Posted on 11/14/2013 9:22:03 PM PST by rktman
As the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy approaches, JFK remains a mythical figure for left-liberals. But they’re wrong to call him the standard bearer of their principles, because though Kennedy had some liberal characteristics he would hardly recognize the Democratic Party as it is currently constructed. Here are five liberal myths about the 35th president.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
what is the date for release of the archive
The election of JFK ended America as we knew it, immigration, Vietnam, the 1960s, federal unions, the creation of all things “Kennedy”, including a half century of his brother, the almost disappearance of the second amendment, LBJ, Jackie, an entire industry focused on myth making and historical revisionism.
That’s an accurate list.
Those of us old enough to remember Eisenhower’s America remember a different world.
His brother Ted lived until quite recently and recognized pretty much everything on the political landscape that is here today. Very likely if JFK were alive today he would be much like Ted in accepting and aiding the current trends in the dim party. To compare the political landscape of now to when JFK was alive and conclude JFK would be appalled is wishful thinking. It is similar to knowing way back when Martin Luther King once voted Republican and then assuming if he were alive today he would still be a Republican. He would be almost certainly where his current fellow blacks are politically, slaves to the dim machine.
An older al (not so) sharpton? Well, old al (not so) sharpton. Which is really BS since this ass clown makes more than I do and I don’t think I’m a pos. I could be wrong.
John Kennedy’s closet was full of skeletons. All his electoral prospects rode on the media remaining resolutely incurious. If he were president in our time, he would do whatever he needed to ensure the media’s support.
Kennedy also had the President of our South Vietnam ally assassinated. Nice guy.
A "conservative" by 2013 standards, but he would have become a bitter has-been leftist kook like Ted.
To see what Kennedy would have become, look at RFK.
At least as anti-commie as his brother, Roy Cohn's right hand man, and good friends with Nixon.
A mere 4 years after his brother was killed, he went "full-retard" left wing.
JFK was only a great president because he was assassinated. Other then that he didn’t have time to prove himself.
Indeed—According to my Dad, the Kennedy presidency was pretty much a bust.
Part of the reason for his ill-fated trip to Dallas was to shore up support for the 1964 campaign.
Getting plugged was the best thing that ever happened to him as he was then cast as a martyr.
“Those of us old enough to remember Eisenhower’s America remember a different world.”
Probably the very late 50’s, a classmate of mine said when the wind up dolls were popular: “I just got the Eisenhower doll, wind it up and it does nothing”.
Had I known then what I know today, I would have countered with: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
This fellow’s family took pride in keeping him in school until the Vietnam war was over. He is currently a professor.
Those on our side who are trying to turn JFK into a conservative icon are also myth-makers.
Hd Richard Nixon had picked Barry Goldwater or Rep. Walter Judd (R-Minn.)--a solid conservative and a compelling orator--as his running mate instead of the RINO Henry Cabot Lodge, had he focused his campaign on key states instead of campaigning in all 50, and had he turned down the televised debates, we would be living in a different world today.
I remember quite fondly the Eisenhower years. They seem to be not just another world but another galaxy. Even with all of the electronic widgetry that we now have, I'm sure as hell glad that I'm not a child growing up today.
“Probably the very late 50’s, a classmate of mine said when the wind up dolls were popular: “I just got the Eisenhower doll, wind it up and it does nothing”.”
Yeah, that sort of insult was popular with liberals who would later claim Reagan was an amiable dunce as defeated them politically.
Both men were content to let such fools underestimate them.
There’s a good book on Eisenhower “The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader” that describes how Ike asserted control behind the scenes and used his image of doing nothing to his advantage.
Eisenhower likely perfected this ability when he corralled some of the strongest egos in the world as Supreme Allied Commander Europe and got them to fight the Nazis instead of each other.
No matter how much the left wants to pretend otherwise, they are only "anti-war" when Republicans are in power, and have gotten us into all kinds of unnecessary wars and overseas conflicts when their side is in power (the crowning example being JFK's ardently liberal successor, LBJ). JFK may not have escalated the war after the Gulf of Tonkin, but he caused the problem in the first place. Along with the Bay of Pigs (which the left will tell was an Eisenhower plan, as if JFK bears no responsibility of royally screwing up its execution), JFK's foreign policy record was pretty bad and far from the idealized peacenik mantle that his brother Bobby later ran on for political purposes.
