Posted on 11/21/2007 4:31:55 PM PST by forty_years
What's wrong with American liberalism? What happened to the self-assured, optimistic, and practical Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy? Why has Joe Lieberman, their closest contemporary incarnation, been run out of the party? How did anti-Americanism infect schools, the media, and Hollywood? And whence comes the liberal rage that conservatives like Ann Coulter, Jeff Jacoby, Michelle Malkin, and the Media Research Center have extensively documented?
In a tour de force, James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute offers an historical explanation both novel and convincing. His book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter), traces liberalism's slide into anti-Americanism back to the seemingly minor fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was neither a segregationist nor a cold warrior but a communist.
Here's what Piereson argues:
During the roughly forty years preceding the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963, progressivism/liberalism was the reigning and nearly only public philosophy; Kennedy, a realistic centrist, came out of an effective tradition that aimed, and succeeded, in expanding democracy and the welfare state.
In contrast, Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower lacked an intellectual alternative to liberalism and so merely slowed it down. The conservative "remnant" led by William F. Buckley, Jr. had virtually no impact on policy. The radical right, embodied by the John Birch Society, spewed illogical and ineffectual fanaticism.
Kennedy's assassination profoundly affected liberalism, Piereson explains, because Oswald, a New Left-style communist, murdered Kennedy to protect Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba from the president who, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, brandished America's military card. Kennedy, in brief, died because he was so tough in the cold war. Liberals resisted this fact because it contradicted their belief system and, instead, presented Kennedy as a victim of the radical right and a martyr for liberal causes.
This political phantasm required two audacious steps. The first applied to Oswald:
With Oswald nearly deleted from the narrative, or even turned into a scapegoat, the ruling establishment – Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and many others – proceeded to take a second, astonishing step. They blamed the assassination not on Oswald the communist but on the American people, and the radical right in particular, accusing them of killing Kennedy for his being too soft in the cold war or too accommodating to civil rights for American blacks. Here are just four of the examples Piereson cites documenting that wild distortion:
In this "denial or disregard" of Oswald's motives and guilt, Piereson locates the rank origins of American liberalism's turn toward anti-American pessimism. "The reformist emphasis of American liberalism, which had been pragmatic and forward-looking, was overtaken by a spirit of national self-condemnation."
Viewing the United States as crass, violent, racist, and militarist shifted liberalism's focus from economics to cultural issues (racism, feminism, sexual freedom, gay rights). This change helped spawn the countercultural movement of the late 1960s; more lastingly, it fed a "residue of ambivalence" about the worth of traditional American institutions and the validity of deploying U.S. military power that 44 years later remains liberalism's general outlook.
Thus does Oswald's malign legacy live on in 2007, yet harming and perverting liberalism, still polluting the national debate.
http://netwmd.com/blog/2007/11/21/2103
I was in 1st grade, lived 40 miles of Dallas, LHO’s niece was in my class, her family lived about 2 blocks away and I later met his brother Robert. None of that has anything to do with my opinion, but I think LHO did not fire a shot that day and that he was set up.............a patsy.
Liberals have forgotten that heaven awaits only after death. It was never meant to exist here on earth, unless you learn in the conservative way to accept what the world presents instead of constanty denying it,appreciate what you have, work hard to have it, and be continually thankful for it.
Happy " THANKS GIVING" in that context, kind sir!
JFK had a good friend that few today are aware of ... namely, Joe McCarthy. The two men saw eye to eye regarding the enemies of Western Civilization.
Now here is something to ponder. At the time of his assassination, Kennedy was being briefed on Golitsyn. Just who was Oswald working for, indeed? Classic KGB false flag recruit.
I don’t think Oswald ‘was’ a U.S. spy.
I wonder if the U.S. intelligence agencies believed he was a double working for them, and they were being duped.
That is why I compared it to the situation with Waco and OKC.
The FBI thought they had a double agent, but he apparently had other thoughts.
Excellent.And you know with the barrage of disinformation,much of it inspired and directed by the KGB, the Americans, on Left or Right fell for it. Everybody's an expert on the grassy knoll and how many shots coul of Oswald fired. Yeah, sure, New Orleans Mafia. Why, KKK, Stormfront.com, while we're at it. KGTB -> Castro -> Oswald -> KGB then working the MSM. Daniel Pipes' got it right. The Kennedy Assasination Cult is as reliable as the KGB misinformation campaigns once were, minus the expertise and the cunning.
