A lot of good reader mail regarding the-Right-killed-Kennedy myth that Jonah and I discussed yesterday:
You might add the following gem from Bob Herbert’s Op-Ed today as Exhibit D:
Think about the Oklahoma City bombing, and the assassinations of King and the Kennedys. On Nov. 22, 1963, as they were preparing to fly to Dallas, a hotbed of political insanity, President Kennedy said to Mrs. Kennedy: “We’re heading into nut country today.”
This quote really sums up the hypocrisy of the left’s current race argument. It seems that they’ve forgotten the very reasons why it’s not acceptable to be a racist: it’s unfair to prejudge people based on their ethnic background, and doing so tends to lead to inaccurate conclusions. The same can also be said for other types of prejudice. Case in point: Herbert (and Kennedy) assume that the residents of Dallas were right-wing nuts (based on the fact that they were from Dallas), and that they were dangerous (based on the assumption that they were right-wing nuts). Not only are these assumptions unfair to Dallas residents, they also allow Herbert to absurdly imply that southern conservatives were responsible for Kennedy’s assassination. I wonder how many people believe this fallacy, and how much of a role their prejudices against Southerners and conservatives plays into their delusion.
And of course let’s not forget what superb journalist was instrumental in propagating this nonsense. A reader notes this Weekly Standard article from 2005:
It was a different lie–one delivered on national news, and at the expense of children–that caused Rather trouble at the time. As reporters from around the world descended on the Texas city, Rather went on the air with a local Methodist minister who made a stunning claim: Children at Dallas’s University Park Elementary School had cheered when told of the president’s death.
The tale was perfect for the moment, reinforcing the notion among distant media elites that Dallas was a reactionary “City of Hate.” It slyly played to a local audience, too: The school named was in upper-income University Park, one of two adjacent municipal enclaves that shared a school district and a reputation for fiercely protected, lily-white privilege. Finally, for the ambitious Rather–a native Texan and then a Dallas resident–the account represented the very sort of revealing, local dirt that the throngs of out-of-town competitors would have to work far harder to get.
Except that it wasn’t true, and Rather knew it, Barker says.
Approached earlier by the same minister with what was a second-hand account, Barker himself had run the story by the school’s principal and some teachers, all of whom denied it outright. Because of the shooting, which took place at 12:30 p.m., the principal had decided to close the school early, though without telling the students why. The children at the school–including three of Barker’s own–were merely happy to be going home early, he was told. There couldn’t have been any spontaneous cheering at the news of Kennedy’s murder, because no such news had been announced.
Undaunted, the dogged minister–”a very, very strong liberal and a very, very strong Kennedy supporter,” Barker says–moved on to Rather.
“Rather came to me, and I said, ‘My kids are in school there, and I checked it out, and there’s not a darn thing to it,’” says Barker. “He said, ‘Well, great–I’ll just forget it.’ But instead of forgetting it, he went out and did this gut job on Dallas and its conservatism,” with the preacher’s story at the center of his report.
