PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE…, ACTUALLY PRETTY CONSISTENT FOR THE GRAY LADY:
● Shot: The New York Times Goes All In on Flawed 1619 Project.
—Mark Hemingway, Real Clear Politics yesterday.
● Chaser: “The New York Times is still all in on its Walter Duranty, Pulitzer-winning non-coverage of the Holodomor.”
—Joel Engel tweets, linking to Hemingway’s article. (Here’s a good video primer from Roger Simon on Duranty’s fabulism, in case you need it.)
● Hangover:
That Kennedy was killed at the hands of a Communist should have had a clear and direct meaning: “President Kennedy was a victim of the Cold War.” Everyone had reasons for averting their gaze from this fact. For Lyndon Johnson, it would have carried frightful implications for foreign policy if it turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald had links to Castro or the KGB (which Piereson suggests is remotely possible). Liberals didn’t want to dwell on this fact for a mix of other reasons. In the early hours after JFK was shot, we didn’t yet know of Oswald’s Communist background, and the media jumped to the conclusion that Kennedy’s killing must have been the work of right-wing extremists. The day after the assassination, James Reston wrote in the New York Times that the assassination was the result of a “streak of violence in the American character” and that “from the beginning to the end of his administration, [Kennedy] was trying to tamp down the violence of extremists from the right.”
This “meme,” as we would say today, so quickly took hold that it could not be shaken, even after Oswald’s noxious background began to come out. Indeed, the notion of collective responsibility would be repeated five years later after Robert Kennedy was murdered by a Communist Arab radical who professed deep hatred for America.
—Stephen F. Hayward: Review of James Pierson’s Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, History News Network, August 22, 2007.
● The D.T.s: NY Times Published an Op-Ed by Taliban Leader. Liz Cheney Has Some Questions.
—Rick Moran, PJ Media, yesterday.