I found the recent comments from Patrick Kennedy both unsettling in their intended purpose, as well as lacking any kind of historical context.
Kennedy warned about 70 AARP union representatives of possible violence over the national health care debate, and using his own family's tragic past as a way to emphasize his point.
My familys seen it up close too much with assassinations and violence in political life. Its a terrible thing when people think that in order to get their point across they have to go to the edge of violent rhetoric and attack people personally, Kennedy told the nurses, union officials and AARP members finishing their breakfasts at the invitation-only event in the Providence Marriott hotel. Its fine for people to debate the issue and attack the issue, but when they go and stoop to the level of the vitriolic rhetoric that weve seen this debate turn up, its very, I think, dangerous to the fabric of our country.
What this Kennedy, and most liberals don't appear willing, or capable of admitting, is that the deaths of both Robert and John Kennedy came at the hands of disturbed left wing fanatics. Both Oswald and Sirhan were communist sympathizers. Oswald was a known Castro supporter, while Palistinian Sirhan developed rage over Robert Kennedy's support of Israel.
Perhaps a recent article in National Review sums up this odd historical disparity so many liberals have regarding violence against politicians in America...
Saturday, September 19, 2009
The 'Kennedy Killed by the Right' Myth [Jonah Goldberg]
They set about creating the fable that Kennedy died battling hateestablished
code, then and now, for the political right. The story became legend because liberals were desperate to imbue Kennedys assassination with a more exalted and politically useful meaning. Over and over again, the entire liberal establishment, led by the New York Timesand even the pope!denounced the hate that claimed Kennedys life. The Supreme Court justice Earl Warren summed up the conventional wisdomas he could always be counted upon to dowhen he theorized that the climate of hatred in Dallascode for heavy right-wing and Republican activitymoved Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the president.
The fact that Oswald was a communist quickly changed from an inconvenience to proof of something even more sinister. How, liberals asked, could a card-carrying Marxist murder a liberal titan on the side of social progress? The fact that Kennedy was a raging anticommunist seemed not to register, perhaps because liberals had convinced themselves, in the wake of the McCarthy era, that the real threat to liberty must always come from the right. Oswalds Marxism sent liberals into even deeper denial, their only choice other than to abandon anti-anti-communism. And so, over the course of the 1960s, the conspiracy theories metastasized, and the Marxist gunman became a patsy. Cui bono? asked the Oliver Stones then and ever since. Answer: the military-industrial complex, allied with the dark forces of reaction and intolerance, of course. Never mind that Oswald had already tried to murder the former army major general and prominent right-wing spokesman Edwin Walker or that, as the Warren Commission would later report, Oswald had an extreme dislike of the rightwing.
Amid the fog of denial, remorse, and confusion over the Kennedy assassination, an informal strategic response developed that would serve the purposes of the burgeoning New Left as well as assuage the consciences of liberals generally: transform Kennedy into an allpurpose martyr for causes he didnt take up and for a politics he didnt subscribe to.
Indeed, over the course of the 1960s and beyond, a legend grew up around the idea that if only Kennedy had lived, we would never have gotten bogged down in Vietnam. It is a central conceit of Arthur Schlesingers Robert Kennedy and His Times. Theodore Sorensen, Tip ONeill, and countless other liberals subscribed to this view. A popular play on Broadway, MacBird, suggested that Johnson had murdered JFK in order to seize power. But even Robert F. Kennedy conceded in an oral history interview that his brother never seriously considered withdrawal and was committed to total victory in
Vietnam. Kennedy was an aggressive anti-communist and Cold War hawk. He campaigned on a fictitious missile gap with the Soviets in a largely successful effort to move to Richard Nixons right on foreign policy, tried to topple Castro at the Bay of Pigs, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis, and got us deep into Vietnam. A mere three and a half hours before Kennedy died, he was boasting to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce that he had increased defense spending on a massive scale, including a 600 percent increase on counterinsurgency special forces in South Vietnam. The previous March, Kennedy had asked Congress to spend fifty cents of every federal dollar on defense.
The Kennedy myth also veers sharply from reality when it comes to the issue of race. The flattering legend is that Kennedy was an unalloyed champion of civil rights. Supposedly, if he had lived, the racial turmoil of the 1960s could have been avoided. The truth is far more prosaic. Yes, Kennedy pushed for civil rights legislation, and he deserves credit for it. But he was hardly breaking with the past. In the supposedly reactionary 1950s, Republicans had carried most of the burden of fulfilling the American promise of equality to blacks. Eisenhower had pushed through two civil rights measures over strong opposition from southern Democrats, and in particular Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who fought hard to dilute the legislation.