Now aren't you a little cutie!
Chances are, if you weren't out dodging the draft somewhere, you might have really learned how to shoot...
Whole different world out there when the targets shoot back, but you wouldn't know about that, would you?
Now let's clarify something: we have a number of coincidences that annoy me about the open and shut case on Oswald. 1. There's a very good quality one hour interview with Oswald ostensibly about his Fair Play for Cuba committee. When was the last time you heard of an assassin getting a full hour of interview on good quality film? 2. His Fair Play for Cuba office was downstairs from the FBI office in New Orleans. A little unusual to say the least. 3. There is a fairly detailed description by Oswald of his time in the Soviet Union which reads like well-written field report by an agent. 4. Last, but not least, what reaction did Oawald have when he faced the press for the first time at the police station? He pointed to his black eye and complained that the police did it to him.
Now - if you had killed the president, how likely would it have been that your first complaint would be about your treatment?
Unless you were set up, of course.
But we'll never know, because Ruby shot him to death right there in that same police station.
So how many high power rifle matches have you won, my non-combat civilian friend?
I distinctly remember watching a TV Special ( CBS w/ Walter Cronkite, IIRC) where they duplicated the shots.
They had a similar rifle, elevated to the same height, moving target, the whole enchilada.
It could and was done.
And seeing the 'missing' frames of the Zapruder film, there is absolutely no question that the wound on Kennedy's right front head was an exit wound.
That shot didn't come from the side or front. It came from the rear.
Is there a person with an IQ over 65 that believes that Oswald was anything other than a pawn? This article is for soft minds.
Suggestion. Read “Case Closed” by Gerald Posner.
"During the roughly forty years preceding the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963, progressivism/liberalism was the reigning and nearly only public philosophy;"
He ignores the Mccarthy Era and the great service, extensively documented by Anne Coulter , and others, of how conservativism saved our nation from a liberal based evolution towards socialism and communism. Liberals have become socialists now, where the only parameter by which human happiness can be measured is in ao called equitable redistribution of material wealth according to current Utopian liberal parameters.( Universal Health Care, open up to illegal aliens, the list goes on and on) Joe McCarthy is not mentioned at all. Piereson is therefore wrong in much of what he says. So is PIpes.
Joseph McCarthy was the catalyst that initiated the social evolutionary rage movement of liberal Utopians. And we are here to end it. That is our task.
And the only one up to that task is Duncan Hunter.
I actually believe that Oswald was the assassin, though I don’t believe he worked alone. I’ve seen enough to convince me that he was a pawn in a KGB/Cuba plot with an assist from the US Mafia. I believe the mob was trading for help in starting up the South American drug trade through Cuba and retaliating for RFKs crack down while he was his brother’s AG. That doesn’t, in any way, detract from this writer’s point.
Maybe. Kennedy was killed because of executive order #11110, which called for the printing of billions of silver certificates, thus bypassing the Federal Reserve system, and returning monetary control to the US Govt.
Presidential assasins are either anarchists, communists, or muslims. Go figure huh. And the Democrats spin it 180 from reality. Go figure huh.
Yes. I have an IQ well over 65 and I’m convinced that Oswald was the lone gunman.
Oliver Stone made a movie that completely distorted history and now millions of people think there was a government conspiracy that killed JFK. Read “Case Closed” by Gerald Posner and get the real facts.
Correction
Presidential assassins: Democrat, Anarchist, Communist, Jew hater.
Basically leftists.
People on this thread seemed to like the article - I found it a huge reach - putting aside whether Oswald “did it” or not, the fact is he was a nut and a loose cannon and hardly one to base a political theory of the last 40 years on.
What happened to American liberalism? In my opinion it was co-opted by the communist enemy. The communists saw them as useful idiots and used and exploited them in the areas of civil rights, Viet-nam and others.
The left embraced communism and communism embraced the left. I really don’t think the story is that complicated. Scratch the surface of a liberal and you’ll find a hard core leftist/marxist/stalinist/maoist underneath. Right, Hillary?
What flavor koolaid do you prefer?
Oliver Stone is irrelevant. Learn some history, and kick off the comic books; a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Excellent post!
I really don't know. I have heard some of his tax speeches however. And I think they were on the side of the little guy. I can't trash the guy at all.
Also, someone who is humorless and self-centered.
I truly believe that liberalism results from a chemical imbalance in the brain.
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