Why Do The Brits Hate Trump? You’ve Got to Read This Englishman’s Take-Down of Donny Dipshit

I found this item on a British forum where the ugliness of Trump was being discussed. A man named Mr. White posted this in response to the prompt, “Why Do The British Dislike Donny the Turd.” It is as eloquent as it is cheeky. It has gone viral, and I am reprinting it here for my readers.

“A few things spring to mind…

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.

For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.

So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.

I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.

But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll.

And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.

Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.

And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.

rump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.

He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.

He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.

That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.

There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think

‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’

is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.

After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form;

He is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit.

His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.

God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.

He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.

In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:

‘My God… what… have… I… created?

If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.”

Take that, you obese, petty narcissist.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

The Cruelty of Neo-Catholicism in the Age of MAGA…or How Covington Catholic Punks Turn My Stomach

As part of the yearly commemoration of MLK Day, MSNBC aired a documentary about the slain civil rights leader. Prominent in the film was the Selma march in 1965, a watershed moment in the fight for African-American equality. Filmmakers and TV cameras captured Alabama policemen beating peaceful protestors. I’ve seen this southern horror many times, but what I failed to notice were some of the white protestors who had joined the blacks for the second Selma demonstration. There they were, Catholic priests and nuns, outraged by the injustice of it all, arm-in-arm with negroes (the term of the day), doing God’s work and living the Church’s clarion call for social justice.

Flash forward to DC last weekend, on MLK weekend no less, and witness the new Catholic-protest paradigm–mocking minorities instead of fighting for them and wearing the insignia of an amoral, racist sociopath (Trump). Now ask yourself, what happened to Catholic dogma in the intervening 54 years? How did the fight for social justice devolve into a cruel, senseless joke? What’s at the heart of neo-Catholicism’s heartlessness?

Writing in OpEd News, B.K. Faunce has an answer. “What you see in these fresh-faced, Trump-loving young men is the inevitable product of a decades-long shift the Catholic church has undergone in moving away from its historical roots in social justice (love thy neighbor) and into its philosophical and ideological opposite, a postmodern or neo-Catholicism.”

Instead of the earnest demeanor of Selma Catholics doing what Jesus would do, the postmodern Catholic displays a smug superiority and is given to demeaning those who are not them–white, condescending, and dismissive. Or as Faunce describes the typical Covington kid, “…sunny, smarmy, privileged, uncouth, aggressive, abusive. Someone whose life is taken care of and whose needs are met, whose clothes are cleaned and pressed, whose food is prepared, whose room is cleaned. Someone who looks no further than the end of his nose to see the world reflected in his own image.”

Who made them this way? Certainly, indulgent parents who taught them no social values beyond what they, by birthskin, are entitled to. The right of white and the diminution of all whose shades are darker. But where is the church in all this? Aren’t the teachings of Jesus part of the curriculum? How do the faculty and clergy overlook the fact that the Nazarene was a long-haired, destitute outsider who deplored the corruption and amorality of the political establishment and reminded us that what we do to the least of men we do to him?

In the age of pedophilia scandals and Vatican excess, the church has circled the wagons. As Faunce puts it, neo-Catholicism demands “Do unto others before they do unto you. Aid and abet the ruling elites: you never know when you might need a friend…Take from the poor and give to the rich. Cheat homeowners, ignore climate change, poison drinking water everywhere. Above all else, demonize the poor, the aged and the infirm, for they will inherit nothing but the whirlwind…neo-Catholics reject outright the good news of the New Testament in favor of Iron Age traditions that emphasize cruelty, hatred, violence, greed and war.”

Where are the Catholic leaders in all this? Are they to blame for the ugly paradigm shift? They are so worried about their own survival that they have made deals with the devil himself. Don’t prosecute us; don’t outlaw our outlaw enterprise; look the other way when we violate children; don’t take away our tax exemption; keep pumping the dough into the collection basket…we need it for our defense fund.

If the MAGA punks of Covington Catholic are the practitioners of neo-Catholicism, then they learned it the hard way, from parents and clergy who care about no one but themselves. If Selma happened today, 2019 Catholics would condemn those uppity blacks for having the temerity to demand equality in a world that belongs to the white man by Scripture and force.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

There are more Children in Trump’s Concentration Camps than Previously Reported. Time for Kirstjen “Eva Braun” Nielsen to be Fired.

