On our page opposite today Andrew Arnett, the son of CNN correspondent Peter Arnett, refutes a scurrilous slander leveled against his father by Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming.

The tactics young Arnett so eloquently describes are reminiscent of the McCarthy era, when thousands of innocent people's lives were ruined for no other reason than that their views differed from those of the self-appointed guardians of orthodoxy. By stubbornly insisting he will never retract what are now known to have been baseless accusations, Simpson has embraced a legacy of intolerance from those years that shames the office he holds.