Sunday, November 17, 2013

 

I Think Mr. McAuley Needs to Study a Little Harder

It is a very common lie, a Big Lie, based on its repetition alone, that exists because the left can't believe their handsome hero, JFK, was killed by a fairly pathetic, single, fellow left-winger. Certainly, they project, the right-wing extremists were involved. No, sorry, it was only the Communist Lee Harvey Oswald, with a Carcano 91/38. Let's look at the latest repetition of the Big Lie here by James McAuley, a Marshall scholar at Oxford.

To a rational mind, Dallas's role in the assassination of the President by the Communist is only that it was the site where it happened, just as Los Angeles's role in Robert Kennedy's assassination by Socialist Sirhan Sirhan is only that LA was the site of the murder. Let's see what new fantasy Mr. McAuley weaves. Big start:

FOR 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.

The force was strong with the Dallas population. City of hate? Willed the death? This is magical thinking. Is there a single thing in this article that is real world accurate?

For those men [of Dallas, with death wishes in their eyes], Kennedy was a veritable enemy of the state, which is why a group of them would commission and circulate “Wanted for Treason” pamphlets before the president’s arrival and fund the presciently black-rimmed “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” advertisement that ran in The Dallas Morning News on the morning of Nov. 22. It’s no surprise that four separate confidants warned the president not to come to Dallas: an incident was well within the realm of imagination.

Not a black-rimmed "Welcome Mr. Kennedy" ad? Oh, the humanity. So let me get this straight, if Kennedy visited Boston, where he was even more wildly popular, and some malcontents passed out literature that was unkind to the President, and some lone wolf shot Kennedy in the head there, then Boston would be the city of hate that willed the death of the President? It's not an absurd question, but it is an absurd thing for anyone actually to say, much less believe. Kennedy/Johnson carried Texas in the 1960 election (although they lost to Nixon/Lodge in Dallas County) and the President was very popular three years later with the majority of the city's population who turned out in their tens of thousands to line the streets on which he was driven to cheer the motorcade.

Just look at the newsreels of adoring crowds along the route in the 50 year anniversary coverage of the assassination coverage during this week. Do you see a lot of hate? Do you see a lot of will to murder? President Kennedy was our coolest president ever and even many of the Republicans who had voted against him had a soft spot for our youthful leader. These are facts, historical facts, not schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells' history, but history nevertheless.The left and its newest repeater have consciously to disbelieve the truth in order to believe the Republicans had the tiniest thing to do with the assassination. Did the four warning confidants know about the plan Oswald was putting the finishing touches on? Then there's this.

Dallas is not, of course, “the city that killed Kennedy.”

Wait, what?

But without question, these memories — and the remnants of the environment of extreme hatred the city’s elite actively cultivated before the president’s visit — have left an indelible mark on Dallas, the kind of mark that would never be left on Memphis or Los Angeles, which were stages rather than actors in the 1968 assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. 

No, what's happened is that historically ignorant people on the left have wanted to believe it was a right winger who killed JFK and since that was impossible (myriad conspiracy theories notwithstanding) they have created out of whole cloth the lie that Dallas was an environment of extreme hate of the President in late November, 1963. The "mark" Mr. McAuley writes about is actually the left's collective inability to accept the truth. One of the things that made the assassination so shocking is that it occurred in a city that had turned out en masse to adore the President. The killing shots were such a contrast to the displayed lack of ill will against Kennedy. The bell curve of human behavior allows for a few at the fringe to hate one man that hundreds of thousands love but the fringe does not define the majority of the people of Dallas, many of whom cried when told the President had been shot to death. The Big Lie of "collective culpability," that Dallas was involved in rather than merely the site of the assassination, is an ultimately malignant delusion.

But those are transient triumphs [like the Cowboys] in the face of what has always been left unsaid, what the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald once called the “dark night of the soul,” on which the bright Texas sun has yet to rise.
The newspaper may have used the term 'dark night of the soul' but it is actually a 16th century Spanish poem/treatise by St. John of the Cross, which Mr. McAuley might be well served to read. It's not about collective guilt.

The far right of 1963 and the radicalism of my grandparents’ generation may have faded in recent years, they remain very much alive in Dallas. Look no further than the troop of gun-rights activists who appeared just days ago, armed and silent, outside a meeting of local mothers concerned about gun violence. If this is what counts as responsible civic dialogue, then Dallas has a long way still to go. 

Far right radicalism is also a concept that exists only in the minds of the delusional left. The right is by general definition conservative, that is, it retains the status quo ante and rejects extremist ideas to overthrow or change it. Extremist conservative is an oxymoron. And skipping over the the self contradiction of silent opponents having a dialogue, the 2nd Amendment puts in writing our God given right to life, that is, to self defense. Keeping and bearing arms is indeed a conservative value while "infringing" on that inalienable right is lefty radicalism. Carrying a gun to protest a group who wants to disarm you despite the enshrined personal right is I think an eloquent silent statement. Calling it irresponsible is the judgment of those who seek a radical infringement of our right to life.

Ultimately, Mr. McAuley weaves the same shopworn fantasy that the left has declared official Truth since about 10 minutes after the assassination. He has added nothing to Big Lie except another dreary repetition. In fact, we've all lost an IQ point or two for having to have read the myth yet again.

Hey, McAuley, the real reason no one talks about Dallas' supposed collective culpability for the Kennedy assassination is that most people are not stupid enough to believe that which does not exist.

UPDATE: Great minds, etc. Money quote from Sonny Bunch:

Liberals were so perturbed by the fact that a man of the left had killed Kennedy that they simply waved away the inconvenient truth like so much smoke. It wasn’t left wing ideology that killed our dear prince but the meanies on the right who created a culture in which something so senseless could happen.

I don't know, but if I were writing about blame for the assassination of JFK near its 50 year anniversary, I might make mention of the guy who actually placed the scope cross-hairs on the President's head and pulled the trigger. Mr. McAuley makes no mention of the actual assassin, Oswald, who, by the way, was such a product of right wing extremist hate that he tried to shoot and kill ultra-conservative Democrat (and rabid anti-Communist) General Edwin Walker about five months before he shot Kennedy. Walker, by the way, was peripherally associated with the Wanted for Treason fliers Mr. McAuley finds so remarkable. Dallas is probably guilty of that attempted murder too, I guess. So, summing up: One day Oswald tries to shoot the leader of the guys putting out the hateful Wanted for Treason fliers and then, under the influence of the Wanted for Treason fliers, et al., he shoots the subject of the fliers. Yeah, that hangs together.

UPDATE 2: Another voice of sanity. James Pierson who places the blame properly on the Cold War and volunteer minion, Oswald. Money quote:

Ironically, U.S. leaders adopted a line similar to the one pushed by the Soviet Union and communist groups around the world. They likewise blamed the "far right" for the assassination. A Soviet spokesman said that, "Senator [ Barry ] Goldwater and other extremists on the right could not escape moral responsibility for the president's death."

Birds of a feather...

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