A new government report indicates that the kidnapping, separation and detention of children is worse than we thought. Which raises two questions: why would we ever believe anything Trump says, and how does Kirstjen Nielsen still have a job?

While the administration said that more than 2,500 children had been kidnapped under in 2018, the Office of the Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General has confirmed that officials were separating families long before that. “How many more children were separated is unknown by us and HHS,” the OIG said Thursday. According to NBC News, “some may have been released to family or nonrelative sponsors, but it is not known how many have been reunified.”

Newly empowered House Democrats weighed in on this humanitarian disaster. “I have been seeking information that would help reunify these children since last year, but the Trump administration refuses to comply,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who now leads the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “As Chairman, I will do everything in my power to obtain the documents I’ve requested to ensure the administration is held accountable for this callous and immoral policy.”

What is unknowable is how the long-term emotional and psychological damage will affect the victimized children. At least there is not a demented Mengele-type doctor performing sadistic experiments on twins, right? The terrible thing is, I wouldn’t put it past Herr Gropenfuhrer.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

Trump is Labeled a Sadist by Prominent Pyschiatrist

In a recent interview with Salon magazine, Dr. John Gartner, a former Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist, warned America that there is a monster in the White House and that this is not going to end well for the country. All reasonable people know that Trump is a bonafide narcissist, but Dr. Gartner says it’s much worse. Why? Because Trump has a uniquely malignant form of narcissism–he is sadistic narcissist, one who is not only incapable of empathy but who actually enjoys inflicting pain on others. And when he is threatened, he will viciously lash out with whatever means he has, no mater how violent, harmful, or destructive those means are. Do I have to remind you he has the nuclear codes?

Dr. Gartner put it this way: “When I first started talking about Trump as a malignant narcissist, people could see the narcissism, the paranoia and the antisocial element. But the fourth component of malignant narcissism is sadism.

“You see it in everything he does, from the separating of the children at the border to how Trump tortures anyone who doesn’t give him what he wants. There’s a way in which he takes a kind of manic glee in causing harm and pain and humiliation to other people.

“Malignant narcissists deteriorate. When they gain power, they become more inflamed in their grandiosity and in their paranoia. They also become more unrestrained in their sadism and in their will to [maintain] power. Malignant narcissists like Trump are antisocial and have a willingness to do anything to get and keep power. The noted psychologist Erich Fromm actually argued that such personalities then begin to verge on psychosis at that point, becoming so grandiose and paranoid that they really live on the boundary of psychosis and reality.”

As Trump is emboldened by fellow sadists (e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, “Gym” Jordan, Steve King, etc.), his condition is exacerbated because his enablers give him a pass. He feels like he can get away with anything. (For his entire life, Trump has never been held accountable for any of his atrocities.) And as Trump grows older and dementia kicks in, the danger he poses becomes much worse.

“Cognitive deterioration only goes in one direction. It doesn’t stand still and it doesn’t get better. No, Trump is not ready for the nursing home. But that doesn’t mean he’s capable of managing the White House. What if there is a global crisis like a war? What if Trump refuses to step down, if he is impeached and convicted? Once you factor in nuclear weapons the possibilities are truly horrific.”

There you have it America. It’s going to end like Stanley Kubrick predicted it would in Dr. Strangelove. “We’ll meet again. Don’t know where; don’t know when…”

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

“Mother” Tucker Carlson’s Vulgar, Racist Rant is Just a Projection of His Own Deep Psychological Trauma

Night after night on FNC (Fascist News Channel), Tucker Carlson (think O’Reilly with more venom and hate to spew) vomits out of his vile mouth the ugliest, most hateful sewage of anyone on his despicable channel. And that’s saying something. Take the other night….here’s the transcript of his monologue:

“Our [Democratic] leaders demand that you shut up and accept [immigration]. We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided. Immigration is a form of atonement.

Previous leaders of our country committed sins — we must pay for those sins by welcoming an endless chain of migrant caravans. That’s the argument they make.

