Wanted for Treason poster put up the day of Kennedy's killing: all were put up (as well as a 'Welcome to Dallas' newspaper ad) at the behest of Right Wing Oil Tycoon Haroldson Lafayette Hunt.
Frame Z-313 of the Zapruder film: Jackie pursues a piece of JFK's skull over the limo trunk. This shows the kill shot could not have come from the Texas School Book Depository so Lee Oswald could not have made it.
Pastor Mikey ever believing he and his lot know more about reality than the 90% inhabiting the sane and rational world (despite the fact that one of George W. Bush's lackeys once opined they no longer follow reality - they "create it"), occasionally puts up video clips of his heroes spouting gibberish and reconstructed historical or other rubbish. One can see the latest clip by an Andrew Klavan (a hack novelist who fancies himself a historian) at Mikey's blog:
http://pastorstahl.blogspot.com/
(For today, February 5th).
I don’t intend to wade through all of Klavan’s unoriginal rubbish, just to take the first – to do with John F. Kennedy, who he (and the other Right revisionists like Charles Krauthammer et al) have always portrayed as a “Tax cutting Cold Warrior” because it suits their mythological fancies to believe a Dem president now iconized was once aligned with their war-starting, tax-cutting follies to starve government (since if the government squanders its money on wars and tax cuts it can’t have anything left for domestic needs).
I suppose I should at least recommend one book to these revisionist knotheads, not that they’d read it – but who knows? It's possible a conservo could become a changeling just like a band of ten thousand monkeys sitting at as many keyboards might type out a monkey "Hamlet". The book I recommend, should they ever want the bottom line truth on Jack Kennedy, is James Douglass’ ‘JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters’.
Most skeptics and conspiracy deniers, as Douglass notes, are unable to confront the unspeakable: they're more than happy to give it cover by their denial. (By "unspeakable", Douglas means a core evil so hideous it must be concealed at all costs) At root, is the denial of what really happened to JFK. Those in denial that it was a vile conspiracy are the sleepwalkers among us who have allowed evil to thrive and prosper the past 47 years. This includes most of the American Right, because they know that their Oil tycoons and segregationists had an enormous hatred for Kennedy – not least because he threatened their major corporations (e.g. U.S. Steel), and also federalized National Guards in Alabama and Mississippi to accommodate school integration. Worst of all, freedom of information files show he planned a full pullout from Vietnam by 1965 - thus raising their ire and hysteria.
Further- the ‘Wanted for Treason’ posters (see one shown) that appeared in Big D the day Kennedy was slain in Dallas, weren’t put up by Lee Harvey Oswald, but by the funds from Right Wing extremist Dallas Oil Tycoon H.L. Hunt (who used to run the hate radio program Facts Forum in the 50s), and distributed by his lackey "Bernard Weissman" (probably a fictitious name).
As Douglass notes:
“Our collective denial of the obvious, in the setting up of Oswald and his transparent silencing by Ruby, made possible the Dallas coverup. The success of the coverup was the indispensable foundation for the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy by the same forces at work in our government – and ourselves”.
Adding:
“Hope for change in the world was targeted and killed four times over. The cover-up of all four murders, each leading into the next, was based – first of all –on denial. Not the government’s but our own- and the unspeakable was not far away.”
Of all the contents in the book, perhaps the most important for the unreconstructed skeptic to read (and turn himself) is Chapter One: ‘A Cold Warrior Turns’.
Therein, with impeccable attention to chronological detail, and also use of FOIA released documents, Douglass shows unimpeachably that JFK turned from his initial cold warrior stance to become the primary threat to the military-industrial-security state, and hence placed in its crosshairs.
Kennedy was an initial Cold Warrior – complaining that the U.S. was “behind in the missile race” – because he knew if he wasn’t tough in his portrayal he’d never beat Nixon. As it was the election was razor thin (though even here Right wingers invent revisionist mythology to assert JFK “stole the 1960 election from Nixon by getting Illinois' electoral votes thanks to Mafia help". They are correct about a Mafia influence in Chicago precinct counts, but it would not have made any difference in outcome. The loss of Illinois would still have left Kennedy a thin margin over the 270 electoral votes needed.
