BRYAN PRESTON: Frank Rich Is Wrong: Hate Didn’t Kill Kennedy, But It Is Killing Civil Discourse in America.

Frank Rich chose to mark the 48th anniversary by smearing Dallas, again, and by extension conservatives of the present. It’s a column which should get him ridiculed and fired; no one who is so irresponsible with the hard facts of life has any place in the commentariat.The title gives Rich’s game away. It’s “What Killed JFK?” not “Who Killed JFK?” as it should be. A “what” is much easier to abstract, isolate, and attack than a “who” who had inconvenient opinions and motivations, and a madness to move.

The cold, hard fact of that day in Dallas is this: Whether Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman or by a conspiracy that included others, Dallas’ “climate” had nothing to do with it. Dallas was the scene of the crime but wasn’t responsible for it. Lee Harvey Oswald was not a mainstream Dallas man. He would not have been a Tea Partier. Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist. He had defected to the Soviet Union, become disillusioned, and returned. He had tried to travel to Cuba and failed. If hate was Oswald’s motive in Kennedy’s killing, the hate lived in the chest of a man who had failed at life, had rejected the freedoms of his country, and used bullets to write himself into the history books. Lee Harvey Oswald was an America-hating leftist.

Indeed. But Frank Rich and his ilk have been unable to wrap their minds around that fact for nearly 50 years.

AGING: In Body’s Shield Against Cancer, a Culprit in Aging May Lurk. “Senescent cells thus seem to be a benign byproduct of the body’s defense against cancer. But researchers have developed growing suspicions of a less benign aspect: the cells’ culpability in aging. Senescent cells accumulate throughout life, probably because the immune system sweeps them away less efficiently as a person ages. Larger and flatter than normal cells, they are especially common in tissues showing signs of aging, like arthritic knees or the plaque in the arteries. . . . Dr. van Deursen thinks it would be better to go after the senescent cells themselves. In his view it should be easy enough by trial and error to find chemicals that selectively destroy senescent cells, just like the targeted chemicals now used to treat certain kinds of cancer. And unlike the cancer cells, which proliferate so fast that they soon develop resistance, the senescent cells cannot replicate, so they should be easy targets.”

Plus, a key bit: “Personally I think we can slow aging down, and over time we will become more and more successful. Aging is a fate that no one can escape, but now we can maybe intervene a bit.”

ANDREW BARR: The Road to Nowhere: The Higher Education Bubble and Liberal Arts Education.

A CHRISTMAS TELESCOPE BLEG: Reader Joel Ard writes: “My 8 year old is extremely interested in astronomy. I know nothing. We’re considering getting him a telescope, but I have no idea what one ought to look for, consider as valuable or worthless, spend, etc. You, or your readers, probably do. Could you inform or inquire?” It’ll have to be inquire, as my knowledge in this area is woefully out of date.

DOCUMENT TROVE EXPOSES SURVEILLANCE METHODS: “Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal open a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology that has arisen in the decade since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The techniques described in the trove of 200-plus marketing documents, spanning 36 companies, include hacking tools that enable governments to break into people’s computers and cellphones, and “massive intercept” gear that can gather all Internet communications in a country. The papers were obtained from attendees of a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C., last month.”

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: If “all men are pigs,” why is a pig’s life worth more than a man’s?

SPACE: The Most Capable Robot Geologist Ever Built Now Heads to Mars to Find Life.

FORGET HYBRIDS AND ELECTRICS, is the future of cars diesel and all-wheel-drive?

BREAKING: ClimateGate 2.

BRUCE THORNTON: The Arab Winter Approaches. “Turkish Prime Minister Reccep Tayyip Erdogan once said, ‘Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the station we want.’ As we survey the consequences of the Arab Spring, it seems more likely that the ‘station’ will not be one that we, in the West, will want.”

IRA STOLL ON the CNN national security debate.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON THE HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE: The Fannie and Freddie University. “I noticed about 1990 that some students in my classes at CSU were both clearly illiterate and yet beneficiaries of lots of federal cash, loans, and university support to ensure their graduation. And when one had to flunk them, an entire apparatus was in place at the university to see that they in fact did not flunk. Just as coaches steered jocks to the right courses, so too counselors did the same with those poorly prepared but on fat federal grants and loans. By the millennium, faculty were conscious that the university was a sort of farm and the students the paying crop that had to be cultivated if it were to make it all the way to harvest and sale — and thus pay for the farmers’ livelihood. How could a Ponzi scheme of such magnitude go on this long? . . . But what cannot go on will not go on — at least for most universities without the billion-dollar plus endowments. The present reckoning is brought on not by introspection, self-critique, or concern for our increasingly poorly educated students, but by money, or rather the lack of it. Higher education is desperately searching for students with cash, loaned or not. And it is, by needs, panicking and will ever so slowly start changing.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Obama’s revealing accidental admission over the deficit impasse. “Obama is actually running against his own ineffectiveness.”

MICKEY KAUS: Three years after going into bankruptcy, the L.A. Times still doesn’t seem to know what business it’s in.

GETTING READY FOR THE POST-ANTIBIOTIC AGE. “In the military’s latest round of small business solicitations, Darpa is making a long-shot request for an all-out replacement to antibiotics, the decades-old standard for killing or injuring bacteria to demolish a disease. In its place: the emerging field of nanomedicine would be used to fight bacterial threats. The agency’s ‘Rapidly Adaptable Nanotherapeutics’ is after a versatile ‘platform capable of rapidly synthesizing therapeutic nanoparticles’ to target unknown, evolving and even genetically engineered bioweapons.” Faster, please.

THE SAUDIS ARE WORRIED ABOUT CANADIAN OIL. Meanwhile, Obama is blocking it. Hmm.

#OCCUPYFAIL: OWS Following the Woodstock to Altamont Trajectory. “Numerous observers have pointed out how the media and liberals (sorry for the redundancy) lavished sympathy on Occupy Wall Street until it became untenable to continue, after which they began to airbrush their previous encomia. They seem to forget that what begins as Woodstock somehow always ends up as Altamont.”

But faster this time. And without even putting on a decent show.

SUFFOLK LAW PROFESSOR RESIGNS OVER COLLEAGUE’S ANTI-MILITARY COMMENTS.

AT AMAZON, Black Friday deals in Audio and Home Theater.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Economic Growth Just 2%, Well Below Earlier Estimate. Unexpectedly!

IS FACEBOOK DOOMED? Possibly. In the last week or two, several people I know — all of them attractive women between their teens and early thirties — have quit Facebook. Their biggest complaint is the lack of privacy, and its tendency to attract creeps. Under not just one, but two of Kaus’s Rules Of Punditry (“generalize from your own experience,” and “three events make a trend”) this now represents a legitimate phenomenon.

HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: K.C. Johnson on a sudden, newfound concern for due process on campus. “Davidson’s latest stab at commentary came in response to the pepper-spraying of peaceful protesters at UC-Davis—which today led to the suspension of the campus police chief. Cal-Davis deserves all the criticism that it gets for this incident, and I agree wholeheartedly with the remarks of FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff on the issue. Yet there’s something . . . peculiar . . . about seeing Cathy Davidson standing up for due process, given what was (at best) her indifference when three of her own institution’s students faced the highest-profile case of prosecutorial misconduct in recent U.S. history.”

TODAY ONLY: Save 55% Off the Lion King Trilogy and Cars Director’s Edition.

GEORGE MONBIOT denounces anti-nuclear “snake oil” on Fukushima.