What is more predictable is how leaders of the caravan are starting to talk. Suddenly, they sound like community college professors from Long Beach. Entitled, cut off from reality, and highly aggressive.

Yesterday a group of leaders of the caravan marched into the U.S. consulate in Mexico, and demanded $50,000 to return to their own countries.

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free? Nope, cynical shakedown artists who have been watching too much CNN.

No surprise there. When rich liberals tell you that America owes you a comfortable life, nobody should be shocked when you believe them.”

First of all, since when does $50,000 buy anyone a comfortable life? That piddly amount wouldn’t even pay for Tucker’s bowties. And what, exactly, does he mean by immigrants will make our country “dirtier?” Brown people are dirty? Or migrants who have traveled hundreds of miles trying to flee oppression, poverty, and corruption are beneath his privileged existence? No one is more entitled than Tucker who has never done anything productive or beneficial for society. Born into a rich California family, little Tucker was sent off to exclusive boarding schools where he learned that being white in America entitles him to superior status. Looking down his smug nose at those who weren’t born with a silver foot in their mouths became a lucrative pastime for him.

But the seminal moment in little Fucker’s–I mean Tucker’s–life came when he was six years old. His liberal mom abandoned him to lead a “bohemian” life, in pursuit of artistic expression, humanism, and the betterment of society. Little Tucky never has recovered from that abandonment by mommy, and now he has devoted his life to taking out his vengeance on all liberals. That’s also why many wags refer to Carlson as “Mother Tucker.”

A sad and spiteful man, Mother Tucker now spends his days railing against those he imagines his mommy liked more than him; which, in essence, is everyone other than him. With this knowledge, one can read the obvious mommy (liberal) hate in his mean and filthy diatribes. For instance, let me interpret his above rant:

“Mommy demanded that I shut up and accept the well-being of someone besides myself. We have a moral obligation to help the world’s poor she tells me, even if it makes me angry, foul-mouthed, and hateful. I have to atone for my sins.

Mommy committed sins, and I must pay the price for her abandonment by welcoming others into the country to have the same privileges and luxuries afforded me. That’s the argument my Mommy made.

These dirty immigrants have no right ask for asylum from oppression, poverty and corruption because Mommy abandoned me to help them. And I will always resent them for that.

I hate huddled masses yearning to be free, and I will shakedown gullible Fox News viewers for every penny I can. When Mommy told me I was entitled to a comfortable, well-adjusted life, she was lying.”

That’s Mother Tucker Carlson. A sick and twisted narcissist with a platform to spew hate on the most sick and twisted channel in America.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

Now That the Bush Eulogies are Finally Subsiding, Some Ugly Truths About 41 and His Connections to 11/22/63

 

In 1962 CIA asset and ex-Russian royalty George DeMohrenschildt met and befriended Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. This odd pairing of an anti-communist aristocrat and a “Marxist” loner in the city of right-wing fanaticism is even more suspicious when one considers that DeMohrenschildt was well acquainted with George H.W. “Poppy” Bush. DeMohrenschildt’s nephew, Edward Gordon Hooker, roomed with Bush at Andover in their youths. Their eastern prep-school ties aside, Bush and DeMohrenschildt, were connected as oil entrepreneurs and CIA operatives in Texas and the Caribbean in the early 1960s.  And many years after the assassination, when Bush was CIA Director and the House Select Committee on Assassinations sought to question DeMohrenschildt about his involvement with Oswald, the paths of the two Georges crossed again in a tragic way.  DeMorhenschildt was found shot to death after writing a letter to Bush about his relationship with Oswald and its importance in the assassination.

From my book, JFK and the End of America:

“The Bush family-George DeMohrenschildt relationship screams JFK assassination connection. The two Georges knew one another from their days in the Texas oil business, but after 11/22/63, H.W. appears to have cut ties with DeMohrenschildt. When Bush was appointed head of the CIA by Gerald Ford in 1976, DeMohrenschildt made an unwelcome return to Bush’s life. As the HSCA was gearing up to re-investigate the Kennedy assassination, DeMohrenschildt’s name resurfaced. The CIA under Bush, naturally, would want to suppress the Bush-DeMohrenschildt-Oswald link, but DeMohrenschildt got nervous and went public when he got spooked by mysterious government agents who began pressuring him. He got so fed up with it that he took the extraordinary measure of writing a letter to his old pal Bush. The letter, dated September 5, 1976, is written in intelligence-coded language that both Georges would have understood quite well. It contains the tone of a desperate man, begging the one person he knows can save him from his coming demise. It reads, in part, ‘Maybe you will be able to bring a solution to the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being followed everywhere…[possibly by] FBI.’ What exactly prompted DeMohrenschildt’s hopeless situation? He tells Bush that, ‘I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald and must have angered a lot of people,’ and then implores Bush to ‘remove the net from around us.’231

