Ready to Listen Now?

Let’s see—officials clearly ready to subvert the Constitution to get and/or retain great political power? Check. Same officials lie and concoct stories to mislead Americans about the truth of a history-changing event? Check. The enforcement and intelligence communities who were supposed to stop that event lead the investigations and inform a commission which issues a reality-defying report? Check. A compliant media dutifully parrots the official line and disparages and minimizes critics? Check. And Arlen Specter is right there to pretend objective, dispassionate pursuit of truth and justice while really selling out the nation to the powers-that-be? Check.

Iraq and its aftermath? Nope. The Kennedy Assassination. If anything good can come from the clear perversion of our democracy by self-aggrandizing zealots who take upon themselves the power to pursue their dreams of shaping the world their way, maybe it will be a greater sympathy among prior skeptics for those of us who have see everything related to post-9/11 happen before. In 1963.

Digby recently ran a post on how the Josh Marshalls and Kevin Drums of the world have awakened to how their beknighted and long-defended “moderation” may have been a bit misguided. Their “it can’t happen here,” “only paranoids believe conspiracies happen” attitudes have been shared among their “moderate” and “civilized” brethren about the reality of Kennedy’s death for decades and held back the true accountability that may have established better defenses against the post-9/11 debacle. People who suddenly realize just how dishonest, incompetent, and malignant government types can be with regard to the last five years might, just might, now have the same realization about the same motivations and even people who convinced “moderate” America that a third-rate prosecutor’s brief guided by an FBI and a CIA doing major CYA and written by, guess who, Arlen Specter might not have gotten at the truth. Certainly that naïve faith in Hoover and the Warren “Let’s not scare Americans into WWIII” Commission should at least be shaken a bit.

The truth of Kennedy’s murder may never be known. Likely few of those who know its components are even still alive. If rogue zealots and/or vengeful Mafia types did take him out when the FBI and CIA should have stopped them (9/11, anyone?), then we clearly can’t expect any revelations from them, then or now. Killing JFK wouldn’t have required a ton of people to cover it up, just people who could be blamed for not preventing it. People can’t keep secrets this long? Please. Direct me to the study that proves that, all the controlled experiments on what happens in a presidential assassination, especially when “moderates” claim anyone who does come forward is psychotic.

Ironically, the post-9/11 fiasco has made it clearer to me why people whom I would trust to demand a far higher standard of evidence than has ever been provided by Arlen Specter’s report instead joined the scoffers. When writers I respect, Digby and Krugman and Greenwald, publicly admit that it’s only been in the last few years that they had gotten their clue about power, politics, and deceit EVEN IN AMERICA when it’s been expanding from Nixon on, then no wonder the Armstrongs and Drums likely still roll their eyes if you suggest the same forces with the same self-serving evil might have been at work to remove a president seen as caving in on nukes, commies, Cuba, Vietnam, oil, and Negroes and then cover it up later when whole agencies and institutions were at stake. (Look at what the “sane” folks do when you suggest today that undemocratic, power-hungry officials would rig elections through machines they control.) No, it’s probably too late for reality to be rediscovered about JFK’s killing, but at least the “it couldn’t happen in America” crowd will now have to explain why what happens in the 2000s couldn’t have happened in 1963.

POSTSCRIPT: Or not. Check this story blowing a giant hole in Specter’s “magic bullet” theory. Think about all the blogs you read. How many of them, Armstrong, Drum, Digby, Greenwald, any of them, have commented, linked to it? (Even as Greenwald essentially makes my case regarding the recent NSA wiretap coverage?) The only ones I’ve seen are Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerilla and Will Bunch at Attytood. Blinders never come completely off, do they? And so the threat will never be overcome.