The Grassy Knoll & Dan Savage
Dan Savage is an honored guest in the White House today because of the death of John F. Kennedy.
That's an important connection to keep in mind this year as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of JFK. Savage, of course, is the enraged, scatalogically-minded gay sex columnist and hysteric who wishes Republicans dead (including Sarah Palin, whom he wants to get mouth cancer) and calls the Bible "bulls*it."
Savage has a new book out, American Savage, and it's even too toxic for a liberal outlet like the New Republic. Savage has been an honored guest at the White House. His new book is a never-ending stream of resentment, rage, and self-hate. It's been observed that oftentimes the most virulently homophobic people are secretly gay; when one observes the volcanic levels of Dan Savage's rage, one suspects that inside him is Rick Santorum.
What does this have to do with the November 1963 murder of President Kennedy? A lot. As fall approaches there is going to come a wave of nostalgia and hagiography about Kennedy -- the Today Show will sentimentalize, op-ed and book authors will compare Kennedy to Obama, and Chris Matthews will slobber. Most of the remembrance will avoid what I consider the central fact about Kennedy's death -- that the president was killed by a Communist, and this fact caused liberalism to shatter and move radically left, resulting in the elevation of tyrants like Dan Savage.
This connection is made clear in James Piereson's remarkable book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. Piereson's book is deeply erudite and well researched, which is to say I am distilling its essence and ignoring much that is worthwhile in it in the name of space. The bottom line: John F. Kennedy, a Cold War hawk and tax cuter, was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Communist.
Kennedy was not a martyr to the civil rights movement, as liberals claim, but to the Cold War. This fact caused massive cognitive dissonance on the left, which going back to the Chambers-Hiss case (and maybe even 1917) had been arguing that Communism was no threat to the United States. When it turned out that it was a threat that could strike at the very heart of our society, liberals went into a strange and aggressive denial. There was simply no way the JFK was felled by a lone Communist with a single rifle. Therefore, he must have been taken down by... conservatives and the supposed "climate of hate" in Dallas.
As a result of the assassination, liberalism in America splintered. Some stuck to Kennedy's program of anti-Communism, low taxes, love of country, and what James Piereson calls the "reform liberalism" of previous decades -- that is, liberalism that sought to slowly reform government and society, not radically alter it. These people became known as neoconservatives. This was due to the fact that after Kennedy's death the majority of the left morphed into what fringe 1950s far-right conservatism was -- aggrieved, paranoid, and anti-American.
Piereson explains, "The anti-Americanism that marked the new radicalism of the 1960s was one of the most distinguishing features that most clearly marked its break from the reform liberalism of the preceding era. The United States -- now 'Amerika' in the lexicon of the New Left -- was now an out-of-control colossus, a world superpower that suppressed the aspiration of third world peoples abroad and minorities at home. The attributes that most Americans (and also the postwar liberals) thought were most valuable about their nation -- its prosperity, its free economy, its representative political institutions its tradition of liberty, its conquest of the American continent -- the radicals denounced as wicked, gross, disreputable."
This is the leftism of Barack Obama, and it has about as much in common with JFK as Dan Savage does with the pope.
There's only one element missing from the above list: sex. After Kennedy died, America was hit by the sexual revolution. Like most revolutions, it may have been needed, but went too far. Today's New New Left hates traditional sexual ethics, seeing in them repression, homophobia, misogyny, and just plain out-and-out hate. Dan Savage is perhaps the most damaged and disturbed advocate, railing against virginity, chastity rings, Christianity -- pretty much any form of self-restraint (Savage, a "married" homosexual, has an open relationship with his "husband" and has cheated more than ten times).
In the months leading up to November 23, 2013, there will be increasing coverage marking 50 years since that terrible day in Dallas. The coverage will be maudlin and mostly inaccurate. There will be attempts -- which will be successful for lack of mainstream media refutation -- to connect John F. Kennedy with Barack H. Obama. There will be talk of Lee Harvey Oswald, but not much looking into the Communism that led him to pull the trigger.
Because, you see, Kennedy was slain because he supported civil rights (he actually was reluctant to for years), not because he was a warrior of the Cold War. He was one of the long line of free-thinking progressives from Woodrow Wilson to Eugene Debs, through FDR and the Beatniks to Martin Luther King.
When the revisionism and hagiography gets going full bore, just ask yourself one question: Would John F. Kennedy have welcomed Dan Savage into the White House?