When DeMohrenschildt sent the letter, he signed his own death warrant. No information could have been more dangerous to the CIA and Bush than their direct connection to the Kennedy assassination through Oswald’s best friend in Dallas before the assassination. The fact that DeMohrenschildt had attempted to reveal the truth of the assassination in his own book almost ensured that he would be called as a witness before the HSCA. Bush and the CIA could not allow this to happen.

Bush’s response to DeMohrenschildt was cordial, but sent a diabolically subtle and unmistakable message to his friend. It read, in part, ‘…my staff has been unable to find any indication of interest in your activities on the part of Federal authorities in recent years…I believe I can appreciate your state of mind in view of your daughter’s death a few years ago and the current poor state of your wife’s health.’232 Translation: The CIA has checked into your matter, and has found nothing to support your allegations that government agents are targeting you or that your life is in danger. It must all be a figment of your imagination due to your deteriorating mental condition, caused by your daughter’s death and your wife’s poor health. Contacting me was a huge mistake.

After reading Bush’s response, DeMohrenschildt must have deduced two things for certain: 1) He could expect no help from Bush and the CIA. He was out in the cold, and they were not going to bring him back in; and 2) His days were numbered.

DeMohrenschildt fled for Europe and stayed there until the spring of 1977. Upon returning to the U.S., he was scheduled to appear before the HSCA which sent an investigator to DeMohrenschildt’s Florida residence. That very day, DeMohrenschildt was found shot to death in his home; a shotgun was found nearby. It was ruled a suicide by police, but his wife Jeanne, the former Jeanne LeGon who worked with Abraham Zapruder at Nardi’s in Dallas, vehemently disputed this. A year later she had the courage to speak freely to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She stated that her husband George had not committed suicide and that Oswald was a government agent who had not killed the President. She also implied that the CIA had killed Kennedy.233

Found in DeMohrenschildt’s belongings was the address of ‘Bush, George H.W., 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum, Midland, Texas.’234 This was not the only JFK suspect who was found dead with Bush’s information on his person. CIA pilot and drug runner Barry Seal, who may have flown a getaway plane out of Dallas on 11/22/63, had George Bush’s private phone number in his pocket when found shot to death.”

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

LBJ Created the Sham Warren Commission, Full of JFK Haters, 55 Years Ago Today

Fearful that an honest investigation (several were being discussed) of his predecessor’s assassination, just a week before, would reveal his involvement, Lyndon Johnson, on November 29, 1963, created the Warren Commission. We now know that this commission was a fraudulent enterprise meant to cover up the truth, not expose it. The following excerpt from my book–JFK and the End of America–addresses the matter:

Of all the things the mainstream media overlooked in the wake of the assassination, one of the most blatant indicators of Lyndon Johnson trying to cover his tracks was his cunningly shrewd selection of Warren Commission members. Republicans were in the majority, and nary a liberal was to be found, unless we count Earl Warren.  As its titular head, Warren imbued the panel with an integrity it did not deserve; he had a reputation for progressive values and was despised by the extreme right-wing.  Johnson saw his appointment as a way to appease liberals and Kennedy loyalists.  But Warren was a reluctant appointee, and he rarely showed up for any of the hearings.  The meat of the commission work was performed by Kennedy haters.

