Modern-day McCarthy: Beck uses flimsy evidence to attack AFL-CIO's Trumka as “in bed with” Communists

Monday on his Fox News show, Glenn Beck launched an attack on the AFL-CIO and its president, Richard Trumka, claiming that the “Communist Party USA is admitting to the party's working relationship with Richard Trumka ... and the AFL-CIO.” Beck reprised his attack this morning on Fox & Friends, during a rant about Democrats being “controlled by radicals and revolutionaries” as well as “communists”:

BECK: Yesterday, AFL-CIO -- the Communist Party leader -- for the Communist Party USA -- talked about how they are coordinating with Richard Trumka and the AFL-CIO. If you're in the unions, do you realize that your money, your union dues, are going to stand with the communists and the revolutionaries in this country.

Beck seems to have based his attack on a November 13 post on a right-wing blog claiming that “Communist Party USA Boasts Working Relationship with AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka” and that Scott Marshall, CPUSA's labor commission chairman, “emphasized their direct working relationship” with Trumka.

What's the evidence that Beck provides? A podcast in which Marshall says (emphasis added):

MARSHALL: The continuing independence of the labor movement was heightened tremendously by this election and in very specific ways, not just in general. Not only did the campaigning take place from union halls et cetera, et cetera, but this time, as Trumka told us when he was in Chicago, they began with the nuts and bolts building independent labor campaign organizations in five key cities around the country, of which Chicago was one. I think the question of how we -- the narrative on jobs, the narrative on the economic crisis is something that needs a lot of work. And I'll tell you, working in an area that -- where a Democrat had won and went back Republican, although it has a high union density, the question that I think that really blew us away was the question of the deficit. We heard that over and over again. People are unclear, they are scared of this deficit thing. Good, working class people don't understand that, and there was no good narrative.

And that's it. All of Beck's evidence for the claim that Trumka and the AFL-CIO have a “direct working relationship” and are “coordinating” with the Communist Party USA is Marshall's vague comment that “Trumka told us” about labor campaign organizations being formed around the country.

Aside from the fact that it's entirely unclear who Marshall is referring to when he says “us,” nothing in his comment details any kind of “working relationship” or “coordinating” between Trumka and CPUSA.

This is weak, even for Beck.