies in the United States; it was that he baselessly accused a vast number of individual Americans of being Soviet spies, and did so for his own political gain. The effects on his political career were devastating, and the effects on his legacy--despite recent efforts to rehabilitate his image--are likely to endure. Rep. West, and others who find the general spirit of his political career inspiring, should not be so eager to follow in his footsteps.

Related Timeline: History of McCarthyism

Before the murder of Trayvon Martin and subsequent police coverup rightly became the most-covered news story of 2012, conservative bloggers criticized Barack Obama for his history of supporting Derrick Bell two decades ago, when Harvard came under fire for a lack of diversity in its hiring practices.

The idea that got Bell in trouble was the idea that racism has been a permanent part of American culture--and that it is unlikely to disappear overnight. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the persistence of segregation. Justice Thurgood Marshall's words in 1991 remain true today:

Whether this 'vestige' of state-sponsored segregation will persist cannot simply be ignored at the point where a district court is contemplating the dissolution of a desegregation decree. In a district with a history of state-sponsored school segregation, racial separation, in my view, remains inherently unequal.

You've probably been following the Rush Limbaugh misogyny scandal, and you've probably also seen at least a link to the viral video calling for the capture of Ugandan terrorist and child-killer Joseph Kony. But did you know these two stories are connected?

Limbaugh is Kony's most vocal supporter in the United States, describing Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) as "Christian, fighting Muslims in Sudan" and has accused Obama of complicity in anti-Christian genocide for attempting to use U.S. forces in an effort to assist with Kony's capture.

This is the guy from whom none of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates want to distance themselves--and that's a problem for U.S. human rights policy.

Related: History of the Tea Party Movement

As I was writing a definition of human rights, I remembered a conversation I'd had with several Indonesian human rights activists who asked, understandably, why the U.S. human rights debate so seldom seemed to actually involve the phrase "human rights." If someone is beaten by a police officer, or their free speech rights are restricted, we tend to say that their civil rights or civil liberties are being violated. We don't tend to say that their human rights are being violated.

One exception is when we encounter an issue from America's past, where our culture tells us - correctly or otherwise - that the controversy belongs to another place or another era. It would be strange to talk about slavery as a civil rights or civil liberties issue today, for example, because it is no longer under debate in the United States. Our country has accepted that slavery, at least when it is explicitly and uncontroversially agreed-upon as such, is a very bad thing. For this reason, we see it as an external problem - which makes it a human rights controversy rather than a civil liberties controversy.

As a corollary, issues that are provincial do not adapt as easily to the language of human rights. When we're talking about a specific cultural context, as we are when we discuss Muslim-American civil liberties or the civil liberties implications of the Tea Party movement, or the specific U.S. incarnation of the right to die movement, we are not talking about issues that rise to the level of scope that we would tend to associate with the phrase "human rights."

Neither of these words are especially well-established. Just asserting that there are human rights, without having a shared explanation regarding where they come from, can be controversial. And it should come as no surprise to any of us that talking about civil liberties in this political climate can sometimes provoke a hostile response, even in a country that purportedly treasures them.

I can't easily answer my Indonesian friends' question. I'm not completely satisfied with the answer I gave them at the time, but it's still the best answer I have.