Johnson appointed just two Democrats—Richard Russell and Hale Boggs—both southerners who had opposed JFK’s domestic agenda especially in the area of civil rights. This is a polite way of saying that even the Democrats on the Commission were not Kennedy admirers.  It is easy to forget that the Democratic party in the early 1960s was evenly split between conservatives and liberals.  Southern Democrats were nearly unanimously right-wing ideologues; much the same way that Republicans are today.  Many of them, like John Connally and Strom Thurmond, switched their party affiliation from Democrat to Republican when the domestic strife of the ‘60s caused politicians to choose sides that more closely identified with their policies.  Today southern Democrats are as rare as southern Republicans were in 1963.  The point is, Johnson could rely on his Dixiecrat friends to avoid digging too deeply into the ugly truths of who really planned and executed the murder of a President for whom they bore no love.  Still in all, despite their political opposition to JFK, Russell, Sherman Cooper (Republican) and Boggs had misgivings about the commission’s findings that a single bullet struck both Kennedy and Connally.  Not until John McCloy came up with compromise language did the three dissenters acquiesce to the others’ magic-bullet charade.  But Russell, according to author Gerald McKnight, never understood the full ramifications of conceding to McCloy.  McKnight writes that, “Because of Russell’s chronic absenteeism he never fully comprehended that the final report’s no-conspiracy conclusion was inextricably tied to…the single-bullet theory.240 Cooper may have been similarly oblivious—he attended barely half the meetings.  Boggs’ attendance was also sporadic, but his dissent appeared to disturb the commission’s hierarchy more than others.  He was bugged and followed by the FBI for years, and he vehemently objected to J. Edgar Hoover’s Gestapo tactics.  (Boggs’ post-Warren Commission troubles and his mysterious disappearance are addressed in a later chapter.)

Over the life of the commission, it was three of the Republicans who exerted the most influence on the eventual whitewash: Allen Dulles, Arlen Specter (Dulles’s intrepid and ambitious lawyer) and Congressman Gerald Ford.  Specter expertly badgered and discredited hostile witnesses (read, witnesses who had knowledge of conspiratorial activity) and concocted the magic-bullet scenario which allowed the commission to frame the dead patsy for the crime.  Because of the time constraints inherent in a frame count of the Zapruder film, Oswald had only six seconds to fire three shots, and two of them—the complete miss and the head shot—were already accounted for.  That left just one bullet to do the rest of the damage.  Specter’s strained contrivance took care of that problem for the plotters.  One bullet, he said, despite all evidence to the contrary, entered the President’s back, exited his throat, entered Connally’s back, broke his wrist, tore through his ribs, landed in his leg, and came out on a Dallas stretcher in pristine condition.  No one but Specter saw this as an even remotely logical occurrence; still it exists in the official record today, despite the fact that no bullet fired in the history of the world has ever duplicated this feat, and despite the fact that no Parkland medical personnel saw a rear entry wound on the President’s body.  The Bethesda doctors did see a rear entry wound, but the wound was too low on the President’s back to have exited his throat.  The only way that wound could have been made was by body alterationists in transit from Parkland to Bethesda.  The body alterationists created a wound that couldn’t be easily accounted for.  Specter tried, but he needed a big assist from Gerald Ford to complete the sham.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

The Death of America, and its Slow Descent into the Quasi-Fascist Nightmare of Trump, Happened 55 Years Ago Today

It was 55 years ago today that America took a wrong turn in Dallas from which it has never found its way back. November 22, 1963, marked the beginning of the end of a genuine American democracy. What died that day was more than a U.S. presidency; it was the hope we would truly fulfill our destiny as a beacon of peace and morality in the world. Today our government is as corrupt and venal as a third-world dictatorship, full of greedy liars and unscrupulous conmen. But it wasn’t always this way. Those of you who are old enough to remember the brief era of Kennedy know of what I speak. If you’re not, please read on and learn how we lost our way. What follows is an excerpt from my book JFK and the End of America:

Despite public perception and media insistence to the contrary, the Kennedy family DID believe that JFK was the victim of a deadly conspiracy.

