50 years of lies

The Warren Commission's Magic Bullet theory

There's a lot of crap published recently on the murder of President Kennedy. Apparently publishers feel obligated to do something on the 50th anniversary. The Chronicle has been running a series of stories by locals about where they were, what they were doing, and how they felt about the assassination. Who cares? It's apparently too much to ask of the Chronicle to publish some substantive discussion of the unanswered questions about the assassination. Instead this morning we got stuff like this from Jonathan Zimmerman: 

It's hard to believe that they[government agencies] could pull off a plot as immense and risky as the murder of a president. So why do so many of us continue to believe it? Perhaps it's a way to protect his image, and the reflection of ourselves that we see in it. If Kennedy could be felled by a loser like Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, then JFK couldn't be the giant that we've made him out to be. There would be no Shining Moment, no Thousand Days, no Camelot. And we would no longer be innocent children, pining for the departed father whom we never really knew. We would put away childish things. We would grow up.

Yes, "grow up" by believing the incredible conclusions of the Warren Commission. In reality it's people like Zimmerman who are childish in their eagerness to believe the ridiculous official government line, much like they once believed Mommy and Daddy about Santa Claus.

And then you have the riff from some on the left, like Beyond Chron's Randy Shaw yesterday, denigrating Kennedy, and, while he was at it, President Obama. Shaw is really a pseudo-leftist political commissar who thinks he's doing political journalism. 

Like all of JFK's detractors, Shaw gives LBJ all the credit for the subsequent Civil Rights legislation, but he ignores Kennedy's nationally-televised Civil Rights speech in June, 1963, and his American University speech announcing the nuclear test ban treaty and questioning Cold War assumptions, not to mention the evidence that JFK was planning to get us out of Vietnam, which I posted about here the other day.

The late Alexander Cockburn was another lefty who endorsed the Warren Commission, though it was obvious that he really knew nothing about it or the many questions surrounding the assassination. Cockburn famously wrote that it doesn't matter how Kennedy died, that he could have tripped on one of Caroline's dolls, and the end result would have had the same significance. 

As some kind of life-long Marxist, Cockburn, like Randy Shaw, was apparently offended ideologically by the notion that history could be made and/or changed by assassination. Instead ideology required that History be made by activists, grassroots movements, or the working class.

Obviously assassinations have changed history: the death of Lenin allowed Stalin's power grab; Stalin's murder of Trotsky, the assassinations of RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, and JFK all changed history significantly. 

Both Kennedys had to die before Richard Nixon could become president.

Oliver Stone's fictionalized version of how JFK was killed is a lot more realistic than the Warren Commission's fantasy.