JFK as a civil-rights pioneer is also greatly exaggerated. He was certainly much better on civil rights that his racist southern RAT contemporaries, but much of JFK's talk about civil rights was just that, talk. A lot of the Republicans from that era went much further in supporting equal rights for minorities, but of course the liberal media will never give them any credit, and has completely eliminated them from the history books to heap praise on Kennedy for lip service.
I would DISAGREE with examples #1 ( "JFK was a Ted Kennedy clone" ), #3 ( "JFK would be at home in today’s secularist Democratic Party" ), and #4 ( "JFK would have loved today’s ever-burgeoning state" ) being "myths". I think they are fairly accurate.
In the case of example #1, it's true JFK was not a "Ted Kennedy liberal" from 1960-1963, but neither was Ted Kennedy himself at that time. Ted Kennedy and the rest of the Kennedy family moved further left as the DemonRat party moved further left, and had no trouble embracing all kinds of awful things that were unthinkable in 1960. The longer they lived, the further left they got. To think JFK would have been the lone Kennedy NOT to move leftward if he had lived, and that he would have been appalled by "today's Democrats" if he had lived, amounts to nothing more than wishful thinking. It certainly doesn't reflect JFK's own pattern, which was to endear himself to whatever smiley political position would get him in power and get the liberal media to fawn over him.
In the case of example #3, I think "today's secularian Democrat Party" would be a natural fit for JFK. He was pretty much a CINO (Catholic In Name Only) when he was alive, and didn't give a hoot what the Pope preached, nor even attend church at Washington's Catholic cathedral during the entire time he was President. Issues like abortion and gay marriage were unthinkable in 1960, but JFK certainly was headed that direction and openly disagreed with the Catholic Church's teachings on social issues like birth control and parochial schools. Certainly he own "personal" social behavior was appalling and would fit right in with "today's Democrats", where being a sleazebag that sleeps around frivolously and using marriage for photo-ops gets you bonus points from the left. Certainly, JFK gave lip service about the importance of religion and claimed to be a faithful Christian who believed in Jesus, but the same can be said of Barack Obama. In both cases, it means nothing.
In the case of example of #4, I absolutely think JFK would have loved today’s ever-burgeoning state. If he was still alive and well today at age 96, I have no doubt that JFK would be defending socialist crap like Obamacare. In fact, when it comes to the "ever-burgeoning state", this is an example where JFK wouldn't even need to "evolve" from where he was in the 60s. JFK ran his entire campaign around how wonderful it was that Woodrow Wilson and FDR had passed all their socialist crap over the objections of the mean, nasty, heartless Republicans, and JFK said he was proud to have supported those efforts and his only regret was the Dems weren't able to go far enough, so he would continue further with his "New Frontier" program. (which eventually "evolved" into LBJ's "Great Society) Kennedy was fully supportive of the left's pet issues like universal health care, free education for all, open borders and free goodies for all illegals, letting labor unions control all the workers, etc., etc. And yes, "liberal" in 1960 had a similar meaning in the U.S. to what it means today. By that time, it no longer reflected the European definition of being for free markets and capitalism. American "liberals" of the 1960s were people that embraced new federal laws and regulations for "progress" and were generous in using taxpayers money to hand out government goodies to everyone. JFK certainly fit into that mold and embraced it. The Liberal Party of New York (to whom JFK was giving the speech extolling the virtues of liberalism) was certainly NOT the conservative party back then.
Well done, BB. I can’t disagree with anything you wrote.
I like to believe there’s a special section in Hell, where the Stalins, Pots, Maos and Hitlers reside that also has it’s own area for the Kennedys.
I also like to believe even Satan doesn’t feed or water them too often...
The only praise I’ll put on JFK is that he served honorably in WWII.
And It’s pretty clear to me that he wasn’t a communist son of a b*tch like some many of today’s Democrat party.
Other than that... nuff said. He’s their martyr. And the ironic thing is, LBJ may have been behind the assassination (Roger Stone’s new book http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/11/13/did-lbj-kill-kennedy-and-why-it-matters).
The more I listened to Stone in a recent interview, the more sense it made to me.
Who stood the most to gain if JFK died? LBJ. Interesting thing. I’ll be picking up the book.
Yup. Much better skipper than the more recent patrol boat skipper who served in VN in case you forgot. Asshat should have gotten a dishonorable.
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