Even Liberals Can Be Victims of Conspiracy Phobia - As on Kornacki This A.M.

It's really distressing to the critical thinker to behold the extent to which crappola continues to be spouted on the JFK assassination, particularly the media's consistent disparaging of the whole notion of conspiracy. And while most Europeans think we're idiots for believing that one lone nut killed Kennedy, in America that meme is just fine and dandy. After all, it keeps the hoi polloi in their comfort zones so they can tweet, play fantasy football, and watch 'Survivor' without being bothered.

This was fully on display this morning at the end of Kornacki's 'UP' program where the usual canards, shibboleths were trotted out in abundance. And, of course, who was front and center at Kornacki's  coffee table?  None other than the moron (or dupe) Philip Shenon, still trying to peddle his nonsense about Oswald declaring he wanted to kill JFK in Mexico City.  See e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/10/author-philip-shenon-is-he-idiot-or-dupe.html

Guest Walter Mears, a former AP reporter, and evidently on the verge of Alzheimers is no better, trying to peddle the baloney that "Oswald was the perfect guy for conspiracy theories" then reciting all kinds of idiocy such as "he  defects to Russia, went to Mexico City, kicked out of the Marines, etc." failing to distinguish actual actions from those that emerged from the false defector program I described 3 blogs ago. Mears  goes off the beam, trying to be sardonic or sarcastic, as when he blabs:

"I covered Washington well enough to know that if you have a conspiracy and three people are involved, one of them is going to blow the whistle."

To which all the guests laughed like idiots, unable to grasp how many witnesses were taken out one by one, not only at the time of the Warren Commission, but at the Garrison Investigation and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1978-79). Indeed, author Richard Charnin has proven - to a mathematical certainty, these witnesses could not have been offed by "coincidence" or some other claptrap. See:  http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/jfk-witness-deaths-graphical-proof-of-a-conspiracy/

Interestingly, Mears did get the key part of the JFK conspiracy right when he blurted: "And if two are involved, it will keep if one of them dies".

But in the JFK "Witness Death project" - likely carried out by CIA contract  hit men (such as killed William Bruce Pitzer), it obviously will also "keep" if dozens are killed - one by one as they are called to testify before any given investigation. (See Charnin's link and proof.) Mears actually nailed the reason for the lack of evidence he claimed not to see, but was too dumb to understand how or why. After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day!

Even Kornacki, an otherwise intelligent MSNBC host on most issues, fell down here,  displaying more ignorance and historical cluelessness than insight.  He made the embarrassing remark:

"Yeah, that's the other part here. We talk about the government as this sort of bumbling, bureaucratic mess. To pull off something as wide scale as in the Oliver Stone movie ('JFK') you try to reconcile that with the government we know."

But Steve K. conflates too many dissimilar factors. For one thing, only one sector was involved- and one clandestine services branch of that. It wasn't like that branch (Richard Helms' DDP) was trying to form an enormous collective involving everyone in gov't! These people didn't "bumble" either, having already shown they could take down the legitimate government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, see:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

Oh, btw, this same branch also took down a Cuban airliner over Barbados, on Oct. 6, 1976 killing all on board. And up to now, the perps involved have never been prosecuted - but we know who the key players were (Freddy Lugo, Hernan Ricardo, Luis Posada), though not the architects within the CIA who dispatched them.  So pardon me, if I have great disdain for any who smirk and laugh at a possible JFK conspiracy.

Steve also misses the boat on 'JFK' which Oliver Stone always maintained was a counter myth to the myth of the Warren Commission. Hence, Stone deliberately interjected all conceivable players to weave that narrative, but at least he was honest in doing so and admitted up front what he was doing (in several interviews I still have on tape, including one with Larry King on CNN from 1991). The WC, meanwhile, deliberately falsified records and evidence, including the autopsy photos and record. (See my FAQ (Pt. 4) on the Warren Commission.)

Both Mears and Kornacki also miss the point that there have been other conspiracies that survived a good deal of time without exposure -including:

- 'Project Stargate' - the DIA and CIA- sponsored program to 'exploit the paranormal' in psy warfare (London Electronic Telegraph, Issue 521,Saturday October 26, 1996) was concealed at least that long.

-MK Ultra which used LSD in secret experiments on military personnel, kept hidden for overt two decades.

-The massacre of South Korean civilians at NO Gun Ri by U.S. soldiers at the start of the Korean War, kept hidden for fifty years.

- The ZR-Rifle Assassination program, kept concealed over twenty-five years.

- The CIA's Report on its own dereliction in the Bay of Pigs, kept concealed over 35 years.

All of these in concert show how anti-conspiracy canards can and do acquire a life and validity of their own simply through repetition. But they're not any more credible from having been repeated - in the media or other venues - umpteen times!

The fact is the government is quite capable of keeping key operations and programs hidden, and the conspiracies associated with them. Indeed, 'black operations' ('black ops') are totally dedicated to that premise! In the JFK case, it is even more possible- given that no formal documents or papers were probably ever generated (by the architects) to sign off on the hit. Though as serious researchers have noted, one can examine exactly who profited in its wake.  We must also bear in mind, as Peter Dale Scott has observed, there are three components here: 1) the fictitious portrayal-framing of Oswald, 2) the actual killing of Kennedy (Executive Action), and 3) the ensuing cover-up, which sadly Kornacki and pals still appear to be part of, if not intentionally.