What turned Kennedy? Probably the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or “Operation Zapata” as it was called by the CIA. Not Kennedy's baby, but IKE's! It was actually fully developed in the Eisenhower administration and was to be executed had Nixon become president instead of JFK.
But Ike, rather than helping the newbie prez out and either icing the project, or at least warning Kennedy, instead tossed this bogus hot potato into his lap claiming a "national security issue".
Worse, the CIA itself kept him in the dark about it. Didn't allow him to know all the holes in the plan, why it was doomed to fail. BAD on THEM! Thus, the Bay of Pigs, that was not JFK's "mistake"- but the CIA's and they had already taken the blame for that pot-assed program, as well they should!
As per a Baltimore Sun piece on the above named Report ('Internal Probe Blamed Bay of Pigs Fiasco on CIA', p. 6A, Feb. 22, 1998), it was noted:
"The 150-page report, released after sitting in the CIA Director's safe for nearly three decades, blames the disastrous attempt to oust Fidel Castro NOT (emphasis mine) on President John F. Kennedy's failure to call airstrikes, but on the agency itself.
The CIA's ignorance, incompetence, and arrogance toward the 1,400 exiles it trained and equipped to mount the invasion was responsible for the fiasco, said the report, obtained by the Associated Press yesterday.
The document criticized almost every aspect of the CIA's handling of the invasion: misinforming Kennedy administration officials, planning poorly, using faulty intelligence and conducting an overt military operation beyond 'agency responsibility as well as agency capability"
- WSJ 8/6/62 'No Cause for Celebration'; p. 6;
- WSJ 3/26/63 'Too Much Money, Too Little Thought', p. 18;
- WSJ 8/15/63 'When Friends Become Foes', p. 8
Dimwits like Klavan (or, being generous, maybe they are deliberate obfuscators and propagandists), fail to point out the actual legislative passage of tax cuts (mainly under congressional pressure) was for Kennedy to later have the same Senators on board for his domestic legislation (he actually conceived Medicare) and later Civil Rights laws.
Even so, the historical revisionists like Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Klavan fail to point out:
1) Tax rates (marginal) were already at 91% and Congress merely lowered them to 65%
2) Most of the tax cuts (85%) were aimed at the middle and working class, not the wealthy.
As for the Kennedy assassination itself, and Klavan's making a big deal of Oliver Stone's 'JFK' - maybe Klavan never got the message that Stone didn't intend 'JFK' to be accurate or historical. In a Larry King (1991) interview (which I fotunately still have on tape - and btw, I maintain 3 VCRs for my old tapes, as well as DVD players) Stone bluntly tells King that the film was intended as a "counter-mythology" to the mythology of the Warren Commission.
Stone admitted in the interview he didn't expect anyone to take the film at face value, and certainly not if they'd already done their homework on the case (as I had for some twenty years before the film appeared). More importantly, Stone's movie prompted the passage of The JFK Records Act- without which relevant files would have remained sealed until 2039. In the meantime those files have disclosed that even more motives have emerged, including one of the most powerful: Kennedy's rapprochement with Fidel Castro through the latter's aide-de-camp, Rene Vallejo- which would have set all the heads of the anti-Castro Cubans and their CIA backers aflame with rage. (Maybe one reason the CIA still refuses to release any files to do with CIA Cuban handler George Joannides.)
Here the guy not only punts on providing air cover to the anti-Castro Cubans on the Bay of Pigs, then he refuses to invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis - and NOW he's making nicey with Castro's main attache behind the backs of the national security state!
And THIS is the "Cold Warrior" Klavan and the befuddled Right hold out as some counter example to what liberals acknowledge? Give me a fuckin' break!
