Posted on 11/22/2011 3:28:24 PM PST by jazusamo
Today marks the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The slain presidents wife, his successor, and the liberal media blamed the murder on Dallas climate of hate. That smear cast a pall on the innocent citizens of that city for decades. I know, because I grew up in the shadow of Big D and in the shadow of Kennedys killing. For decades after Nov. 22, 1963, you could go anywhere in the country, tell anyone you were from Dallas, and if you spent enough time with that person, Kennedys assassination would inevitably come up.
Frank Rich chose to mark the 48th anniversary by smearing Dallas, again, and by extension conservatives of the present. Its a column which should get him ridiculed and fired; no one who is so irresponsible with the hard facts of life has any place in the commentariat.The title gives Richs game away. Its What Killed JFK? not Who Killed JFK? as it should be. A what is much easier to abstract, isolate, and attack than a who who had inconvenient opinions and motivations, and a madness to move.
The cold, hard fact of that day in Dallas is this: Whether Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman or by a conspiracy that included others, Dallas climate had nothing to do with it. Dallas was the scene of the crime but wasnt responsible for it. Lee Harvey Oswald was not a mainstream Dallas man. He would not have been a Tea Partier. Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist. He had defected to the Soviet Union, become disillusioned, and returned. He had tried to travel to Cuba and failed. If hate was Oswalds motive in Kennedys killing, the hate lived in the chest of a man who had failed at life, had rejected the freedoms of his country, and used bullets to write himself into the history books. Lee Harvey Oswald was an America-hating leftist.
Or, alternatively, Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy to stop his Vietnam policy or whatever the Oliver Stones of the world think. You make the call. Either way, Dallas is not collectively guilty of Kennedys death anymore than Washington DC is collectively guilty of Lincolns.
To the extent that his politics are relevant today, Lee Harvey Oswald belongs to the same ideological strain that later gave us Pentagon bomber Bill Ayers. That same strain of politics can be traced through a certain church in Chicago, right to the camps in Oakland, Los Angeles and Wall Street. People who subscribe to this strain of thought blame others for their feelings of powerlessness. They reject American freedom and damn America. They accept some violence as a legitimate political tactic. They despise America and want to bring her down to create a moment in which they can rearrange power to their benefit.
But Im less interested in them at the moment than I am interested in Frank Rich. His column shows that in all the decades since Kennedys murder, the left has never really changed. They blamed Dallas for Kennedys death then, and they blame Sarah Palin and conservatives for the senseless shooting in Tucson this year. The facts of the story change, but the smear stays the same. Frank Rich blames hate for both, but the only hate on display is his own. It blinds him to the fact that Oswald was a man very much of the left, and that the Tucson shooter had no discernible ideology at all. But men of the left such as Rich prefer to assign collective guilt on their political enemies. Without pushing that collective guilt on others, their own lives have no meaning. They cannot convince themselves of their own superiority without an inferior other to hate. And collective guilt is a useful tool to intimidate. There is a reason that Saul Alinsky has found such a receptive audience among the left. Theyre fueled by hate; Alinsky gave them the means of channeling that hate toward useful (to the haters) ends.
Frank Richs hatefulness is killing civil discourse in America. It dishonestly condemned an entire city for generations and turns an innocent campaign map into a murder map. It replaces individual responsibility with collective guilt, and turns what should be a unifying national tragedy into corrosive partisan crossfire.
***Or, alternatively, Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy to stop his Vietnam policy or whatever the Oliver Stones of the world think.***
Already done before Olie Stone came on the scene.
EXECUTIVE ACTION.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070046/
The case connecting Oswald to Officer Tippitt’s murder is flawed?? Ironclad evidence. Four eyewitnesses saw Oswald shoot Tippitt then execute him with a shot to the head as he lay wounded on the ground. Oswald was apprehended with the murder weapon hiding in the Texas Theater. I don’t think there is the slightest doubt about his guilt in killing Tippitt; never heard of any other theory.
Oh, but hate did kill Kennedy. The Democrats hated the fact that JFK was having an affair with a communist spy and they hated what was going to happen to the Democrat party when this came out. The Democrats hate losing.
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