I see by memeorandum, and elswhere, that the Left is off on the Obama Assassination fantasy again. It isn’t the first time, of course — there were several spates of it during the last year or two — but those all died out pretty quickly. Eric Boehlert at Media Matters appears to have kicked it off, but this one is being picked up by the full chorus, and looks likely to last a while. Ed Driscoll at Pajamas Media has a fisking.
The reasons being bruited about are transparently factitious. It passes any kind of rational belief to imagine that a group of people whose attitude toward the Previous Occupant ranged from “somebody kill the SOB” to “will no one rid us of this turbulent Texan?” is genuinely concerned about the morality and ethics of Presidential assassinations. But if that’s not it, what is?
It really isn’t all that hard to see. They don’t have George Bush to kick around any more, the race card has become so tattered and threadbare that even the more thoughtful leftists are questioning its validity, and the thinkers at the DNC and their advisors and toadies are frantically casting about for something, anything, else. As usual, though, It ain’t that simple! For the real reason the notion pushes to the forefront of their thinking processes, look no farther than what they’re using as a scarecrow to front their “concerns:” the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The parallels are indeed eerie. JFK was propelled to candidacy by people still smarting from past ethnic stereotyping and discrimination — Irish Catholics in his case, largely of the working class. I well remember the front-porch and barbershop arguments, among people who knew nothing about the Roman Catholic Church except that the preacher said it was bad, over whether or not the Pope could or would tell a President Kennedy what to do. In the South of 1960 it was a serious issue, and the Democratic Party took it seriously, sending people to explain in words of one syllable and offering Lyndon Johnson as a counterweight.
As a candidate, John Kennedy was a campaign organizer’s dream: movie-star looks, an easy, sophisticated manner, the ability to deliver stem-winding speeches with utmost sincerity and gravity, a resume that was quite creditable in a minor way and could be easily inflated into more than was really justified, and a highly camera-friendly family. His opponent was a career politician, the opposite of photogenic, with a frumpy wife, a somewhat-annoying voice, and a close association with the Previous Administration. Sound familiar?
And six weeks into his Presidency people across the country, most certainly including Democrats, were looking at one another and thinking, Oh, shit, we have really screwed the pooch with this one. The man had the attention span and the historical grounding of an ADD ten-year-old; he agreed with the last person he’d talked with, depending on how vehement they were; he was filling up the posts of Government with feckless relatives, party hacks, and courtiers; the only way to avoid outraging the country with his <ahem> extracurricular activities was to declare them “non-newsworthy” and enforce that in any way necessary. In the last truly bipartisan effort American politicians have ever made, Republicans and Democrats joined with one another and the Press to keep as much of the reality concealed as possible on the ground of preserving the good reputation of the United States. When the Democrats betrayed that deal by issuing the “Daisy” ad against Goldwater, it nailed the coffin-lid down rather thoroughly on any possibility of further “bipartisanship”.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, cited even by the Right as an example of decisive action, was handled the way it was because Kennedy had by then so thoroughly fouled up the Cuban situation — after making a major campaign “plank” out of handling it better than his predecessor had, because of greater understanding of the “root causes” — that the rest of the Democratic Party was telling him he had damned well better get this one right. Domestically, Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency had effectively begun sometime in the late summer of 1961, leaving Kennedy to screw Marilyn and pose with his loving family for the cameras, but only the President can handle foreign affairs at that level; a Vice President would simply be ignored, and Lyndon, the prototypical “local” politician, didn’t have the chops for it anyway.
I will tell you what every Democratic Party theorist and advisor knows but will never breathe, even to his or her spouse in the dark of night: If John Kennedy had not been assassinated and had completed his term, Barry Goldwater would have been elected President in 1964 and re-elected in ’68, Lyndon Johnson would never have been President and might have failed of re-election to the Senate, the history of the World for the past half-century would have been entirely different (not necessarily better, but different), and we wouldn’t have (or need) Jimmy Carter as the emblem of a bad Presidency.
And that, my friends, is why the Democrats are pushing assassination pr0n. Barack Obama is making Jimmy Carter look like Metternich and JFK like Robespierre, in retrospect, and they didn’t even have the forethought to stick a Lyndon Johnson in as backstop — the very thought of Sunny Joe as an effective backup generates guffaws. This Administration is crashing, burning, and leaking radiation and noxious fumes all over the place, and the only way to keep it from being a millstone around their necks for the next two decades is to end it, and end it soon. We don’t have a method for recalling a President (there’s impeachment, of course, but nobody’s going to buy incompetence as a “high crime”), and they couldn’t use it if we did; not only would it be an admission of defeat they aren’t willing to make, they’ve specifically declared any such thing invalid (vide Honduras). Absent Divine intervention — lightning or meteor strike, the Earth opening and swallowing the guy up in mid-oration — the only possible solution is bullets, bombs, poison gas, and the like.
