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Kennedy and the Heyday of Overambitious Government
Townhall.com ^ | November 21, 2013 | Steve Chapman

Posted on 11/21/2013 9:15:43 AM PST by Kaslin

Extravagance can be intoxicating, and those who grow accustomed to extravagance, only to be deprived of it, can miss it terribly. That accounts for much of the powerful hold John F. Kennedy has on a generation of Americans even today. He led people to imagine that their government had the boundless capacity to improve the world, and on the day he died, they could still believe that.

His administration and that of his vice president and successor Lyndon B. Johnson are significant in the same way: They represent the pinnacle of ambitious, visionary government. What each president lacked was a sober sense of the limits of what it could do, at home or abroad.

For a while, their confidence infected the American people. But the course of history was to furnish an unpleasant antidote.

Kennedy came into office having roused unrealistic expectations. "With the coming of a new administration, something akin to religious fervor distracts most Americans, an extension of the endless quest for a future that has something more to offer," wrote biographer Herbert Parmet. "With Kennedy this spirit was compounded, exaggerated, made more irrational."

His inaugural address did nothing to dampen the mood. It cast the United States not just as the defender of its own security and freedom, but as guarantor for the entire planet. Kennedy declared that "we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty (emphasis added)."

In case that promise did not seem sufficiently grandiose, he added, "The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it -- and the glow from that fire can truly light the world."

Kennedy gave the highest priority to the foreign arena. But Johnson's domestic program grew out of initiatives begun by JFK. And LBJ was no more inclined to restrain his rhetoric.

He extolled his social welfare plan as though he were describing paradise: "The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. ... It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community ... beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor."

Neither president paused to consider whether and how the clumsy tools of government could actually fulfill these dreams. Kennedy took the first steps into a war in Vietnam -- which proved that supporting friends did not assure the success of liberty and that there were some burdens Americans would not bear.

When Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act, he proclaimed that it represented nothing less than "a commitment to eradicate poverty." But biographer Robert Dallek wrote that the president "was clueless as to just how the program would work." Like many Great Society programs, it did not live up to its billing.

Neoconservative thinkers have long revered Kennedy for his belief in using military power to propagate democracy and human rights abroad, even in places where they were unlikely to flourish. There is a straight line from his inaugural address to our invasion of Iraq and our protracted presence in Afghanistan, both costly, high-minded adventures with meager payoffs.

JFK's domestic plans provided the inspiration for Johnson's Great Society, which likewise attracted plenty of overconfident intellectuals. "In 1962," wrote Dallek, "a group of University of Michigan social welfare experts predicted that it would be relatively easy to end poverty in America at a cost of $2 billion a year, less than 2 percent of GDP."

Today, we spend triple that amount, 6 percent of GDP, and poverty has yet to be ended. In 2012, the Census Bureau says, nearly 50 million Americans -- 16 percent of the population -- were poor even after it counted the various forms of government aid they get.

JFK and LBJ set out to prove how much the U.S. government could accomplish at home and abroad, a mission that endeared them to those who believe in the promiscuous use of power. They ended up proving how much it could not accomplish, and how little extravagance can buy.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Government
KEYWORDS: biggovernment; govpowergrab; jaohfkennedy

1 posted on 11/21/2013 9:15:43 AM PST by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

There will be 24-7 coverage of JFK and history rewritten from MSM now through next week to aid Obama in diverting from the Obama scandals including Obamacare.


2 posted on 11/21/2013 9:33:13 AM PST by KeyLargo
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To: KeyLargo

I’m sick and tired of hearing about the Kennedys. They didn’t shoot enough of them.


3 posted on 11/21/2013 9:41:12 AM PST by jmacusa (I don't think so, but I doubt it.)
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To: Kaslin

Kennedy was just a spoiled brat given the keys to the kingdom. No wonder he couldn’t conceive of limits.


4 posted on 11/21/2013 9:45:48 AM PST by DariusBane (Liberty and Risk. Flip sides of the same coin. So how much risk will YOU accept?)
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To: jmacusa
It has been PROVEN that a conspiracy killed JFK.

There are two ways to determine the time between shots that were fired. IF the time between shots is the same, that means STATISTICALLY BOTH are valid.

This video shows that the times are the same.

