The GOP learned quite a while back that it was more expedient to pay Streisand not to sing.

Is this Bizarro world? Is Hollywood's Barbara Streisand obsessive behavior against the Republicans reminiscent of Republican Senator McCarthy's obsessive behavior toward Hollywood?

Bruchey asked the musical question:

Is Hollywood's Barbara Streisand obsessive behavior against the Republicans reminiscent of Republican Senator McCarthy's obsessive behavior toward Hollywood?

In a word: "No."

Oh, but if she could hold a hearing...

The answer is "no" especially because McCarthy didn't have an obsession with Hollywood. That was the House Unamerican Activities Committee, with such worthies as John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon among its membership.

By the way, HUAC did nail a couple of real-life communist spies (Jack Kennedy snagged one; so did Dick Nixon), but their activities in Hollywood were cut short by efforts by the industry to police itself.

Hollywood did have real problems with this, by the way. There was Stalinist infilitration of most of the town trade unions, and a good deal of Stalin-inspired violence among those unions--blowing up cars, beating people up, breaking arms, etc. There were also a few efforts by some screenwriters to sneak in some minor Stalinist propaganda--though not much of that ever got through.

While it was going on, though, the President of SAG got threatening phone calls, including a promise to throw acid on his face to ruin his career. The FBI had infilitrated communist meetings and heard people attacking him. The LAPD wound up giving him a gun to carry and assigning him a bodyguard. He wasn't the only one who needed such protection.

If you ever watch that old Barbra Streisand puff piece, "The Way We Were," note that they pretend like none of this kind of stuff ever happened. But it did.

Anyway, Hollywood did mostly fight off HUAC and slipped mostly under McCarthy's RADAR. Unfortunately, it did so by blacklisting. The same President of SAG who had been threatened, and who had been instrumental in trying to get HUAC to leave Hollywood alone so Hollywood could handle its own problems, was then mortified to discover that the studio heads were going to be even more crazy than Washington had been. He spent the rest of the decade fighting against the blacklists and trying to get people off the lists in the meantime. He even formed a group with some other well-known actors, including Olivia De Havilland, to end the lists and to exhonerate innocent screenwriters, directors, and actors.

For 1,000 trivia points, name that SAG President.

I'm gonna take a stab at it.

Ronald Reagan

>I see that good old Babs sung the other day...

Sorry, but that's the wrong verb tense. It is correct to say that Babs *sang* the other day.

Babs sings
Babs sang
Babs has sung...

...but probably not for the last time, unfortunately. ;-)

A. Pedant (not A. Babsfan)

I've bee having trouble getting online for the last 24 hours or I would have acknowledged by now that my lovely wife guessed correctly. And no, I did not feed her the answer, I was at work when I posed the question and she at home.

As for the wrong tense on sing/sang/sung -- I stand corrected! I have very little formal training as a writer, so I often make minor mistakes like that.