As for the assassination proper, it was obvious from the firing times and acoustics analsysis (re-done by D.B. Thomas in 2001) that at least four shots had been fired - and hence Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 mm rifle would not have been able to make them - given its bolt action recycling time was 2.33 seconds. Four shots would have meant a minimal time of nearly 7 seconds starting with the first shot at time zero. But all the impulses arrive within 5.6 seconds. Hence, there had to be at least TWO shooters, and possibly more (in the full acoustic record at least six impulses are 10dB higher than any other sounds and hence probable gunshots.) More recently a Michael O'Dell has attempted to nullify the 2001 echo correlation of D.B. Thomas but O'Dell misses the boat on numerous fronts - including that his "corrective" linear regression formula: C = 0.000406(T2 - T1/2) + 0.601909 (T2 - T1) doesn't even give the correct predicted values from his own table of times! Worse, he still doesn't address the actual 1978 tests that validated the original placement of impulses, preferring to be led around by a 60Hz hum tone, which merely shows the dictabelt tape was a copy.
Did Oswald make any shots? Not with that rifle! The Warren Commission enlisted a trio of crack Army experts to try and duplicate the feat and they were unable to do so with his alleged rifle - even lowering the elevation to 30' (from 60' - since Oswald was supposedly on the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository) and making the limo target vehicle stationary, instead of moving at 11 mph. Even so, they couldn't make the shots, and had to toss the actual Oswald-alleged rifle away (actually it was put in the National Archives where no one is allowed to handle it) and substitute another model.
Trouble is, this isn't kosher. Once you exchange rifles you're no longer replicating the actual feat you're putting on a side show. Worse, S.F. Latonia (of the FBI's latent fingerprints specialists at the time) pointedly noted there were no prints of Oswald's on the rifle and none appeared - magically - until after his shooting - killing. Hmmmmm....
The final nail in the coffin of the Oswald-did-it malarkey is the key Zapruder film frame (Z-313) shown, with Jackie going over the limo trunk to try and retrieve a piece of JFK's skull (in her own testimony to the Warren Commission Special Hearings, Vol. V).
Newtonian dynamics from basic physics sheds the light. IF the shot came from the Texas Book Depository to the left (to the rear of the limo) Kennedy's skull fragment would not have been hurled in that direction. The transfer of momentum is always in the direction of the initial impulse. Thus, in order to drive Kennedy's head back, and specifically a piece of it over the trunk - with Jackie in pursuit- the shot had to have come from the front, or in the vicinity of the Grassy knoll.
In other words, Oswald could not have made the kill shot.
Maybe Klavan, before his gives his next podcast, needs to brush up on his basic physics as well. Maybe he can take a community college course along with Pastor Mikey!
http://pastorstahl.blogspot.com/
(For today, February 5th).
I don’t intend to wade through all of Klavan’s unoriginal rubbish, just to take the first – to do with John F. Kennedy, who he (and the other Right revisionists like Charles Krauthammer et al) have always portrayed as a “Tax cutting Cold Warrior” because it suits their mythological fancies to believe a Dem president now iconized was once aligned with their war-starting, tax-cutting follies to starve government (since if the government squanders its money on wars and tax cuts it can’t have anything left for domestic needs).
I suppose I should at least recommend one book to these revisionist knotheads, not that they’d read it – but who knows? It's possible a conservo could become a changeling just like a band of ten thousand monkeys sitting at as many keyboards might type out a monkey "Hamlet". The book I recommend, should they ever want the bottom line truth on Jack Kennedy, is James Douglass’ ‘JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters’.
Most skeptics and conspiracy deniers, as Douglass notes, are unable to confront the unspeakable: they're more than happy to give it cover by their denial. (By "unspeakable", Douglas means a core evil so hideous it must be concealed at all costs) At root, is the denial of what really happened to JFK. Those in denial that it was a vile conspiracy are the sleepwalkers among us who have allowed evil to thrive and prosper the past 47 years. This includes most of the American Right, because they know that their Oil tycoons and segregationists had an enormous hatred for Kennedy – not least because he threatened their major corporations (e.g. U.S. Steel), and also federalized National Guards in Alabama and Mississippi to accommodate school integration. Worst of all, freedom of information files show he planned a full pullout from Vietnam by 1965 - thus raising their ire and hysteria.
Further- the ‘Wanted for Treason’ posters (see one shown) that appeared in Big D the day Kennedy was slain in Dallas, weren’t put up by Lee Harvey Oswald, but by the funds from Right Wing extremist Dallas Oil Tycoon H.L. Hunt (who used to run the hate radio program Facts Forum in the 50s), and distributed by his lackey "Bernard Weissman" (probably a fictitious name).
