George Will: When liberals became scolds

The Washington Post ^ | October 9, 2013 | George Will

[2ndDivisionVet]

“Ex-Marine Asks Soviet Citizenship”

— Washington Post headline,

Nov. 1, 1959

(concerning Lee Harvey Oswald)

“He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It’s — it had to be some silly little Communist.”

— Jacqueline Kennedy,

Nov. 22, 1963

She thought it robbed his death of any meaning. But a meaning would be quickly manufactured to serve a new politics. First, however, an inconvenient fact — Oswald — had to be expunged from the story. So, just 24 months after the assassination, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Kennedys’ kept historian, published a thousand-page history of the thousand-day presidency without mentioning the assassin.

The transformation of a murder by a marginal man into a killing by a sick culture began instantly — before Kennedy was buried. The afternoon of the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy’s “martyrdom” to “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American character,” noting especially “the violence of the extremists on the right.”

Never mind that adjacent to Reston’s article was a Times report on Oswald’s Communist convictions and associations. A Soviet spokesman, too, assigned “moral responsibility” for Kennedy’s death to “Barry Goldwater and other extremists on the right.”

Three days after the assassination, a Times editorial, “Spiral of Hate,” identified Kennedy’s killer as a “spirit(continued0

[Poincare]

I’m no Will fan, but this piece is worth reading and rumination upon.

[2ndDivisionVet]

Me either, he seems a trained poodle conservative, like David Brooks, Kathleen Parker and Scarborough (and Krauthammer half the time) but once in a while....

[VerySadAmerican]

What are kids being taught about this in school these days? That Oswald started the Tea Party, was a racist and hated gays?

[2ndDivisionVet]

Don’t give them any ideas, they read threads here, believe it or not.

[DustyMoment]

The irony is delicious. The leftists have veered so far left since JFK that, by today’s standards, Kennedy would be a Republican!!

And, most Dems don’t like to talk about JFK anymore BECAUSE he would be a Republican by today’s standards!!

This is how far left the dems have dragged us and how far left the ‘Pubbies have allowed themselves to BE dragged so they will still be invited to the posh Georgetown parties!!

[Cen-Tejas]

...........sigh, I don’t like George Will, I don’t like the Kennedy’s and I don’t like the article and could not get into it at all. So, I gave up. Goodnight! Jeez!

[laplata]

You sure wasted energy to tell us that.

[detective]

“He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It’s — it had to be some silly little Communist.” — Jacqueline Kennedy

The MSM and Democrat Party have created a mythical John Kennedy. He was not only portrayed as far more capable than he actually was but he has also been portrayed as a champion of Civil Rights and all liberal causes. JFK is also portrayed as being like Abraham Lincoln when in fact they were very different.

Lee Harvey Oswald is portrayed as everything from a lone nut to a CIA agent to a right wing conspirator.

In fact, Oswald was a Communist and JFK was the last anti-Communist Democrat. The Kennedys distrusted Martin Luther King and his Communist connections.

JFK's greatest damage to the country was he let a group of leftist elitists(the self described “Best and the Brightest”) get control of the government, the MSM and the universities. The result has been one disaster after another.

A good description of these events is the Chapter “America's Suicide Attempt” in Modern Times by historian Paul Johnson.

[Blackirish]

I know if it’s not Ted Cruz or Sarah Palin there’re rino traitors.

[gattaca]

I heard Rush talking about this last week. Interesting.

[laconic]

I remember how the media tarred Dallas as the city of hate for decades afterward. Somehow, other cities where assassinations or attempted assassinations took place Los Angeles (RFK), Memphis (MLK), Milwaukee (George Wallace) and DC (Ronald Reagan) escaped this moniker and their residents weren’t blamed for the actions of sole leftists and lunatics— I believe it had everything to do with politics.

[MARTIAL MONK]

Laurel, Maryland

[Sherman Logan]

Woody Allen and JFK. Back when he was funny.

http://dvp-potpourri.blogspot.com/2011/07/woody-allen-on-jfk-assassination.html

[laconic]

Right you are; thanks! I guess the Milwaukee connection was because I remembered that is where the attempted assassin Arthur Bremer was from.

[SC_Pete]

George used to be a genuine, insightful conservative intellectual. He’s not worth my time now. Unfortunately, he’s attended too many Inside the Beltway cocktail parties in the last 30 years.

[Sirius Lee]

Kennedy’s posthumous reputation — Americans often place him, absurdly, atop the presidential rankings — reflects regrets about might-have-beens. To reread Robert Frost’s banal poem written for Kennedy’s inauguration (“A golden age of poetry and power of which this noonday’s the beginning hour”) is to wince at its clunky attempt to conjure an Augustan age from the melding of politics and celebrity that the Kennedys used to pioneer the presidency-as-entertainment.

I'm not a big fan of Will but it was a good article. Praise when it's deserved.

[Oratam]

bump for late November

[Ditto]

Good read.

I'd add to this thesis that in the post-Vietnam period, conventional 'Liberals' were chased out of the Democrat party and replaced by hard line Leftists --- people far closer the Lee Harvey Oswald's political ideology than JFKs ideology.