Fair warning to Democrats and disillusioned former Obamaphiles: DO NOT EXPECT US “WINGNUTS” TO CLEAN UP YOUR TRASH FOR YOU. If you think Barack Obama is in danger of assassination, look to your own nutcase extremists — to the frustrated hyper-progressives whose complaint is that Obama has moved too far to the Right or hasn’t moved Left fast enough, to the Lee Harvey Oswalds and “Squeaky” Frommes, to the Kos Kidz and Huffington Huffers declaring “public option or fight”. If the Secret Service feels it needs more bodies for the duty of “catching the bullet” intended for Barry, they need look no farther than the nearest Right Wing Conspiracy for volunteers. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of kooks and loudmouths who don’t know how their bread is buttered, but their leaders do and have been passing the word: We want this man to live forever, to serve as an emblem of Progressive politics at least that long, and (in the words of a Jack Vance character from the Sixties) we want him safe as a forty-ton statue of a dead dog.E
12 comments
Comments feed for this article
20 September 2009 at 10:55 pm
Bob Reed
Nice piece Ric, you are sooooo right about what would have happened had JFK notbeen assasinated. And, the disenchanted feeling is growing more among lefties than on the right; because of their misinterpretation of the margin of discontent that handed them a victory in the last election as any type of mandate and the ensuing inability to get more through than that gastly spendulus bill…
ALl the best
21 September 2009 at 3:00 am
“It was a good day for limited government … ” [Darleen Click]
[…] the shrill, hysterical and, frankly, unhinged Leftcultists continue slandering the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of anti-incumbent […]
21 September 2009 at 3:22 am
Silver Whistle
Ric,
That was outstanding…almost as if you had been there. Kind of funny how Camelot II has turned into Blazing Saddles so quickly.
21 September 2009 at 9:36 am
geoffb
The scenario you have written about the Left, much better than I could have ever done, is one I think of as the “Sierra Maestra” one after a 1975 short story by Norman Spinrad that has eerie similarities to what we have today. There is another option for the Left that they have used before.
President Clinton’s first years were a disaster too. He came into office when we were recovering from a rather mild recession which had been hyped as the worst one evuh. The economy did a slow recovery, stagnated, and his approval was tanking. The economy only started to recover with the 1994 election where the Republicans came to power in the legislative branch. Clinton was, going into 1995, looking like a Carter one term President.
Then came the Oklahoma City Bombing of April 1995. Clinton pulled out all the stops and turned that attack by a guy who had been thrown bodily out of the one Michigan Militia meeting he had attended into a Right Wing assault on the Federal Government as embodied in himself. That event and his media coverage was the start of the long slide of the Republicans who had only a few months before been in triumph.
The odd maneuvers in the foreign policy realm by this administration all expose the USA to an attack of some nature. They are like a story I read about how to commit the perfect murder. You don’t do something that will have a close to 100% chance of succeeding in causing the death . You do many, many little things that each have a slight chance of causing that death. At some point chance alone will make it happen.
They are upping the chances of some horrific attack. Then they will attempt to spin it as the fault of their political enemies. That has to be watched for too and stopped in it’s tracks.
21 September 2009 at 11:35 am
warlocketx
Yeah, geoffb, but there’s a big difference: we may not agree that what Clinton did was good or bad, but you can’t get away from the fact that he was competent. Almost as important, there was, then, no way to get around the Gatekeepers and get “the rest of the story”.
For the event to have the effect you describe, it would have to be really spectacular — no Tim McVeigh has enough resources to do it.
That’s not to say it’s impossible. If I lived or worked in NYC or the areas of DC near the Capitol and White House, I would definitely be looking for a way to move.
Regards,
Ric
21 September 2009 at 7:15 pm
Mikey NTH
The problem with a Tim McVeigh scenario now is that there are a lot of independent actors out there – citizens and local, state and federal agents – that aren’t going to let something goofy go past them. They may not be as alert as they were after 9/11, but they are more alert than they were before Oklahoma City.
It is hard for me to boil this down, but most government security agents actually are committed to their jobs and protecting the public. And, I think, most will stop and question rather than let the funny go by. By example: do not think of doing something in an airliner – the passengers will kill you.
