Tag: John F. Kennedy

He’s fifty, he lost his job three years ago, he won’t ever have a job again because American companies don’t hire the long-term unemployed parasites.  He wakes up Sunday mornings now, with no way to hold his head that doesn’t hurt.  And the beer he has for breakfast isn’t bad, so he has one more for dessert.  Then he fumbles through his closet for his clothes, and finds his cleanest dirty shirt, and stumbles down the stairs to meet the day.

Meet the day, parasite.  Welcome to the Brave New World of the Wall Street Gods, welcome to the Shock Doctrine Century, welcome to hunger games and drones in the sky and batshit ten feet deep in the halls of Congress.  Get ready to dodge bullets when you walk out the door, the NRA has turned America into a free fire zone, remember to salute the Job Creators and the police, bring three forms of photo ID if you’re going to cross the street.  Bring some courage along if you have any left, but leave your dignity behind, you won’t need it out here, hardly anyone in this shit storm that used to be America even remembers what it is anymore.

On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, after hearing his brother had died at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Bobby Kennedy phoned CIA headquarters.  According to David Talbot in Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years . . .  

Bobby’s phone call to Langley on the afternoon of Nov. 22 was a stunning outburst.  Getting a ranking official on the phone–whose identity is still unknown–Kennedy confronted him in a voice vibrating with fury and pain. “Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?” Kennedy erupted.

RFK summoned the CIA director himself, John McCone, to ask him the same question. McCone, who had replaced the legendary Allen Dulles after the old spymaster had walked the plank for the Bay of Pigs, swore that his agency was not involved.

Despite this denial, Bobby Kennedy knew McCone was just a figurehead, he knew what the CIA was capable of, he knew all too well how many coups and assassinations the CIA had been involved in, and continued to suspect that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.    

In The Mother of All Coverups, David Talbot explains that Bobby Kennedy’s supportive public statements about the Warren Report “were obviously freighted with political and emotional, and perhaps even security concerns. But we have no doubt what his private opinion of the report was–as his biographer Evan Thomas wrote, Kennedy ‘regarded the Warren Commission as a public relations exercise to reassure the public.'”

RFK confided to close friends and advisers that as President, he would order a full investigation into his brother’s assassination.  His own death in a hail of assassin’s bullets prevented that, he was silenced, the truth was silenced.

It’s been said that the past is prologue.

It’s been said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

Maybe someday, Barack Obama will figure that out, maybe someday he’ll STFU about “looking forward” and enforce the rule of law so America won’t keep getting hit by one rightwing shitstorm after another.