As Douglass notes:
“Our collective denial of the obvious, in the setting up of Oswald and his transparent silencing by Ruby, made possible the Dallas coverup. The success of the coverup was the indispensable foundation for the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy by the same forces at work in our government – and ourselves”.
Adding:
“Hope for change in the world was targeted and killed four times over. The cover-up of all four murders, each leading into the next, was based – first of all –on denial. Not the government’s but our own- and the unspeakable was not far away.”
Of all the contents in the book, perhaps the most important for the unreconstructed skeptic to read (and turn himself) is Chapter One: ‘A Cold Warrior Turns’.
Therein, with impeccable attention to chronological detail, and also use of FOIA released documents, Douglass shows unimpeachably that JFK turned from his initial cold warrior stance to become the primary threat to the military-industrial-security state, and hence placed in its crosshairs.
Kennedy was an initial Cold Warrior – complaining that the U.S. was “behind in the missile race” – because he knew if he wasn’t tough in his portrayal he’d never beat Nixon. As it was the election was razor thin (though even here Right wingers invent revisionist mythology to assert JFK “stole the 1960 election from Nixon by getting Illinois' electoral votes thanks to Mafia help". They are correct about a Mafia influence in Chicago precinct counts, but it would not have made any difference in outcome. The loss of Illinois would still have left Kennedy a thin margin over the 270 electoral votes needed.
What turned Kennedy? Probably the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or “Operation Zapata” as it was called by the CIA. Not Kennedy's baby, but IKE's! It was actually fully developed in the Eisenhower administration and was to be executed had Nixon become president instead of JFK.
But Ike, rather than helping the newbie prez out and either icing the project, or at least warning Kennedy, instead tossed this bogus hot potato into his lap claiming a "national security issue".
Worse, the CIA itself kept him in the dark about it. Didn't allow him to know all the holes in the plan, why it was doomed to fail. BAD on THEM! Thus, the Bay of Pigs, that was not JFK's "mistake"- but the CIA's and they had already taken the blame for that pot-assed program, as well they should!
As per a Baltimore Sun piece on the above named Report ('Internal Probe Blamed Bay of Pigs Fiasco on CIA', p. 6A, Feb. 22, 1998), it was noted:
"The 150-page report, released after sitting in the CIA Director's safe for nearly three decades, blames the disastrous attempt to oust Fidel Castro NOT (emphasis mine) on President John F. Kennedy's failure to call airstrikes, but on the agency itself.
The CIA's ignorance, incompetence, and arrogance toward the 1,400 exiles it trained and equipped to mount the invasion was responsible for the fiasco, said the report, obtained by the Associated Press yesterday.
The document criticized almost every aspect of the CIA's handling of the invasion: misinforming Kennedy administration officials, planning poorly, using faulty intelligence and conducting an overt military operation beyond 'agency responsibility as well as agency capability"
The actual CIA document, which appeared in the book, The Bay of Pigs Declassified, edited by Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive, gave all the sordid details behind the scheme and how Kennedy got sucked into it. In particular, the Report noted that The Agency committed at least four extremely serious mistakes
i)Failure to subject the project, especially in its latter, frenzied stages to a cold and objective appraisal by the best talent available before submitting the final plan to Kennedy.
ii)Failure to advise the President, at an appropriate time, that the mission’s success had become dubious- and to recommend the operation therefore be canceled.
iii)Failure to recognize the project had become overt and that the military effort had become too large to be handled by the Agency alone.
iv)Failure to reduce successive project plans (dating back to 1959) to formal papers and to leave copies with the President and his advisors, to request specific written approval, confirmation thereof
The most severe skewering of the nonsense that JFK was some rabid Cold Warrior comes out of the words of the Joint Chiefs themselves, including General Curtis Lemay. This was at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October, 1962, when JFK refused the Joint Chiefs' advice to bomb then invade Cuba. As reported from just-released FOIA files in The Baltimore Sun, Oct. 26, 1996, 'Bomb Cuba! Le May Urged JFK', p. 2A, LeMay denounced Kennedy and lambasted his naval blockade. LeMay's exact words were:
"This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich."
