As Freddie Mercury once said, "Another one bites the dust." One more of the fabled "Hollywood Ten," Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, has died at age 88.

The Ten, of course, were a group of prominent entertainment figures, who were blacklisted in the 1950's for refusing to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Most of them became much more famous as victims than they would have been within their chosen careers, but the hype on both fronts was so great, that it is impossible to separate the two.

Polonsky, especially, was vocal earlier this year when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it was planning to give a lifetime achievement award to Elia Kazan.

As you might recall, Kazan committed the unpardonable sin of naming names to the HUAC, including Polonsky's. Moreover, he took out an ad in the New York Times, soon after testifying, calling Communism a "dangerous and alien conspiracy." Never mind that everything he said was true. Truth is no defense under the stifling climate of political correctness, then OR now.

Even before the revelations that came out after the Soviet Union fell, including the famous Venona files, it was clear to anyone who had eyes to see, and a brain to reason, that the days of Communism as a worker's paradise never existed. I suppose it was possible, if you were extremely stupid and misguided, to ignore all of Stalin's crimes, from the 1930's on. As it is, to state that the Nazis were amateurs at human destruction, compared to the Communists, is still likely to get you shunned by the arts and croissant crowd.

In 1956, when Khrushchev correctly re-assessed Stalin as a maniacal mass murderer, the cat was most definitely out of the bag. Feeling betrayed and confused, members left the Communist Party-USA (CP-USA) like rats from a sinking ship. There's just one problem. Polonsky and his ilk remained then, and to this very day, unrepentant.

Even though Venona covered less than two years of intercepted communications, there was more than enough material to prove the guilt, and the depth of involvement, of such "martyrs" as Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. In addition, it established the KGB and/or party affiliations of people who consistently denied it, including journalist Izzie Stone, and the Eleanor Roosevelt/Ed Murrow/Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. championed State Department official, Laurence Duggan.

One can hardly exaggerate the damage that these operatives did to the United States and the World. Armed with the bomb, courtesy of Rosenberg et al., Stalin could pursue a far more aggressive policy in Europe and Asia. If you have a relative who died in the Korean war, you can thank Julius Rosenberg.

And yet, the gliterati will have none of it. Indeed, their clinging to long defunct Left/Liberal mythology is more pathetic than anything else. To the apologists for all those "well meaning if misguided" members of the CP-USA, I say this: There is no record, whatsoever, of any American Communist ever refusing a request to spy and reporting it to law enforcement, or just plain denouncing it. If the majority of members were not spying, they could not all be ignorant of their comrades who were.

That the Ten could develop a clever strategy in attacking their accuser--as also was employed by O. J. Simpson--does not remove one iota of their collective guilt. That Joe McCarthy's excesses fueled that fire is a pity, but as Andrew Sullivan, former editor of the New Republic noted, "Mc Carthy, for all his unpardonable excesses, was mainly right about the extent of communist influence." Other liberals who hold this viewpoint include Nicholas von Hoffman and Gary Wills.

Perhaps it is fitting that Polonsky was named after that warm-hearted paragon of tolerance (especially to Southerners) and master of duplicity--Abraham Lincoln. Both men will have their cult: history, logic, and right reason notwithstanding.