Posted on 11/23/2013 6:50:11 AM PST by GrootheWanderer
When we’re evaluating our 35th president’s conservative credentials, it ought to matter that his administration conducted a systematic effort to silence the Right. In fact, on two of the Tea Partiers’ betes noires, abuse of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine and politicization of the IRS, the Kennedy administration practically wrote the playbook.
A key document is the 1961 “Reuther Memorandum,” a 24-page strategy memo commissioned by Bobby Kennedy and drafted by United Auto Workers leaders Walter and Victor Reuther with liberal attorney Joseph Rauh. It called for “deliberate Administration policies and programs to contain the radical right from further expansion and in the long run to reduce it to its historic role of the impotent lunatic fringe.”
The Reuther Memorandum took a capacious view of “the radical right,” using the term broadly enough to include Senator Barry Goldwater and groups like the Volker Fund, which provided support to Ludwig Von Mises, Friedrich Hayek.
“Prompt revocation” of tax-exempt status “in a few cases might scare off a substantial part of the big money now flowing into these tax exempt organizations,” the Reuthers argued. Likewise, the Federal Communications Commission should combat “free [air] time for the radical right” by taking “measures to encourage stations to assign comparable time for an opposing point of view on a free basis.”
The Kennedy Team forged new frontiers in what Nixon White House counsel John Dean later called “the use of the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” As historian John A. Andrew III documents in his 2002 book Power to Destroy: The Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon, the Kennedy White House was “a driving force” behind the IRS’s Ideological Organizations Project, a “far-reaching effort to undercut the power of the right” with politically motivated audits and challenges to tax-exempt status.
(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanconservative.com ...
If Jack were alive today, he’d be Bill Clinton. Except that Jack did Marilyn and Clinton did a blue dress.
Kennedy was more conservative than Clinton. Clinton would never have approved of a Bay Of Pigs. And remember Bobby Kenney was an aide to Joe McCarthy. Can you imagine Slick Willy every doing something like that? In those days a great many Dems, like my father, were strong anti-communists. Not so today. While Kennedy was no conservative as it is now defined, he was not really close to Clinton ideologically speaking. The only think they really had in common was lascivious behavior.
I'll keep that in mind as I reflect on Kennedy's decision not to support the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
Context. Look at his brothers. Jack would have been just the same: what was liberal then is now all out socialist.
On the Bay of Pigs, he pulled air support at the last minute—that’s what caused the disaster.
Democrats in 1963 were American proud for the most part. Not today. Democrats were not liberal like today.....no gay marriage or abortion in those days. I would say that Democrats in the 1960 were like Republicans today. I don’t know what conservatives in the 1960’s were called. The country probably would be shocked if those in 1960 saw America today.
Today’s Democrat Party resembles Lee Harvey Oswald more than it does JFK. They dabble in communist ideology and demand equality for all but more equality for themselves. If they don’t get what they want by legitimate means, they will break any law or tell any lie to get what they demand. And, most of all, they will deny who they truly are to themselves and anyone else even as they go about spreading their evil.
I think in the "quantity" department, JFK would make Bubba look like a school boy. And perhaps the "quality" department too.
JFK was no conservative but in general his positions were to the right of every democrat and half the republicans in Washington today.
Of course that really doesn’t require much of a swing to the right these days.
But today a man with his overall political stance would not even be allowed in the door at a democrat nomanating convention.
And he would be booed at and thrown off the stage if he did manage to get in and say:
“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
Good job Gene Healy (not). JFK is still a hero to many Catholics and working-class Americans. So conservatives could make a play for those folks, like Reagan did, by emphasizing the things that JFK did right (lowering taxes, etc.).
But instead Healy chose to just write another "he's not one of us" article. I'm not saying Healy is wrong on his facts, or anything like that.
What I am saying is that conservatives no longer play it smart. And that's why we are going to be a minority party from now on.
So you’re saying we have to deny the truth in order to win?
Good point. And with a bad back. No wonder he had to wear a brace. “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”
You may be right about becoming what his brothers became, but that’s the wrong context IMO. Compare him to modern Democrats, and he IS conservative. Compare him to some modern Republicans, and he’s right in line. Compare him to the Tea Party or Reagan base, and he’s certainly to the left.
And yes, he was all about Kennedy more than anything else, which is comparable to so many….
Kennedy not only was not a conservative on the issues, as Healy pointed out in the excerpt I posted, he actively used the IRS and other government agencies to try to silence conservative groups and individuals.
My late grandparents were democratic voters who lived then but were also patriotic, Bible believing church going Christians who were pro 2nd-amendment and detested communism and the hippy movement. I believe they’re in Heaven now but to use an old cliché, they would “be turning in their graves” to see what America and the democratic party have turned into today.
Exactly.
JFK on tax cuts August 13, 1962
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEdXrfIMdiU
No democratic politician would be allowed to espouse such a position today.
“poorly defined anti-communism”
I would say it was more defined that not. He forced MLK to purge his staff of communists before he would parlay with him.
When I was writing my message (#10), that was in the back of my mind. And so I thought twice before hitting the Post button.
But then I looked at it this way. Reagan referenced JFK a lot. Reagan knew what he was doing. He knew that JFK had some good ideas, and those good ideas should be emphasized. The result was that many democrats became Reagan democrats, and some of those Reagan democrats became Reagan republicans.
Exactly. It’s a matter of context and comparison. Compared to Obama, Pelosi, Reid, etc., JFK was to the right of them as were most Democrats of the 1960-1963 time period.
In fact, the following was put in the Congressional record by a democrat congressman back in 1963-
http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm
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