Dallas is a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.”

Nothing has changed in the 46 years since JFK was assassinated. The hate mongering, the demonizing, and the incitement to violence existed then. The 4th graders who cheered Kennedy's death are now the grown-ups with racial and nazi signs at tea parties. The era of Regan, Delay and Gringrich, along with the inflammatory rhetoric of talk radio and Fox News has emboldened these lunatic. The Republican party has cowered under pressure from these extreme right wing groups.

And this is just plain scary:
CNN's Rick Sanchez in a startling video reports threats against President Obama are up 400 percent.

http://www.rbguy.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/9/12/780953/-CNNs-Rick-Sanchez-in-a-startling-video-reports-threats-against-President-Obama-are-up-400-percent.

When will the moderate Republicans find a backbone, do what is right and condemn these groups.

As I read the article about William Manchester writing the 1967 best seller "The Death of a President", and got to the part about the political climate at the time, I couldn't stop drawing parallels and shudder.


Following is an excerpt from the article.

He also discovered that Kennedy had been warned not to make the trip. “Evangelist Billy Graham had attempted to reach Kennedy … about his own foreboding. The Dallas mood was no secret,” he wrote. And Senator William Fulbright, the liberal senator from Arkansas, had pleaded with Kennedy: “Dallas is a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.”

<snip>

Manchester also discovered that Dallas “had become the Mecca for medicine-show evangelists … the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry Societies, and the headquarters of H. L. Hunt and his activities.”

“In that third year of the Kennedy presidency,” Manchester wrote, “a kind of fever lay over Dallas country. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed, ‘Impeach Earl Warren.’ Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas.…Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; corporate junior executives were required to attend radical seminars.” A retired major general ran the American flag upside down, deriding it as “the Democrat flag.” A wanted poster with J.F.K.’s face on it was circulated, announcing “this man is Wanted” for—among other things—“turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations” and appointing “anti-Christians … aliens and known Communists” to federal offices. And a full-page advertisement had appeared the day of the assassination in The Dallas Morning News accusing Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party; when it was shown to the president, he was appalled. He turned to Jacqueline, who was visibly upset, and said, “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today.”

Manchester discovered that in a wealthy Dallas suburb, when told that President Kennedy had been murdered in their city, the students in a fourth-grade class burst into applause.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/10/death-of-a-president200910?currentPage=1

This is a holy war for them, they will never stop.

Hell, the moderates are leaving the party, and the rest are now cheer leading the nutters.

... and I think they now find they were wrong, because the scorpions have entered the inner chambers of power and control the airwaves.

Apologies to any actual scorpions going about their business who might be offended.

Hekate

In the parable of the scorpion and the frog.

Riding a tiger (or holding it by the tail) can also get the rider eaten. There are some things in nature that the power-hungry never seem to learn.

Hekate

Great analogy.

So all they have remaining are the super rich corporatists, and the super dumb white trash.

It is MSM urban myth that children at a certain school cheered. They were told school had been canceled that day and no reason given though the principal of course knew why. The story was passed on by Dan Rather and they refused to budge though angry sources tried to deny that that version was ever given them.

I am sure at least this one incident and maybe others are myths looped around the expected Dallas extremist response which was most likely less than normal sympathetic shock. Similar to the legend of liberal protesters spitting on returning veterans.

Or I could be wrong. I find many many myths I have been taught or heard endlessly repeated over decades in the media are totally different with just a bit of research. Context puts them down so much closer to the state of affairs where we all live that it really tempers outrage, demonization or despair at mankind in general, OR knee jerk glorification of any man or achievement. Truth shows you the light and darkness. It has always better than tradition and assumption in my experience at least.

to put in his book. I was a HS student in a suburb of Boston in '63. It was a WASP Republican town. There were cheers by a few in my high school. I am not quite as quick to think that could not have happened in Dallas.

That goes to the point that there were jerks outside Dallas but I remember at first nobody, not even the teacher took it seriously at first when the message was handed him. He thought the message must have been a prank and then did a very slow take.

The children of Dallas were writing letters to the Kennedy family at the time, asking for forgiveness for the city and its people. I would never believe that Kennedy's death was celebrated here. I grew up in Dallas, around die hard Republicans, even some racists and "commie" hater types and I've never encountered anyone who expressed anything other than sadness over the assassination of JFK. Even my 80 year old neighbor who loathed the Kennedy family would get weepy eyed at remembrances.

Lee Harvey Oswald was an outsider in Dallas. He was a loner, not a member of Dallas society or any respected organizations.

"Lee Harvey Oswald was an outsider in Dallas. He was a loner, not a member of Dallas society or any respected organizations." ??? and IMO...LHO had nothing to do with any of it...but there were those who would have been considered part of Society, High Society even, who did....wb

Sent shivers up my spine.