Tales Of Two Lees

Andrew Sullivan's quote of the day is from William Manchester's Death of a President:

In that third year of the Kennedy Presidency a kind of fever lay over Dallas County. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed "Impeach Earl Warren.” Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant, “Stevenson’s going to die–his heart will stop, stop, stop and he will burn, burn burn!” Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; junior executives were required to attend radical seminars. Dallas had become the mecca for medicine-show evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders, the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies . . .

In Dallas a retired major general flew the American flag upside down in front of his house, and when, on Labor Day of 1963, the Stars and Stripes were hoisted right side up outside his own home by County Treasurer Warren G. Harding–named by Democratic parents for a Republican President in an era when all Texas children were taught to respect the Presidency, regardless of party–Harding was accosted by a physician’s son, who remarked bitterly, “That’s the Democrat flag. Why not just run up the hammer and sickle while you’re at it?

More ironies but still not much clarity. Is the idea that Dallas' nutty, toxic right-wing dynamics provoked Lee Harvey Oswald to murder President Kennedy? How could they have, since Oswald was a communist? Also, reading how bad it was then, I'm a little less discouraged about how things are now.

U.S. Right Is Soft On Terrorists And Traitors

Forty-three conservative bloggers discern that Richard Nixon was worse than Alger Hiss, Ted Kennedy than John Wilkes Booth, and Woodrow Wilson than Timothy McVeigh. Lee Harvey Oswald doesn't even make the list. Worst person ever in U.S., they say: Jimmy Carter.

Hasan And Oswald

My pastor brother David Stokes writes as follows about those who minimize the apparent Islamist tendencies of the accused Ft. Hood murderer:

During the Cuban Missile Crisis (c. 1962), if an American soldier would have opened fire on his comrades while wearing a Che Guevera T-shirt and yelling, “Long Live Lenin, Khrushchev, and Castro,” it is doubtful that the guy’s communist sympathies would have been dismissed as irrelevant and peripheral. The commies were the enemy.

A year after the Cuban missile crisis, the commander-in-chief was murdered in Dallas by a Marine veteran who had not only shilled for Fidel Castro and reached out to the communists in Moscow but tried to defect to the Soviet Union. It was the height of the Cold War. And yet Lee Harvey Oswald's darkest of acts didn't become a pretext for Americans going door to door in their neighborhoods trying to root out communist President killers. It was and remains obvious that he had acted alone. Most of those who resist calling Nidal Malik Hasan a terrorist or lumping him with al-Qaeda are making the same prudent distinction, at least until we learn the whole story.

There's That, Yeah.

JFK assassination conspiracy theorists wonder why the CIA won't release documents related to its covert support for a group of anti-Castro Cubans who clashed with Lee Harvey Oswald before President Kennedy's November 1963 murder. A leading expert on the assassination states the bleeding obvious:

[Gerald] Posner, the anti-conspiracy author, said that if there really were something explosive involving the C.I.A. and President Kennedy, it would not be in the files — not even in the documents the C.I.A. has fought to keep secret.

“Most conspiracy theorists don’t understand this,” Mr. Posner said. “But if there really were a C.I.A. plot, no documents would exist.”