JFK Assassination at 60: Various thoughts

Just dropping tidbits here, including parts of my editorial column from last week for starters.

First, it's "lovely" that NY Mag's Intelligencer is platforming a conspiracy theorist in Scott Sayare. And, the tiny bits of loose thread of Jeff Morley that he pulls on further than Morley does are hilarious. That said, it's funny that Rick Atkinson, when an editor at the WaPost while Morley was a staff writer there, found his research to that point "boring." That said, NY Mag already platforms a Russiagate conspiracy theorist in Jon Chait, so, while this is "lovely," it's not surprising.

Related? I covered Morley's most recent bouts of idiocy, including about George Ioannides, not quite a year ago.

Second, I've already covered James Robenalt's co-authored book with Secret Service agent Paul Landis as well as noting that I don't get why Gerald Posner hasn't followed up on Robenalt. That said, given that Posner's a full-on Zionist to the point of hasbara, at the current time, I have no desire to visit his Substack to see if he has anything new on this issue. Sadly, Fred Litwin, considered the doyen of assassination researchers by many, has nothing on his site about the book, and his Twitter shows he's as much an in-the-tank Zionist as Posner, so no desire to engage him, either.

Third? I found a better conspiracy theory than any I've seen before: Mossad whacked Jack over Dimona. 

Fourth? Snippets from my editorial column last week. (My newspaper group still doesn't have a website.)

For a summary, there’s this, first on the conspiracy theories, and second on other assassinations. 

Castro? When he heard what had actually happened, he thought, per Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s desire to do similar to Nicaragua in 1981, that the U.S. would bomb Cuba into a parking lot.

Khrushchev? The USSR thought Lee Harvey Oswald was nuts from the day he got on their soil.

LBJ? The man was, if not as depressed as in the summer of 1961, still too depressed to have either the willpower or the organizational level to pull it off.

As for Oswald being a nut? Most actual or attempted presidential assassins were, even if not clinically insane.

The insanity defense didn’t exist in the 1830s, but a man who tried to assassinate President Andrew Jackson, Richard Lawrence, was sent to an asylum after being found guilty. Specifically, he was at St. Elizabeths, later famed as the home of John Hinckley.

John Wilkes Booth was a megalomaniac, at minimum. (I don't think he was more than that, as far as mental instability.) This was also the first politically driven presidential assassination or attempt.

Charles Guiteau, President James Garfield’s assassin, thought that a minor political service on behalf of the Republican party merited a diplomatic appointment or something similar.

Leon Czolgosz, William McKinley’s assassin, was so mentally unstable that Emma Goldman, herself an anarchist like him, distrusted him. Also an actual political assassination, like Booth and unlike Guiteau.

John Schrenk, the 1912 would-be assassin of TR? Found not guilty by reason of insanity, but clearly not politically driven in his insanity.

The Puerto Rican nationalists who tried to kill Truman? Clearly political, and stone cold sober on sanity. The exception that "proves" the rule here.

Squeaky Fromme, one of the two women who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford, was one of “Charlie’s girls.” That's enough to be clearly a nutter, and arguably a twisted-sense would-be political assassin. Sara Jane Moore had some weird ties to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, President Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin, John Hinckley, was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and got decades in an institution.

Outside of presidents? Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy because Bobby was a Zionist. (No, not just because Sirhan thought Bobby was a Zionist, which he rightly did, but because Bobby was a Zionist.)

So, Oswald was far from an outlier. He was part of the pack.