So according to Mr Ryan the war on terror is a phoney campaign being used to attack free speech in the US. Thousands have died at the hands of terrorists and this self-righteous little drip tries to tell us that there is no war. Moreover, this buffoon cannot even see that he has contradicted himself. If free speech is under attack how come Clooney and his fellow lefties have not been shut up? How come they haven’t been threatened with arrest? How is it they can slime their country with impunity?

The truth, as if Ryan cared, is that Clooney’s film is a despicable piece of leftwing disinformation. In plain English, Clooney is a liar, and the politically bigoted likes of Ryan are no better.

Let’s start with Ed Murrow whose hands are far from clean, as we shall soon see. McCarthy fingered Murrow’s mate Laurence Duggan as a Stalinist agent. This was too much for Murrow. He immediately began an investigation into his friends activities. No, wait. I got that wrong. Murrow immediately set about defending his little mate by going on the air in In December 1948 to denounce the evil Joe McCarthy who forced poor old Larry Duggan to defenestrate himself.

Although these scenes would have made for excellent drama Clooney saw fit not to include them in his movie. Now why would that be, Mr Ryan? Because it has been indisputably proven by the Venona Papers that McCarthy was spot on about Duggan (code names Frank, Sherwood and Prince) being a traitor with blood on his hands. In 1954 Saint Ed did a TV hatchet job on McCarthy that became notorious for its viciousness. So some odd reason, Murrow and his media pals couldn’t find the time to investigate Stalinists.

The blindness of Clooney’s admirers is emphasised by the fact that none of them apparently cottoned to the failure of his film to provide the name of a single person that was done in by McCarthy. The story of Lt. Milo Radulovich strongly suggests that Clooney knew he was firing blanks.

To hear Clooney’s political fans tell it, the dramatisation of Murrow publicising the case of Radulovich is proof positive that individuals suffered from the so-called McCarthyist purge. But Radulovich, who was being threatened with a discharge from the Air Force Reserve because a couple of his relatives were suspected reds, had never been mentioned by McCarthy. Radulovich was only dragged into the picture because Clooney couldn’t find any bodies — apart from Annie Lee Moss’s

The case of Moss demonstrates just how far Clooney is prepared to go in bending the truth. Moss was exposed as member of the Communist Party, information that the FBI had in its possession. So what was such an obvious security risk doing in the Code Room of the Pentagon? Murrow witlessly responded by arguing that the Moss case was proof of McCarthy’s reckless behaviour!

Clooney naturally concurs with Murrow’s fatuous assessment, at least on celluloid. It turns out that he confessed in an interview (The Salon Interview: George Clooney, 16 September 2005) that actors on the set pointed out to him that Moss was in fact a Communist Party member and that McCarthy right. Nevertheless, Clooney still shamelessly insinuated that McCarthy smeared Moss. In my book this makes Clooney a vicious liar. No wonder the lefty Ryan loves him.

Clooney’s movie also showed Morrow ripping into McCarthy for questioning the patriotism of the ACLU. What Clooney left out is that McCarthy was referring to the 1930s when the organisation had been rightly viewed government agencies as a Soviet front. (Incidentally, ACLU founder Roger Baldwin was an admitted communist and admirer of Stalin’s Russia). I think it’s clear that in attacking McCarthy over his ACLU comment Murrow was being just as dishonest as Clooney is today.

One well and tried way of deceiving a film audience is to ignore the subject’s context. In this case that was communist expansion and spying. The “Venona Papers”, decrypted Soviet messages to their agents, reveal just how comprehensive and sophisticated the Soviet intelligence assault on the US really was.

In addition there was the fall of the Iron Curtain followed by show trials in Eastern Europe, civil war in Greece, the threat to Turkey, the fall of China to the communists and the Korean War. Clooney’s only response to this is to admit that Soviet spying was not the issue but “whether they were allowed to face their accuser or not”. Someone should remind this idiot that those accused of spying were in fact allowed to face their accusers. He had evidently never heard of the Hiss and Rosenberg trials.

The second and very important point is that when talking of security risks McCarthy did not want to name names in case a mistake was made, though he was perfectly prepared to discuss the matter in a closed-committee hearing. It was the Democrats who insisted on naming people, not that Ryan would know that.

Despite any excesses on McCarthy’s part the release of the Venona Papers vindicated him. As for the sort of verbal abuse that appals the so civil Mr Ryan, I suggest he do a little research into what McCarthy had to put up with from Democrats and their pals in the media. We are getting the same vile stuff today with respect to President Bush and Prime Minister Howard. And some of the worst offenders are Ryan’s colleagues.

Even worse, Democrats are trying to use the Federal Election Commission to censor conservative blogs with the help of, to put it charitably, clueless judges like Colleen Kollar-Kotelly who cannot grasp the meaning of “Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech”, so reads the First Amendment to the US Constitution. But to lefties like Ryan and Clooney, freedom speech is meant to be highly selective. Clooney made this clear when he said he preferred it when there used to be only “three networks ... basically supplying the same information”.

Meanwhile, in Ryan’s home state of Victoria two Christian pastors are having their right to free speech trampled on by Muslim fanatics with the aid of a bunch of cowardly two-faced government Stalinists. Being a lefty, the liberty-loving Ryan is completely blind to the irony of the situation.

Readers who have not seen Goodnight, and Good Luck might be wondering who played McCarthy. He played himself. Fearful that having someone portray McCarthy might spoil the film’s mendacious theme the very courageous Clooney relied on stock footage.

Next week I shall steel myself to deal with Mr Ryan’s adoring treatment of the appalling The Constant Gardener.

The following articles will show just how respectful of free speech and the rights of others Mr Ryan’s progressive Hollywood heroes really are.

What the Kazan scandal tells us about the Hollywood left and President Bush

Elia Kazan: the Iraq war and the Hollywood left

Elia Kazan is dead but his leftwing critics won’t let go

Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor

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