If John F. Kennedy was around today he’d be somewhat to the right of Giuliani and McCain.
‘Inherit The Wind’ was written in the early 1950s and intended as an allegory of McCarthyism as such it takes brazen liberties with the actual events of the 1925 trial.
Most of the Liberals I know look to JFK and FDR as icons of the Liberal movement. But JFK died 44 years ago and FDR goes back 60 years. They need to get over it and get on with their lives, constructing the future, not reliving the past.
But they won’t...
In spite of the left's love of "Inherit the Wind", they will never accept the scientific method for one simple reason. Science is blind to ideology -- fact based. Hard Left ideologues will never accept reasoning where they cannot control the outcome.
I fully expect text books to eventually blame JFK's death on conservatives just as they discount Reagan when discussing the fall of the Soviet Union. Their irrationality when viewing history is a major reason why Putin is able to quietly reconstruct Soviet Russia.
“against the Bible-thumping antievolutionist William Jennings Bryan.”
He was an eternal “also ran” Democrat candidate. Much like Al Gore Junior, it was his final issue to gain the public spotlight.
What has changed, I think, is that one party has become dominated by emotionally immature people who do not think clearly on major issues. People say Leftism is a mental illness, and I think that is true.
In the 1960's, there were certain Liberals (JFK, RFK, MLK, and Hubert Humphrey come to mind) and things weren't too crazy. But then JFK, RFK and MLK got killed. I think at that point the American Left gave up on Liberalism and walked away from the survivors like Hubert Humphrey. Instead, we got the Black Panthers, Weather Underground, and Hillary Clinton. Ever since, the Democrats have been dominated by people who don't have their head screwed on srtraight.
They hate this country because their dreams of Liberalism was taken away from them in their youth. Ever since, they have hated this country and sought to bring it down, and they indoctrinate the young in similar thinking. Howard Dean is crazy, Nancy Pelosi is crazy, all the Dems are.
Guess I'll have to keep an eye peeled for the book.
“It’s not reason that is at the heart of modern-day liberalism but rather the claim to superior virtue and, even more important, to a special knowledge unavailable to the unwashed or unenlightened”
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That is absolutely spot-on!!
Some here want to ignore the reality of the early-1960s American left wing and instead choose to disbelieve and excuse the whole culture of the violent left based upon the unpredictability of 'magic bullet' terminal ballistics after it's passed through human tissue. To them, random circumstance vanquishes all logic.
Special thanks go to the 'Lone Gunman' deniers who have been carrying water for the radical left wing for over 40 years.
There is no doubt that Oswald was nutty as a loon but that is true of many of the lefties on the stage today. He was basically a prototype for later '60s radical types like Tom Hayden, John Kerry, SDS, the Weathermen, etc. The main difference was that he was a genuine poor person working alone and they were mostly a country club of spoiled rich white boys.
Lee Harvey Oswald was the father of the modern "Progressive" left and the shot he fired from the Texas School Book Depository was the opening shot of the hard left takeover of the Democrat party that took hold by the end of the Vietnam War.
Most of the alleged "controversy" about the assassination is an attempt to cover up the fact that JFK was killed by the left because he, whatever his VERY great faults, was not a traitor. They have done a very good job of muddying the waters.
The opposite of scientism and of mysticism is candor. Rush Limbaugh is candid - he expresses himself openly, and continuously for hours at a time daily. Contrast that with the constricted "news" report which is scripted in advance (if it's not "breaking news") and which in any case is about a defined subject on which the reporter is, putatively, the expert and you and I are presumed to be ignorant. The reporter is always in a race to stay ahead of the rest of us in his knowledge of the story - and when that is no longer possible, the reporter drops the story as "old news" and moves on to another story in which the reporter has the advantage over the audience.
What senses?????
Many of those "segregationist cousins" were, in fact, Southern Democrats. Think George Wallace.
BUMP
Must you post this Camelot crap here?
Unfortunately not. Stuck in the sixties holistically. Can’t/won’t grow up.
During his presidency, Kennedy had repeatedly criticized the irrationalism of far-right-wing anticommunists and their segregationist cousins. It was a turbulent time, lest we forget.
In April 1963, the police in Birmingham, Ala., had set dogs upon peaceful civil-rights marchers, and in June segregationists in Mississippi assassinated NAACP leader Medgar Evers.
In October, protesters in Dallas had harassed Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy's United Nations ambassador. Dallas was a notoriously segregated city, and the John Birch Society (whose members thought President Eisenhower had been under communist sway) were a part of the city's political culture.
The society's Dallas leader was Gen. Edwin Walker, whom Oswald had tried to kill in April by shooting at him through a window in his home. (Oswald just missed.)
Thus when Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963, it was widely assumed that his killer was the kind of hate-filled reactionary who believed Kennedy to be selling out America to Soviet Communism and to be showing too little resistance to the civil-rights movement.
That was not "widely assumed" at all - as Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union was established almost immediately.
In the minds of liberals, then, Kennedy's killer should have been a right-wing fanatic. But he wasn't. Oswald was a man of the hard left. He had defected to the Soviet Union. When he found that country too bureaucratic, he returned to America and began proselytizing for Fidel Castro and his supposedly new brand of the third-world revolution.
Yep, those facts were shouted from the rooftops, leaving many rational people doubtful of Oswald's motives from day one.
- Why would a known leftist shoot at JFK? - It made no sense then, - and it still doesn't now.
Nor was Oswald an irrational, discontented Dostoevskian loner, as some depicted him.
He was in fact a joiner of movements and something of a self-defined intellectual who thought that his mixture of Marxism and anarchism made him smarter and more sophisticated than his frivolous peers.
Yes indeed. - As details of Oswalds life became known -- long before the Warren Report was published, - the mystery of his motivation was being discussed. - However, most people were willing to wait for the Report before making judgments.
Little did we know that the Report would raise more questions than it resolved; - it was a mess, and the American people overwhelmingly rejected it immediately. - Before any conspiracy books were even published.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus