The key to understanding Haynes Johnson’s deeply flawed book, “The Age of Anxiety” (Harcourt, 609 pages, $26), on the rise and fall of Joe McCarthy, and the anti-communist crusade he pursued, is found on page 460:

Whatever McCarthy’s personal qualities, McCarthyism in one form or another outlives the man. Its impact on our politics, and on the way Americans view their leaders and their government, has been profound. It continues to this day, and we are forced to come to grips with it.

Just in case anybody fails to get the point, on page 461 Mr. Johnson writes:

Yet McCarthy’s Republican Party was far more moderate – even liberal and progressive – than the present Republican Party. Over the decades, a more rigidly ideological Republican Party has emerged, forged by many of the forces that McCarthy unleashed or harnessed.

So hard-wired are Mr. Johnson’s lefty politics that he betrays no sense of irony in using some of the same tactics as “Tail Gunner Joe” in launching his blistering attack on President Bush, his administration, and the horse he rode in on.

Here is the reckless resort to hyperbole: “Out of McCarthyism came the modern conservative movement and the former liberals turned neocons who exercise their greatest intellectual and political influence today.” Here is the half-truth: He compares the minor dustup over the Dixie Chicks – a country music group that used a London concert to blast the Bush Administration’s Iraq policies – with the infamous blacklist of entertainers. The Dixie Chicks may have found themselves shunned by some conservative radio stations, but they didn’t feel the need to leave the country as did scores artists and entertainers during the so-called McCarthy Era. Above all, Mr. Johnson has McCarthy’s tendency to find guilt by association. The whole book is nothing more than a strained effort to indict the Bush Administration and the con temporary Republican Party by associating it with McCarthy. As such, it rates a Paul Krugman Award for Tendentious Achievement (more popularly known as a Krugie).

All that said, Mr. Johnson is not an untalented writer, and he’s shrewd enough to find heroes and villains in both parties. It is not a partisan book so much as a deeply ideological one. And although this should surprise no one who read Mr. Johnson’s relentless attacks on Ronald Reagan’s social and economic policies when he worked for the Washington Post, what is truly breathtaking is the lengths he is willing to go to smear Mr. Bush. It’s another indication, as if we needed one, of how deeply disliked this president is by his critics.

In a way, it is understandable that long-suffering liberals like Mr. Johnson would be drawn to a subject like Joe McCarthy, whose drunken antics and occasionally preposterous claims threatened to make militant anti-communist attitudes morally suspect. It is no coincidence that George Clooney’s new film, which opened this year’s New York Film Festival, is about the showdown between McCarthy and the sainted broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. After all, liberals haven’t had a lot to feel good about lately.

Also, McCarthyism allows people like Messrs. Johnson and Clooney to look at the 1950s without having to dwell on inconvenient figures like Alger Hiss, who really was guilty after all. In a 500-page book, Mr. Johnson only fleetingly mentions the Venona Project, which documented plenty of Soviet espionage and communist treason during the McCarthy Era.

Haynes Johnson cut his professional teeth in the heyday of Big Media. That world, which was in its death throes long before CBS pulled the plug on Dan Rather, was a self-satisfied and self-righteous preserve dominated for the most part by liberal mandarins like Haynes Johnson. These folks are feeling more than a little cranky nowadays, and it shows.

Mr. Willcox is the former editor in chief of Reader’s Digest magazine and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Bush Administration.