The 'Kennedy Killed by the Right' Myth - Jonah Goldberg - The Corner on National Review Online
Kennedy warned about 70 AARP union representatives of possible violence over the national health care debate, and using his own family's tragic past as a way to emphasize his point.
My familys seen it up close too much with assassinations and violence in political life. Its a terrible thing when people think that in order to get their point across they have to go to the edge of violent rhetoric and attack people personally, Kennedy told the nurses, union officials and AARP members finishing their breakfasts at the invitation-only event in the Providence Marriott hotel. Its fine for people to debate the issue and attack the issue, but when they go and stoop to the level of the vitriolic rhetoric that weve seen this debate turn up, its very, I think, dangerous to the fabric of our country.
What this Kennedy, and most liberals don't appear willing, or capable of admitting, is that the deaths of both Robert and John Kennedy came at the hands of disturbed left wing fanatics. Both Oswald and Sirhan were communist sympathizers. Oswald was a known Castro supporter, while Palistinian Sirhan developed rage over Robert Kennedy's support of Israel.
Perhaps a recent article in National Review sums up this odd historical disparity so many liberals have regarding violence against politicians in America...
Saturday, September 19, 2009
The 'Kennedy Killed by the Right' Myth [Jonah Goldberg]
They set about creating the fable that Kennedy died battling hateestablished
code, then and now, for the political right. The story became legend because liberals were desperate to imbue Kennedys assassination with a more exalted and politically useful meaning. Over and over again, the entire liberal establishment, led by the New York Timesand even the pope!denounced the hate that claimed Kennedys life. The Supreme Court justice Earl Warren summed up the conventional wisdomas he could always be counted upon to dowhen he theorized that the climate of hatred in Dallascode for heavy right-wing and Republican activitymoved Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the president.
The fact that Oswald was a communist quickly changed from an inconvenience to proof of something even more sinister. How, liberals asked, could a card-carrying Marxist murder a liberal titan on the side of social progress? The fact that Kennedy was a raging anticommunist seemed not to register, perhaps because liberals had convinced themselves, in the wake of the McCarthy era, that the real threat to liberty must always come from the right. Oswalds Marxism sent liberals into even deeper denial, their only choice other than to abandon anti-anti-communism. And so, over the course of the 1960s, the conspiracy theories metastasized, and the Marxist gunman became a patsy. Cui bono? asked the Oliver Stones then and ever since. Answer: the military-industrial complex, allied with the dark forces of reaction and intolerance, of course. Never mind that Oswald had already tried to murder the former army major general and prominent right-wing spokesman Edwin Walker or that, as the Warren Commission would later report, Oswald had an extreme dislike of the rightwing.
Amid the fog of denial, remorse, and confusion over the Kennedy assassination, an informal strategic response developed that would serve the purposes of the burgeoning New Left as well as assuage the consciences of liberals generally: transform Kennedy into an allpurpose martyr for causes he didnt take up and for a politics he didnt subscribe to.
Indeed, over the course of the 1960s and beyond, a legend grew up around the idea that if only Kennedy had lived, we would never have gotten bogged down in Vietnam. It is a central conceit of Arthur Schlesingers Robert Kennedy and His Times. Theodore Sorensen, Tip ONeill, and countless other liberals subscribed to this view. A popular play on Broadway, MacBird, suggested that Johnson had murdered JFK in order to seize power. But even Robert F. Kennedy conceded in an oral history interview that his brother never seriously considered withdrawal and was committed to total victory in
Vietnam. Kennedy was an aggressive anti-communist and Cold War hawk. He campaigned on a fictitious missile gap with the Soviets in a largely successful effort to move to Richard Nixons right on foreign policy, tried to topple Castro at the Bay of Pigs, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis, and got us deep into Vietnam. A mere three and a half hours before Kennedy died, he was boasting to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce that he had increased defense spending on a massive scale, including a 600 percent increase on counterinsurgency special forces in South Vietnam. The previous March, Kennedy had asked Congress to spend fifty cents of every federal dollar on defense.
The Kennedy myth also veers sharply from reality when it comes to the issue of race. The flattering legend is that Kennedy was an unalloyed champion of civil rights. Supposedly, if he had lived, the racial turmoil of the 1960s could have been avoided. The truth is far more prosaic. Yes, Kennedy pushed for civil rights legislation, and he deserves credit for it. But he was hardly breaking with the past. In the supposedly reactionary 1950s, Republicans had carried most of the burden of fulfilling the American promise of equality to blacks. Eisenhower had pushed through two civil rights measures over strong opposition from southern Democrats, and in particular Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who fought hard to dilute the legislation.
The 'Kennedy Killed by the Right' Myth - Jonah Goldberg - The Corner on National Review Online
Which is to say why his face is so red.