From pp. 342-347: [Those who propagate the lie that Oswald acted alone] still attempt to deny a conspiracy in JFK’s murder by citing Robert Kennedy’s inaction after the assassination. The common cry among the sightless is, “He was Attorney General at the time. If there really was a conspiracy, he could have uncovered it. This is proof that the Kennedy family knew there was no conspiracy.” The appropriate reply to this nonsense is, the Kennedys knew almost immediately that JFK had been killed by a domestic right-wing plot concocted by his many enemies in American intelligence, government and business. But Bobby knew that, with his brother gone, he no longer had the power that goes with being the top law enforcement officer in the country. After 11/22/63 Hoover and Johnson held all the cards. Any public proclamation by Bobby concerning the truth of how his brother died could have easily been dismissed as the deranged ramblings of a man overcome by grief and bitterness; besides, as Bobby privately acknowledged many times, the truth was not going to bring his brother back, and the only thing left to do was to protect his brother’s legacy. JFK’s enemies could have countered any move by Bobby with public revelations of JFK’s sexual affairs.

With no public avenue of justice to pursue domestically, the Kennedys reached out to Russian officials with their private suspicions about who was really behind the assassination. Bobby and Jackie wanted to assure Moscow that they did not blame the Soviets for Jack’s murder, and that Kruschev should continue to advance the peace initiatives he and President Kennedy had undertaken in the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is a cruel irony that the family of the martyred President could only turn to America’s Cold War enemy to convey a terrible truth. A little background is necessary to understand why the Kennedys divulged to the Soviets what they could not speak aloud in America after 11/22/63.

During the 1960 presidential campaign, candidate Kennedy’s tough-on-communism rhetoric was almost a prerequisite to be elected to the highest office in the world. But his stance towards the Soviets softened even before he was sworn in. As early as December 1960 Kennedy made back-channel overtures to Moscow concerning nuclear disarmament and test-ban negotiations.29 Once he took office, he was forced, by political pressure and the hawkish generals and intelligence advisors, to maintain a public anti-Soviet posture, but his fear of global nuclear war always informed his deep desire for détente with the Russians. However, his mistake of assenting to the disastrous Bay of Pigs mission undercut any early attempts of dialing back Cold War tensions. Moscow became suspicious of Kennedy’s real intentions, and an era of renewed superpower aggression began. Kruschev used the Cuban fiasco to bully Kennedy at their Vienna summit in 1961. Kennedy was stunned by Kruschev’s willingness to exacerbate animosities and risk armed confrontation. Tensions culminated in the Missile Crisis of 1962. Two weeks of staring into the nuclear abyss changed the two leaders. Kennedy and Kruschev decided to back away from it all.

For the next year, they forged a tentative but very real alliance in the pursuit of peace and disarmament. It was a sometimes rocky road, what with both men forced by internal war-eager factions to avoid the appearance of weakness, but both Kennedy and Kruschev made great strides in moving towards a peaceful resolution to the Cold War. Kennedy went public with his revolutionary vision on June 10, 1963. His speech at American University that day still reverberates across the decades as the most visionary and courageous of the entire Cold War. In it he praised the Russian people and commiserated with the suffering they endured as our allies in World War II. He proposed that America consider the possibility of peaceful coexistence with our avowed enemies. He lyrically reminded us that, in the end, we shared the same fragile planet with them, they breathed the same air we did, and we both cherished our children’s future. Details of that speech were published in Soviet newspapers, and the reaction from the Kremlin was positive. The dawn of a new era in Soviet-American relations had been set in motion. A nuclear test ban treaty was signed by the superpowers two months later. As part of this process, Jack and Bobby Kennedy nurtured friendly back-channel contacts with Russian officials.

But JFK’s murder, and the news that his accused assassin had indisputable Soviet ties, threatened to undo all of the progress that Kennedy and Kruschev had made in forging a new superpower paradigm. Indeed, this was a critical aspiration of the plotters. Kennedy’s enemies killed him, in large part, because they were angered and terrified by peaceful coexistence with the Soviets. Massive military weapons stockpiles and the domestic contractors who made enormous profits from the manufacture of these weapons were threatened with obsolescence. The CIA feared its usefulness, maybe its very existence, would be extraneous in a world without a Cold War. The right-wing fringe would be deprived of its hot war with the communists.   Dallas was their remedy. The framing of Oswald as a Soviet stooge was their attempt to undo all that Kennedy and Kruschev had done.