Comparing JFK's decision to the sellout of Neville Chamberlain to Hitler at Munich, which paved the way for Hitler's aggression in The Sudetenland and Poland. Now, if Klavan is really as bright as he makes out to be, perhaps he can address the issue of why LeMay - the top military man- would regard Kennedy's actions as "appeasement"? Inquiring minds want to know. Certainly no real Cold Warrior would appease, eh?
Klavan, if he took time to read his history instead of bloviating on You tube videos about "liberal fantasies" and other red herrings, would also learn that the Military command was even more pissed at Kennedy after he moved all the Jupiter missiles out of Turkey 6 months later. The final straw for them was probably Kennedy's decision to pull out all personnel out of Vietnam by 1965 under National Security Action Memorandum 263. (Overturned by NSAM-273 when Johnson assumed power.)
Klavan’s mythology that Kennedy was a rabid tax cutter is belied by the fact that the major organs of finance like the Wall Street Journal and Forbes regularly castigated him as a "statist" (because of his numerous tax INCREASE proposals) and shows how fearful they were of just his proposals! See for example the Journal demolition pieces on JFK:- WSJ 8/6/62 'No Cause for Celebration'; p. 6;
- WSJ 3/26/63 'Too Much Money, Too Little Thought', p. 18;
- WSJ 8/15/63 'When Friends Become Foes', p. 8
Dimwits like Klavan (or, being generous, maybe they are deliberate obfuscators and propagandists), fail to point out the actual legislative passage of tax cuts (mainly under congressional pressure) was for Kennedy to later have the same Senators on board for his domestic legislation (he actually conceived Medicare) and later Civil Rights laws.
Even so, the historical revisionists like Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Klavan fail to point out:
1) Tax rates (marginal) were already at 91% and Congress merely lowered them to 65%
2) Most of the tax cuts (85%) were aimed at the middle and working class, not the wealthy.
As for the Kennedy assassination itself, and Klavan's making a big deal of Oliver Stone's 'JFK' - maybe Klavan never got the message that Stone didn't intend 'JFK' to be accurate or historical. In a Larry King (1991) interview (which I fotunately still have on tape - and btw, I maintain 3 VCRs for my old tapes, as well as DVD players) Stone bluntly tells King that the film was intended as a "counter-mythology" to the mythology of the Warren Commission.
Stone admitted in the interview he didn't expect anyone to take the film at face value, and certainly not if they'd already done their homework on the case (as I had for some twenty years before the film appeared). More importantly, Stone's movie prompted the passage of The JFK Records Act- without which relevant files would have remained sealed until 2039. In the meantime those files have disclosed that even more motives have emerged, including one of the most powerful: Kennedy's rapprochement with Fidel Castro through the latter's aide-de-camp, Rene Vallejo- which would have set all the heads of the anti-Castro Cubans and their CIA backers aflame with rage. (Maybe one reason the CIA still refuses to release any files to do with CIA Cuban handler George Joannides.)
Here the guy not only punts on providing air cover to the anti-Castro Cubans on the Bay of Pigs, then he refuses to invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis - and NOW he's making nicey with Castro's main attache behind the backs of the national security state!
And THIS is the "Cold Warrior" Klavan and the befuddled Right hold out as some counter example to what liberals acknowledge? Give me a fuckin' break!
As for the assassination proper, it was obvious from the firing times and acoustics analsysis (re-done by D.B. Thomas in 2001) that at least four shots had been fired - and hence Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 mm rifle would not have been able to make them - given its bolt action recycling time was 2.33 seconds. Four shots would have meant a minimal time of nearly 7 seconds starting with the first shot at time zero. But all the impulses arrive within 5.6 seconds. Hence, there had to be at least TWO shooters, and possibly more (in the full acoustic record at least six impulses are 10dB higher than any other sounds and hence probable gunshots.) More recently a Michael O'Dell has attempted to nullify the 2001 echo correlation of D.B. Thomas but O'Dell misses the boat on numerous fronts - including that his "corrective" linear regression formula: C = 0.000406(T2 - T1/2) + 0.601909 (T2 - T1) doesn't even give the correct predicted values from his own table of times! Worse, he still doesn't address the actual 1978 tests that validated the original placement of impulses, preferring to be led around by a 60Hz hum tone, which merely shows the dictabelt tape was a copy.
