[NKP_Vet]

He was also pro-life (appointing pro-life Byron White to the Supreme Court) and would have thought the idea of sodomite "marriage" the dumbest thing he ever heard in his life. And last, but not least, if JFK were alive today and in politics, he would be a Tea Party conservative. He would have absolutely nothing to do with the anti-God, left-wing nutcases that make up the democrat party.

[Flash Bazbeaux]

I just recently mostly read (partly skimmed) a biography of old Joe Kennedy, which was very sympathetic, probably too much so, but it more or less made the point that Joe became a Democrat because the Republicans would not accept him.

[Venturer]

He was also a womanizer who damned near got us all nuked.

[Hardraade]

He was also pro-Adolf Hitler, the scum. JFK is not a good role model for conservatives, no matter how they might want to dig him out of the cellar.

Druggie wh*remonger got himself a little too involved with the mob molls.

[Trapped Behind Enemy Lines]

The Democrat Party has been extremely progressive since 1912.

Etremely statist since 1932.

Extremely radical Left since 1972.

And yes, JFK today would be considered almost a reactionary compared to contemporary Democrats.

[Buckeye McFrog]

His two great causes were blondes and nepotism.

[pgkdan]

Why does anyone want to count this intellectually light weight, morally bankrupt empty suit among our ranks as a conservative?

[nathanbedford]

Kennedy was an oxymoron, a patriot and a fraud, a patrician with appeal as a lunchpail politician, a shining hero who was morally dissolute, a picture of health who was a dying junkie, an orator who offered transcendental vision but who was essentially a cynic.

The iconography of Camelot, after a half-century, has been exposed for the myth it always was. Ironically, it is the myth and not the man which has done so much for the Democrat party as the Democrats have run on the myth in every cycle. It provided cover for one of the most debased politicians in American history, Teddy Kennedy, to survive scandal, indeed even negligent homicide, and cause the Republic untold harm during his long tenure in the United States Senate.

The entire myth was a lie, a lie in the sense of Obama's charisma is a lie, it is a myth served up by elite Democrats to be accepted by rank-and-file Democrats and impressionable but naïve Americans who want to believe in their heroes.

[dfwgator]

Who was more liberal back then, Kennedy or the Rockefeller Republicans?

[ansel12]

JFK was an incompetent president and a liberal, today he would be a more modern version of the liberal that he was in his own day, his being elected killed America.

Democrats wrote a law to replace the American voter.

From unionizing government, to Vietnam, to the 1965 Immigration Act, JFK was the end of us.

“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin. After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”

[Sam Gamgee]

Didn't JFK direct the FBI to spy on non-criminal US citizens, like MLK?

[98ZJ USMC]

He inspired LBJ to push for landmark civil rights laws.

No he did not. The Democrats hijacked CR legislation that they had just been filibustering for purely political reasons. Voting Rights AND Civil Rights legislation were Republican initiatives co-opted by an ascendent left. The legislation was passed with more Republican support than Democrat. The CR narrative that emerged over the years, was a media invention from the same traitorous ba$tards who backstabbed the US military in Vietnam.

[pallmallman]

I like(ed) JFK...the favorite Presidents of my lifetime are Reagan, Eisenhower and JFK. He would have been like a sore thumb to these diseased liberal “statists” of today.

[Lancey Howard]

The Kennedys were scum.

[what's up]

He was also pro-life (appointing pro-life Byron White to the Supreme Court) and would have thought the idea of sodomite "marriage" the dumbest thing he ever heard in his life. And last, but not least, if JFK were alive today and in politics, he would be a Tea Party conservative

Everybody was pro-life back then except for the Margaret Sangers.

And everybody on earth would have laughed in your face if you had mentioned gay marriage so that's no great accomplishment.

JFK would never have been a Tea Partier. He would have moved with his brother Teddy toward pro-abortion policies and embraced gay marriage.

[x]

He inspired LBJ to push for landmark civil rights laws.

Well, maybe his death somehow inspired the country and the Congress to get behind civil rights, but I really don't see JFK as some kind of inspirational "better angel" for LBJ. Give Johnson more credit on this. There are enough other things to fault him with.

He was also pro-life (appointing pro-life Byron White to the Supreme Court) and would have thought the idea of sodomite "marriage" the dumbest thing he ever heard in his life.

Everybody would have felt that way about gay marriage back in 1960 -- maybe even in 1990 or 2000 -- and virtually everybody was pro-life back then.

And last, but not least, if JFK were alive today and in politics, he would be a Tea Party conservative. He would have absolutely nothing to do with the anti-God, left-wing nutcases that make up the democrat party.

You mean his whole family, his staffers, and most of his constituents? More likely he would have followed the rest of his family deep into the liberal camp.

But hypotheticals like this are pointless. What do you mean by "JFK"? A guy born in 1917 that you pick up in 1963 and drop off in 2013? Chances are that guy would need a while to get his bearings and whose to say what he would have thought after that. Or a guy born in 1917 who's still alive now at 96? Either he'd be too out of it now for his opinions to carry much weight, or he would have followed his family's path leftward.

JFK was an interesting case in his own day. He wasn't that liberal or left-wing. But that was in the far less ideological era dominated by Eisenhower, before all the upheaval that came later in the 1960s and 1970s. I don't see Kennedy being especially independent minded or strong enough to resist that leftward current. But that's my own unprovable hypothetical.

[NCLaw441]

The (incorrect) assumption is that JFK and other politicians of yesteryear would hold their same positions if they were on the scene today. I take issue with that. Politicians have always been, with rare exception, persons without any core beliefs, taking positions that they believe will further their careers. Some are better than others at hiding it. John Kerry is among the worst, Bill Clinton among the best.

Had JFK come along in the 2000’s, he would have been liberal, just like Ted “the Swimmer” Kennedy.