Bravo to the Republican senator who stood tall in the chamber and assailed a Republican demagogue for his disgraceful reliance on “the Four Horsemen of Calumny - Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.” Bravo to the senator for insisting, with virtually no support from cowered colleagues, that “it’s high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some soul-searching, for us to weigh our consciences.”I’m referring, of course, to Margaret Chase Smith.It’s great that Jeff Flake stood up to Donald Trump’s serial lies and dangerous toxicity, but, lest we forget our history (and too often, we don’t even know it), Flake’s act was not unprecedented. Sixty-seven years ago Chase was a junior senator from Maine, the only member of her gender, and unlike virtually everyone around her, she’d already had enough of colleague Joseph McCarthy.At that point, in June 1950, McCarthy had only been on the national scene for a few months, smearing people as “Communists” and “fellow travelers,” destroying innocents’ reputations, forcing them from their jobs, prompting a number to commit suicide.