In early December 1963 the Kennedy family sent a personal emissary, William Walton, to speak with Georgi Bolshakov, a Russian diplomat. Bolshakov had met with Bobby Kennedy countless times before, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis the men had come to trust one another as useful conduits for Soviet-American peacekeeping negotiations. Bolshakov was assured by Walton that the Kennedy family was convinced that Oswald did not act alone. Walton’s explicit message contradicted the Kennedys’ subsequent public support of the Warren Commission findings. Walton told the Soviets that pro-fascist reactionaries who despised the President and his policies, and who were “…dissatisfied with…improving relations with the Soviet Union…” had organized the plot; these included, among others, oilmen H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison.30

Notably absent from the Kennedys’ identification of the plotters were Lyndon Johnson and the CIA. Bobby Kennedy initially suspected both, but he was likely dissuaded by intelligence sources who may have been trying to divert blame away from themselves. John McCone, CIA Director at the time, denied intelligence involvement and swore to the Attorney General that he would have known if the CIA had been involved. But it was Richard Helms, the Allen Dulles protégé, who was really running the CIA, and he would have kept McCone in the dark.31 And McCone would not have been privy to the machinations of Allen Dulles’s CIA-in-exile.  In later years Bobby reportedly directly confronted Johnson with his knowledge of Johnson’s involvement.

But never did the Kennedys, in any public forum, accuse Johnson and Dulles of engineering the assassination. And Bobby’s reticence to come forward with what he really knew was used by the plotters as a means by which they could exonerate themselves. The reasoning was that if JFK’s own brother believed Oswald acted alone, there was no reason to believe in a conspiracy. LBJ’s surrogates gave their boss cover this way. One of Johnson’ aides, a college professor named John P. Roche, wrote a letter to a newspaper denouncing assassination researchers as “paranoids,” and cited the Kennedy family’s support of the Warren Commission as proof that there was no conspiracy.32

The CIA used the same tactic. In a memo distributed to agency assets at major media outlets, it listed several arguments that CIA-friendly journalists could use to counter Warren Commission critics. Included in the list was the reminder that “Bobby Kennedy…would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy.”33

In private, however, Bobby quietly sought out the truth of Dallas. He knew quite well who his brothers’ dire enemies were, and he directed his close associates to find out what they could. Behind closed doors he engaged in conversations with trusted advisers about assassination scenarios that implicated the CIA, the Mafia, the Joint Chiefs and Texas oilmen. He listened to what they had to say, but remained largely silent. He knew he would not have the power to bring the killers to justice until he himself ascended to the presidency.34

Shortly before his death, Bobby momentarily let his guard down on a campaign trip and revealed to a stunned audience that he knew the Warren Commission was a fraud. On March 25, 1968, at a rally in southern California, he was asked by someone in the audience if he planned to reopen the investigation into his brother’s death if he were elected president. Bobby paused and measured his words. “I haven’t answered this question before, but there would be nobody that would be more interested in all of these matters as to who was responsible for the…death of President Kennedy than I would.”35

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

 

55 Years Ago Today, JFK Foretold of His Own Demise

It was October 2, 1963, and a remarkable story, written by Richard Starnes, appeared in the Washington Daily News. It claimed that the CIA was working diligently to undermine JFK’s Vietnam policies and that his own Ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, was complicit in this subterfuge.  Frustrated by South Vietnamese President Diem’s inability to unite his people in resistance to the aggression of the communist North, Kennedy hesitantly agreed to the CIA’s call for a regime change.  But he did not sanction the assassination of Diem.  On November 1, 1963, the CIA, in a plot concocted by Lucien Conein, murdered Diem in spite of JFK’s wishes.  Furious at the CIA’s unwarranted actions, Kennedy vented to Starnes.  In that interview, JFK tried to warn the American people that the CIA was out of control and capable of anything, including murdering its own President.