Then there's Robert MacNeil who chirps in his own two cents - while conceding he's never studied any conspiracy theory ( though he was in Dallas at the time):

"I have never seen any hard evidence that convinces me either that Oswald was not the shooter or that there was a conspiracy around it."

Then, Robert, I suggest you take a careful look at my Frequently Asked Questions, Part 5, related to the bullets and wounds. READ that through carefully, examine the images - and then tell me or write to me with a straight, sober face there was no conspiracy. If you can do that I award you The Utmost Idiot Medal of the Year.

Not content to offer his first "insight" MacNeil continues:

"I think the other piece of this is the emotional radiance Kennedy achieved in the minds of the public, and the inconceivability of that being shattered in this way, by this man."

Which regurgitates a decades long trope that 'Oh me, oh my, we were all so shocked, SHOCKED by the murder of a beloved President at the time - by an alleged filthy commie loner - that it was too much to accept and process'. Horse SHIT.

All MacNeil does here is echo what John Paulos wrote in his book, 'Irreligion' (2008, p. 108) dealing with people's emotional factors to do with belief and non-belief. He wrote:

"Lee Harvey Oswald was an unprepossessing nobody who seemed ill-suited for the job of Giant-slayer. There had to be something more, and maybe there was, but one added reason for the intense fascination with other possibilities was that significant consequences must necessarily be the result of significant perpetrators. Similar remarks apply to the death of Princess Diana"


Paulos’ major error again is in conflating the personal political value of JFK with the value of the assassination. Thus, whether Lee Oswald was an “unprepossessing nobody” or an intel contract agent who tried to warn of an earlier assassination[1], is immaterial to the proposal of a conspiracy hypothesis in JFK’s assassination. The fact is that the assassination as an event had immense historical ramifications.

One of many was the Vietnam War which Kennedy clearly planned to terminate as per his National Security Action Memorandum 263, by the end of 1965.  With Johnson’s ascension to power, his NSAM -273 (allowing for full military engagement) could easily trump JFK’s NSAM-263, and the final touch was the bogus firing on the Turner Joy in claimed international waters in Aug. 1964- the trigger for the massive U.S. military action leading to 58,000 lives lost.

Other historical ramifications can easily be followed if one has the mind, the political insight and the intestinal fortitude. For example, the $269 billion squandered on the Vietnam War meant that the Apollo Moon missions had to be short circuited (last one launched in 1973), since the money wasn’t there to further the early lunar visitations. One can exactly trace that truncated space program arc to the conservative near-Earth Shuttle program.

 

The point is that the assassination was the primary event, not John F. Kennedy per se. It was the assassination that altered the arc of American history for the worse. It was the assassination  that had the high political value, since with Kennedy out of the way, many more nefarious initiatives could be undertaken, including assassinations and launching an 8-plus year undeclared war in Vietnam, for the benefit of war profiteers and oil companies.

 

Of course, because Paulos - and Robert MacNeil likewise- err by mistaking the low political value of the person for the high political value of the assassination,  they similarly err by believing the choice to embrace conspiracy is contingent on the shock effect of an emotional loss to a "loser". But had either enough history and deep politics education they'd see how stupid this sounds. Further, if they knew how hard many of us worked to dig up the FACTS through filing requests, and pouring through the files released they wouldn't be so damned dismissive of conspiracy in this case. Or so brain dead as to embrace Philip Shenon's palpable BS.

What we (including authors James Douglass and Michael Parenti) want is for the nation to finally face this tragedy without pretense or specious rationalizations. No denials, no subterfuge, no deflections and no more excuses for intelligence agency stone-walling and inaction. Or, protecting their asses by specious arguments because it's believed the American people can't handle the truth that their own government (at least one branch) played a major role in Kennedy's killing.

We do so not to "run from reality", a demeaning choice of canard from the pseudo-historians, but confront it. As Michael Parenti has pointedly noted ('The Dirty Truth'. p. 186), we:

"are raising grave questions about the nature of state power in what is supposed to be a democracy."

Parenti also notes (op. cit., p.174):


" Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: 'Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room, plotting things?' For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers.  But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels?"

 I sincerely hope my Brane Space readers don't suffer from conspiracy phobia, because I believe this 50th anniversary year of the assassination is the time to let it all hang out in terms of smashing through the cobwebs of manufactured delirium and false history with which we've all been saddled. That is a primary reason I am expending a lot of energy on these assassination-related posts which I think people have a right to see, and in the process learn of our real history. Yes, it will often be painful, but unlike Steve Kornacki and his guests I am betting they can handle the truth.
 

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[1] See, e.g. Douglass, op. cit., p 200 (and further) with reference to an “informant named Lee” who phoned to expose the plot to kill Kennedy in Chicago on November 2, 1963- the same day the Diems were to be executed in Vietnam. As Douglass observes, had that earlier plot succeeded, the accused lone-nut assassin we’d be arguing about would be another former Marine, Thomas Arthur Vallee, not Lee Harvey Oswald.