The Leftist New York Times Just Can't Give Up Its Woobie

They claim, again, that the dark rightwing chatter of Dallas '63 was somehow a major influence on the communist and Soviet defector Lee Harvey Oswald.

Watch how the New York Times argues not that an important constituency of the Democratic Party -- socialists and the socialist-curious left -- must reflect upon its responsibility for Kennedy's murder, but that the right must.

[T]he tension between past and present has unleashed a wave of citywide self-reflection a half-century later in a distinctly American place that is part Dallas Cowboys, part Texas excess and part urban melting pot, where the public school students come from homes where 70 languages are spoken. Painful, embarrassing memories of the angry anti-Washington culture that flourished here 50 years ago — and now seems a permanent part of the national mood — have resurfaced, confronting Dallasites daily.

An angry anti-Washington culture killed Kennedy?

Well, indeed, communists were anti-Washington (before Washington became a Socialist Beacon) and were usually pretty angry.

But that's not what they mean, is it?

Blocks from Dealey Plaza, the windows of restaurants and the lobbies of hotels are plastered with posters reading “Love” — a nonprofit group’s campaign, using artwork by schoolchildren and others, to counter the City of Hate label given Dallas after the assassination. As the city prepares for the biggest event it has ever held to mark the assassination on Friday — led by Mayor Michael S. Rawlings, a committee of civic leaders raised about $3 million in private donations for the ceremony — the focus has been on the city’s legacy as much as Kennedy’s.

“I’ve learned a lot about my city through this,” Mr. Rawlings said. “The world is peering into Dallas and saying, What’s that place all about right now, 50 years later? We’ve grown a lot, and we’ve changed a lot. The main story about Dallas is it took that punch and turned that tragedy into motivation to go to the next level.”

In the early 1960s, a small but vocal subset of the Dallas power structure turned the political climate toxic, inciting a right-wing hysteria that led to attacks on visiting public figures. In the years and months before Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson; his wife, Lady Bird; and Adlai E. Stevenson, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, were jostled and spat upon in Dallas by angry mobs. In sermons, rallies, newspapers and radio broadcasts, the city’s richest oil baron, a Republican congressman, a Baptist pastor and others, including the local John Birch Society, filled Dallas with an angry McCarthyesque paranoia.

The immediate reaction of many in Dallas to the news that Kennedy had been shot was not only shock but also a sickening sense of recognition. Moments after hearing about the shooting, the wife of the Methodist bishop told Tom J. Simmons, an editor at The Dallas Morning News, “You might have known it would be Dallas.”

Uh, yes, that might have been the initial erroneous reaction from the left, who is always sure that every evil is perpetrated by a rightwinger, but what has their erroneous first reaction to do with what actually happened?

Here's where they link up the rightwing H8 to Oswald:

...

Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist and not a product of right-wing Dallas. But because the anti-Kennedy tenor came not so much from radical outcasts but from parts of mainstream Dallas, some say the anger seemed to come with the city’s informal blessing.

This is precisely what they did with Palin and Jared Loughner-- they attempt to claim that a man who is obviously not influenced by Palin at all is somehow indirectly influenced by "anti-government" chatter, and then he kills people.

So, you know: You're not permitted to be anti-government. An entire strain of American politics, sometimes dominant, always present, is thus claimed by the New York Times to be tantamount to murder, and hence forbidden.

How convenient for them.

posted by Ace at 08:44 PM

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