Posted on 11/17/2013 1:06:31 PM PST by smoothsailing
Via pretty much everyone in my Twitter feed, I ran across a remarkably silly piece in the New York Times this morning about “Dallas’ Role in Kennedy’s Murder.” It’s peppered with a sort of liberal self-loathing—James McAuley is taking to the newspaper of record to slag his ancestors and demonstrate to his peers that he is not like them no siree bob! as much as grapple with Dallas’ “role” in the assassination—as well as the typical liberal notion that Dallas served as a special cauldron of hate, the toxic brew of which contributed to Kennedy’s killing.
It’s telling that the only time the word “communist” is used in McAuley’s piece is in this sentence:
Those “men of Dallas” — men like my grandfather, oil men and corporate executives, self-made but self-segregated in a white-collar enclave in a decidedly blue-collar state — often loathed the federal government at least as much as, if not more than, they did the Soviet Union or Communist China.
The name “Lee Harvey Oswald” goes entirely unmentioned. As does the name “General Edwin Walker,” an arch-conservative Oswald tried to murder. As does the phrase “Russian defector,” which is what Oswald was. No no. The fact that Kennedy was killed by a communist is not worth mentioning at all; rather, McAuley chooses to pronounce that the people of Dallas hated Kennedy even more than they did “the Soviet Union or Communist China.”
The kind of cognitive dissonance it takes to write something so remarkably foolish long ago lost the power to surprise. James Piereson, in his remarkably smart book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, laid out the myriad ways in which the left has been trying to cope with the killing these last 50 years. Wrote Piereson:
President Kennedy’s assassination stalled the advance of twentieth-century liberalism, then the nation’s reigning public philosophy and, in the opinion of historians at the time, our only genuine public philosophy. It did this in several ways: first, by undermining the confidence of liberals in the future; and second, by changing their perspective from one of possibility and practical reform to one of grief, loss, and frustrated hopes. It also compromised their faith in the nation because many concluded, against all factual evidence, that in some way the nation itself was responsible for President Kennedy’s death. A confident, practical, and forward-looking philosophy, with a heritage of genuine accomplishment, was thus turned into a pessimistic doctrine—and one with a decidedly negative view of American society and its institutions.
McAuley, of course, is just the latest in a long line of writers at the Grey Lady to deflect blame for Kennedy’s murder from the left and try and pin it on the right. Indeed, immediately following the assassination, James Reston penned a remarkably ugly and stupid piece entitled “Why America Weeps: Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation.” Wrote Reston,
The indictment extended beyond the assassin, for something in the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence, had destroyed the highest symbol of law and order. … From the beginning to the end of his administration, he was trying to tamp down the violence of the extremists from the right.
Liberals were so perturbed by the fact that a man of the left had killed Kennedy that they simply waved away the inconvenient truth like so much smoke. It wasn’t left wing ideology that killed our dear prince but the meanies on the right who created a culture in which something so senseless could happen.
You see this attitude not just in news reports but popular culture as well. In his book about a man who goes back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination, 11/22/63, Stephen King compared the city of Dallas to the fictional city of Derry, which some of you will remember as the hate-filled pit that served as the home of the child-eating Pennywise in It. Here’s the protagonist of 11/22/63, deciding that he will move out of Dallas until closer to the assassination:
I could move out from beneath the suffocating shadow I felt over [Dallas]. I could find a place that was smaller and less daunting, a place that didn’t feel so filled with hate and violence. In broad daylight I could tell myself I was imagining those things, but not in the ditch of the morning. There were undoubtedly good people in Dallas, thousands upon thousands of them, the great majority, but that underchord was there, and sometimes it broke out. As it had outside the Desert Rose. Bevvie-from-the-levee had said that In Derry I think the bad times are over. I wasn’t convinced about Derry, and I felt the same way about Dallas, even with its worst day still over three years away.
Simply put, the Kennedy assassination drove the left kind of batty. And it obviously hasn’t stopped doing so 50 years later.
Hell Kennedy is about the only democrat who ever gets any kind words from the right.
The right may not have loved him but he was a whole lot better than the psychopaths the democrat party produces today.
What’d ya make of that theory out there he was killed because he really wanted to get out of Viet Nam, (although there is no proof). Read that a couple of times lately, by Alec Baldwin.
Me, I have always and always will think it was Oswald.
Of course it was Oswald. Kennedy wasn’t far enough left for Oswald.
If Oswald were alive today he’d have the top rated show on MSNBC.
any kind words from the right.
The further we move from 1963, the more I like JFK.
Where Reagan was trained in stand-up, Kennedy was a natural. As much as my family was Anti-Kennedy, the guy would make us laugh.
The guy was no Liberal, in today’s sense of the word.
If he ran today, he would get my vote...
Please Dear Lord, do not let Obama become a martyr.
Nobody else cares.
Stuff like this, though, does get his name in the papers, and I guess that makes him happy.
I, for one, am sick and tired of this orgy of Kennedy crap slobbering all over two weeks before the anniversary of his death.
He was a terrible president and was a terrible husband. Enough already . . . he was barely photogenic and screwed anything that didn’t move. The only thing different from him and most of the latest jackasses we’ve been given in the White House in the last 40 years, is that he served in the military.
The left always ignores the fact that Bobby Kennedy happily joined Joe McCarthy in going after communists.
The left of today would probably treat both brothers about as well as they treat Sarah Palin.
There is simply no evidence, absolutely none of any kind, that anyone other than Oswald acting alone, killed JFK. This hard fact has been proven over and over, yet otherwise logical people, many of them regular posters on this site, believe otherwise. This second fact has allowed conspiracy hacks, from Mark Lane to Oliver Stone, to profit from spreading rumors and outright lies.
Not back then, that is about trying to change the political discussion, the way the liberals sometimes do with Reagan.
Reagan labeled him a Marxist and wrote Nixon asking for permission to campaign for him, to save America from JFK.
Oswald was a commie.
And Sirhan Sirhan, who shot RFK, was an Arab terrorist whose motive was RFK’s support for Israel.
But facts are so inconvenient for leftards.
What revisionist nonsense, about such a depraved man.
Reagan of that era, in a personal letter to the vice-president asked to campaign for the republican and register republican, to counter what Reagan labelled a Marxist, in the letter.
REAGAN:
“”No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote; but a Republican bucking the giveaway trend might re-create some voters who have been staying home.
One last thought - shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx - first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a Government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his ‘State Socialism’ and way before him it was ‘benevolent monarchy.’””
No mention either that JFK was an anti-communist. Democrats today are indistiguishable from communists.
The Piereson book is excellent.
In today's sense of the word he was not.
But he had weak character and and thus led us into trouble during the Cold War.
In general liberals are adolescents. Just look at John Kerry trying to act like an adult in Syria and failing.
They can’t face the fact that a Commie acted alone.
Truman gets some, because at least he dropped the bomb on Japan.
I'm not sure if he could compete. From the few words he spoke on camera
he seemed far more rational than the likes of Chris Matthews or Ed Schultz.
Assassination does great things for a persons reputation.
As far as who had him killed, all I ever heard was LBJ as the culprit.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.