PROVING THE US GOV'T LIED

After a bit more homework, you can finally know WHO ordered JFK's murder and why. The US Government will tell any lie to hide the truth. The press couldn't figure out what color the sky is unless the Ministry of Truth tells them. And the gov't knows that the average US citizen will believe almost anything they are told. Where do you fit in?

5 posted on 11/21/2013 1:14:41 PM PST by politicianslie (Our first Muslim President laughs at you. Are you waiting for NBC to tell you who he is?)
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To: politicianslie

My friend as the saying goes ‘’When any two people know anything in Washington it’s a conspiracy’’. I do believe there was a conspiracy to kill JFK and said conspiracy existed entirely and solely in the mind of one troubled and angry loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. Consider perhaps the two greatest crimes in history, The Holocaust and the killing of President John F. Kennedy. The first can be understood by anyone, history’s greatest crime committed by history’s most monstrous and evil villains, the Nazis. The second less so. A popular, youthful, much admired American president. Scion of a wealthy and powerful family,a decorated war hero, the most powerful man in the world married to a beautiful woman, an aristocrat in her own right with two beautiful children. Such a man laid low by a man so common, so insignificant as to be invisible. The mind rebels and refuses to accept this and so there has to be something more to the obvious, there has to be some dark, complex and evil scheme behind it all. And that’s the trouble. There is only this pathetic loser, Oswald and no one else. For fifty years the incredulous have been chasing the invisible. There is no ‘’there’’ there. It’s all a mirage. An illusion.


6 posted on 11/21/2013 1:42:28 PM PST by jmacusa (I don't think so, but I doubt it.)
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To: Kaslin
Those were the days when we believed that if the GOP could just win the next election the nation would be put on the correct path.

Certainly not true today.

7 posted on 11/21/2013 2:08:06 PM PST by Paladin2
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To: jmacusa
Many have liked and repeated the argument that you make about LHO but no one has ever published the argument I make.

It turns out there are TWO INDEPENDENT WAYS to determine the times between shots. One way is usually thought of as valid and the other way has been viciously attacked as invalid. What the YOUTUBE video shows is that the times between the last three shots is the same in BOTH, which means statistically that both are valid. When you know that, it proves the last two shots were fired a split second apart. Argue all you want but one man firing from behind could not have fired two shots from different directions nearly simultaneously.

Once you understand the mathematics of the situation, you know several things:

1. There was more than TWO SHOOTERS

2. It took real power to hide evidence that would have revealed the truth. LHO did not fire the shot that killed JFK, it was someone else

3. The US government could NOT have screwed up the investigations this badly without trying which means the fix was in. That quickly gives leads to WHO was behind the murder because the liars fingerprints are all over the evidence that was altered.

4. Those weren't echoes that so many heard, they were two separate shots.

5. Nellie pulled John Connally over into her lap AFTER Connally was shot in the back

Prove the bottom line in this video wrong statistically and I will write you a check for $10,000. You will not be able to do it.

PROVING A CONSPIRACY KILLED JFK

8 posted on 11/21/2013 2:45:06 PM PST by politicianslie (Our first Muslim President laughs at you. Are you waiting for NBC to tell you who he is?)
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To: politicianslie
Again, to accomplish something of this magnitude would mean dozens of people to carry it out and everyone to keep their mouths shut.Such a thing is impossible. Someone will always talk. A person involved in this conspiracy might some day be facing a serious criminal charge and might want to bargain by saying “I know who killed JFK’’. If there was a second gunman you would have to eliminate him and the guy who eliminated that guy and on it would go until you're piling up bodies to Pluto. I don't understand what you're trying to infer about Nellie Connally pulling her husband towards her.Seems to me to be a natural, protective reaction by any wife or husband to protect their spouse. The one thing Lee Harvey Oswald accomplished in his short, unhappy life beside killing JFK, wounding Governor John Connally and killing Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit was he became a United States Marine. In order to do that he had to qualify as a marksman in order to be given The Globe and Anchor . Granted he was using a poor excuse of a rifle but for those few seconds he had that drill instructor telling him to ‘’Fire that weapon Marine’’ and that's exactly what Oswald did. Seriously, who would keep something like this quiet for half a century? And if there was a conspiracy, what was it? Why was Kennedy assassinated?
9 posted on 11/21/2013 8:46:03 PM PST by jmacusa (I don't think so, but I doubt it.)
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