From pages 170-171 of my book JFK and the End of America:

Together Conein and Lodge, perhaps knowing that JFK’s days were numbered, defied the President and gave the go-ahead to kill Diem. The South Vietnamese generals, having been informed that Kennedy was going to pull out of Vietnam entirely by 1965, saw the regime change as their only chance to win the war against the North before America left.101 On November 1, just hours before the coup, Lodge lied to Diem by telling him there was nothing to worry about.102 Later that day Diem was assassinated.  When JFK received the news he was, according to Arthur Schlesinger, “somber and shaken”; he knew the CIA, through their emissaries Lodge and Conein, had arranged the murder against his wishes.  As he had done after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy told intimates that he needed “to do something about those bastards; they should be stripped of their exorbitant power.”103

In his own way, Kennedy was aware of the storm that was coming. He was, in all likelihood, the source for incendiary quotes about the CIA which appeared in major East Coast newspapers in the early fall of 1963; his intent was probably to alert an oblivious public to the dangers the CIA posed to American democracy.  Scripps-Howard reporter Richard Starnes wrote an article for the Washington Daily News which ran on October 2 under the headline, “Arrogant CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam.”  In it, Starnes quotes a high U.S. official [President Kennedy] saying that “if the United States ever experiences a Seven Days in May (a reference to a popular early 1960s fictional book detailing the overthrow of a U.S. president), it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon.”104 The following day Arthur Krock wrote a sort of corollary piece which ran in the New York Times and was less harsh on the CIA.  Still, Krock quoted “a very high American official [Kennedy]” who compared the CIA’s growth to a “malignancy…[and] was not sure even the White House could control…any longer.”105

Less than a month later, Conein pulled off the CIA-connected murder of Diem. Just three weeks after that, Conein was, quite possibly, in Dallas to witness the demise of the CIA’s public enemy number one.  On 11/22/63 he (or his identical twin) was photographed with a self-serving smirk on his face as JFK’s limo passes.  Kennedy is looking straight ahead and does not notice the Conein lookalike staring directly at him.  Less than a minute after this photo was taken, the fatal shots rang out.  If Conein played a part in the execution, it was the second time in less than a month that he helped topple a head of state.  As Neil Sheehan wrote in A Bright Shining Lie, “[Conein] had accomplished the act that is one of the highest professional aspirations for a [secret agent]—setting up a successful coup d’etat.”106

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

 

Fox News Ignores Felony Guilt of Cohen and Manafort

On a day when Trump’s campaign manager was found guilty on eight felony counts and his personal lawyer pleaded guilty to eight felony counts, I couldn’t resist turning on Fox News to see what the propaganda arm of the administration was saying about the walls closing in on Donny Douchebag. How could FNC ignore this one? Well, Tucker (Joseph Goebbels) Carlson did his best. For most of the show Goebbelson aired the Money Launderer-in-Chief’s wildly erratic and self-promoting speech in Coal Country where truth (about coal and criminals) is a dirty word. Then we were treated to a lengthy segment on the murder of a white Iowa girl which has been blamed on an illegal Hispanic immigrant–a bone to the drooling Troglodytes who have to be kept in the Dark Ages for Donny Bone Spurs to survive.

Any fading semblance of journalistic integrity attached to FNC should be abandoned after Goebbelson’s disgraceful show. Does he really think that by ignoring the obvious criminal implications for his Fuhrer will somehow make it all blow over? For Chrissakes, Cohen even stood up in court, under oath, and announced to the world that his boss directed him to make the felonious payoffs to porn stars. In a normal world that would suffice for impeachment proceedings to immediately commence. But not in this Putin-Limbaugh-Giuliani-Hannity-Carlson-Graham-Nunes dystopian nightmare where up is down, the earth is flat, and truth isn’t truth.

No, desperate to change the topic, Goebbelson exploited the grief of an Iowa family. Never mind that since the launch of Fox News not one case of a white man killing someone in Iowa has ever aired. Hundreds of Caucasians, wielding guns they should not have had, but for, in part, FNC’s coddling of the firearms lobby, have murdered unlucky citizens from Dubuque to Mason City without Goebbelson ever expressing his righteous indignation. But let one illegal Latino be accused of taking a life in the lilly-white Heartland, and Tucker’s rage turns his face Donny-orange, his beady eyes narrow with ire, and spittle flies from his vile mouth.

Meanwhile, Cohen and Manafort are going to the Big House and, before they do, might come forward to divulge all of Donny Dumbshit’s dirty secrets. The day that happens I’ll turn on the Fourth Reich’s favorite network to see what Goebbelson’s airing. Maybe a replay of Hillary’s Benghazi testimony to Congress? Or perhaps another good, old-fashioned hillbilly/Nuremberg rally like the one in West Virginia last night.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085