WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT US

I was going to title this post "RADIO TIDBITS" but it grew into something else: a perfect example of how the lying Right attempts to define Liberals and Liberalism to its own advantage.

Slots Bennett had James Piereson on to discuss his bizarre theory that JFK's assassination caused American liberals to become lunatics. As you can learn from the short bio at the Manhattan Institute, he is a radical conservative deeply embedded in the conservative Noise Machine. I found this 4 page article by Piereson that gives his take on the liberals:

Lee Harvey Oswald and the Liberal Crack-Up
James Piereson
May 2006
Commentary Magazine

(excerpts)

...by the end of the decade, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the immediately preceding years. It has yet to recover.What happened?

But there can be no doubt, either, that an event from the early 1960’s—namely, the assassination of Kennedy himself—contributed heavily. As many observers have noted, Kennedy’s death seemed somehow to give new energy to the more extreme impulses of the Left, as not only left-wing ideas but revolutionary leftist leaders—Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro among them—came in the aftermath to enjoy a greater vogue in the United States than at any other time in our history. By 1968, student radicals were taking over campuses and joining protest demonstrations in support of a host of extreme causes.

[NOTE: This is where Piereson jumps the shark]

Part of the answer surely lies in the enduring need of the Left to circumvent the most inconvenient fact about President Kennedy’s assassination—that he was killed by a Communist and probably for reasons related to left-wing ideology.

In the years and decades that followed, nearly all of the tendencies of the far Right that had so unnerved the liberals of the 1950’s—the fascination with conspiracies, the use of overheated and abusive rhetoric to characterize political adversaries, expressions of hatred for the United States and its national culture—moved across the political spectrum to the far and then the near Left.For many American liberals, the shock of Kennedy’s death compromised their faith in the nation itself. Against all evidence, they concluded that a violent strain in our national culture was somehow to blame. A confident, practical, and forward-looking philosophy with a heritage of accomplishment was thus turned into a doctrine of pessimism and self-blame, with a decidedly dark view of American society. Such assumptions, far from marking a temporary adjustment to the events of the 1960’s, have proved remarkably durable.


First, we note that again, the "dirty fucking hippies" (©Atrios) are blamed. Second, we have the invention of a need out of thin air: Piereson gives no evidence for his claim that liberals needed to deny that Oswald was a Communist, if indeed he was one. The Oswald entry in American National Biography notes "During his five months in New Orleans, Oswald outwardly posed as a Marxist and a staunch supporter of Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba. However, all of his known acquaintances of the time were men of extremist anti-Communist, right-wing views. " Third, given Vietnam, Bobby and Martin, and Nixon's paranoia, who wouldn't start to have a dark view?

Piereson claimed that 60's liberals didn't take the Communist threat seriously and Slots said that today's liberals aren't taking the Islamo-Fascist threat seriously. The latter point is a deliberate lie that attempts to cover up the enormous failures of the neo-conservatives and the Bush regime in the WOT. Let's not forget that Slots was one of the many neo-con signers of the 1998 PNAC letter to Pres. Clinton calling for the overthrow of Saddam.