On a USCGAUX patrol, the terrorist thing isn’t as hot as it was after 9/11, but it is still there, and I still look for the boat doing something very wrong.
9/11 did change a few things.
21 September 2009 at 2:28 pm
richard mcenroe
one or two small details that escaped Media Matters…
21 September 2009 at 2:45 pm
WWRTC
V. interesting article, I agree that the rapid decline of the deaf Obama administration will cause a lot of heartache to the Left which by nature is very tuned to burying their problem with violence. The Left has already made it’s bed and will be destroyed by this Admin.
However I think BJC was a competent Prez only in comparison to Obama and Carter.
21 September 2009 at 4:05 pm
geoffb
Ric, thank you for your reply.
I agree it would be harder to pull off with the lessening of the power of the gatekeepers. I was thoroughly online from ’94 on and was floored by what was passed over to defend WJC. He was more competent than Obama but was still a man who focused on events by what they could mean to his personal wants/needs and not much on the country he was supposed to be serving. IMNSHO.
My thoughts on an event are that it would not need to be physically large but must be newsworthy. The size of it’s newsworthiness would be inversely proportional to the ease of hanging the blame on the “Teabaggers”. A NYC or DC attack would not have to be sourced to anyone to rally the country around the President.
5 October 2009 at 8:52 pm
Donald Sensing
And you could probably say the same thing about Lincoln.
6 October 2009 at 12:30 pm
Gregory Koster
Dear Mr. Locke: You write:
“If John Kennedy had not been assassinated and had completed his term, Barry Goldwater would have been elected President in 1964 and re-elected in ‘68, Lyndon Johnson would never have been President and might have failed of re-election to the Senate…”
Good thing you don’t have to prove it, you’d lose a lot of money that way. Take the most improbable assertion: that Lyndon Johnson would even have tried to run for the Senate in 1964. True, Texas law would have allowed him to run for both Senate and Veepacy, but imagine if he had done so: the press would, rightly, interpret it as a vote of no confidence in Kennedy, thus negating his value to the ticket. Nor would Kennedy have dumped Johnson from the ticket. That’s why Kennedy went to Dallas, for heaven’s sake, to straighten out the intramural Democratic feud in Texas.
As for Goldwater winning, Kennedy’s own estimate of him is close enough: “No brains.” Goldwater was rock solid on integrity, and that would have carried him down to defeat. Goldwater’s off the cuff remarks, such as his crack about lobbing one [a nuclear bomb—GK] into the men’s room, would run up against the propaganda about JFK the statesman who guided the world through the Cuban Missile Crisis. And you still think Kennedy would have won? Indeed, he might have lost, but only if the GOP nominee had been Nelson Rockefeller. The thought of a Rockefeller Presidency should make your redneck spine shiver. It certainly does mine.
6 October 2009 at 2:10 pm
warlocketx
Do keep your illusions if they comfort you.
The reason Kennedy had to be the one that went “…to straighten out the intramural Democratic feud in Texas” is that the feud wasn’t straightenable, and I speak as one who knew some of the insiders. It was between the old Jim Crow segregationists and the new Civil Rights people, and that, as you may recall, was the beginning of the Party reversal where Democrats veered Left and the Republicans went a bit Right.
What’s worse, the Big Agriculture people were shakily allied with the anti-Communists over Fidel and United Sugar, both were in bed with the Jim Crows, and both of them were starting to look at Johnson’s record with an eye to exposing some of the wilder shenanigans. Both halves of the Party were going after one another with hammer and tongs under the surface, and the Republicans were smelling blood and making gains at the County level thanks to the intramural fighting, which they could join on either side as the mood struck.
As for Goldwater having “No brains,” that was just one of the opening shots in the Republicans-are-stupid campaign. Eisenhower’s pose as an amiable dunce who let the heavy lifting be done by subordinates was just that, a pose, designed by Dwight David himself to counteract the picture people who’d known him during the war had — several of my neighbors and friends despised him on that ground, having known him as an essentially amoral operator prepared to run roughshod over any competition, and distrusting the pretense. Goldwater’s main fault was believing the phrase “off the record” — presaging McCain, who trusted the Press and paid for the sin.
When Kennedy was assassinated the Progressive wing of the Party had a martyr, and they ran with it. Lacking that, it is entirely possible that Lyndon might have been in jail by 1965! — there was certainly enough evidence lying around, and the intramural squabbles would have let it bubble to the surface, with help from the newly established Republicans.
Regards,
Ric