Did Oswald make any shots? Not with that rifle! The Warren Commission enlisted a trio of crack Army experts to try and duplicate the feat and they were unable to do so with his alleged rifle - even lowering the elevation to 30' (from 60' - since Oswald was supposedly on the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository) and making the limo target vehicle stationary, instead of moving at 11 mph. Even so, they couldn't make the shots, and had to toss the actual Oswald-alleged rifle away (actually it was put in the National Archives where no one is allowed to handle it) and substitute another model.
Trouble is, this isn't kosher. Once you exchange rifles you're no longer replicating the actual feat you're putting on a side show. Worse, S.F. Latonia (of the FBI's latent fingerprints specialists at the time) pointedly noted there were no prints of Oswald's on the rifle and none appeared - magically - until after his shooting - killing. Hmmmmm....
The final nail in the coffin of the Oswald-did-it malarkey is the key Zapruder film frame (Z-313) shown, with Jackie going over the limo trunk to try and retrieve a piece of JFK's skull (in her own testimony to the Warren Commission Special Hearings, Vol. V).
Newtonian dynamics from basic physics sheds the light. IF the shot came from the Texas Book Depository to the left (to the rear of the limo) Kennedy's skull fragment would not have been hurled in that direction. The transfer of momentum is always in the direction of the initial impulse. Thus, in order to drive Kennedy's head back, and specifically a piece of it over the trunk - with Jackie in pursuit- the shot had to have come from the front, or in the vicinity of the Grassy knoll.
In other words, Oswald could not have made the kill shot.
Maybe Klavan, before his gives his next podcast, needs to brush up on his basic physics as well. Maybe he can take a community college course along with Pastor Mikey!
3 comments:
"maybe Klavan never got the message that Stone didn't intend 'JFK' to be accurate or historical."
I'm glad he didn't intend it to be that way because it was in fact neither. That's the point Klavan was making. I just saw Oliver Stone on Rogan's podcast and Joe repeats the very phrase "pristine bullet". It was far from pristine and yet thanks to Stone's shitty movie, this lie....sorry "alternative myth" is firmly embedded in the American conscience(along with hundreds of "alternative myths" created by Hollywood), and trotted out as undeniable fact. The myth has become reality. As a writer you need to work on your listening skills. That was and is Klavan's point.
As far as your many personal attacks against Klavan, I suspect petty jealousy.
Puh-leeze! Sorry, the "magic bullet" was essentially that and for all intents, pristine. Check my FAQ: http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/frequently-asked-questions-on-jfk_15.html
Reference to Fig. 3 (a) and the comparison between bullets.
Conclusion? It was in a relatively unmarked, undamaged or PRISTINE state. Hence, clearly planted at Parkland. So please don't say it was "far from pristine"!
Stone's movie also was not 'shitty' but actually highlighted numerous plausible aspects of how the actual conspiracy could have unfolded, included the MIC reactions to JFK's peace moves, e.g. using NSAM 263 to pull out of Viet Nam. The scenes in the Garrison courtroom are also accurate, as when the Zapruder film was shown to the jury. The emphasis being on the shot coming from the front, as Parkland surgeon Charles Crenshaw pointed out. (See my recent post on John Oliver's flubbing it, comparing the JFK hit to the attempted one on Reagan and the link to the pdf of Crenshaw's book, 'Conspiracy of Silence'.
As for petty jealousy, of what? Because this fool gets on you tube and spouts bollocks regarding history he knows nothing about? Get real.
On that note, further discussions on Klavan or his claptrap are closed as this post is 9 years old. So no more comments will be posted concerning Klavan or his propaganda. If you want to argue more about the JFK assassination kindly reference more recent posts and make your case from those as opposed to 'ancient' material already skewered as codswallop.
Further note for future reference: I tend to take comments more seriously and the commenter as well, when not made hiding behind an 'Unknown' monicker. If you have the courage of your convictions and really mean what you say you don't have to hide behind an 'Unknown' profile!
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