"Is Obama an Enlightened Being?"
Courtesy of Mark Morford, SF Gate columnist, who is not kidding in his article "Is Obama an Enlightened Being?":
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/06/06/notes060608.DTL
Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the ( Read more... )
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/06/06/notes060608.DTL
Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the ( Read more... )
Having actually studied the history of the Cold War (in college, in the 1980's when it was still ongoing), I find the conspiracy-theories' pacifist martyr version of JFK surreal, along with the notion that he was murdered over the issue of Vietnam.
If you actually read accounts of his Administration, his disagreements with the military over Vietnam amounted to reinforcement schedules. Both JFK and the military commanders agreed with the general notion that US troops needed to be brought in to stablize the situation; the only issue was which troops and how fast. Literally, it boiled down to conflicting estimates of the relative worth of airpower versus infantry, armored cavalry versus airmobile units, and how many to dispatch over the next few months.
JFK being murdered because the military-intelligence establishment wanted us to reinforce and JFK wanted us to abandon South Vietnam is improbable enough. The idea of him being murdered because, say, the Air Force bomber interests had a squabble with the Fighter Mafia over the relative usage of fighter-bombers versus heavy bombers is absurd.
Some of the confusion may have come because Robert Kennedy supported the antiwar position. But that was in 1968, and for obvious political purposes. In 1963, Robert was neither as antiwar as he would be five years later, nor was he in a position to decide US foreign policy. (He was Attorney General of the United States at the time of his big brother's murder).
Robert Kennedy was indeed murdered because of his politics. But not because of his antiwar position. He was murdered by a Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, who is to this day acknowledged as a hero by the Palestinian Authority -- and he was killed for supporting Israel, in the first example of Islamic terrorism striking on American soil. This also forces the modern American Left to tie themselves into logic-pretzels to avoid drawing the logical conclusion from this, that the Palestinians are not our friends.
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/sarcasm
Speaking of alternate realities, this little dream I had should amuse you, if nothing else because of the scrambling of political landscape.
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And yes, once you understand history, the whole "JFK was a pacifist" does seem like an odd argument.
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Understanding history is too much of an effort for a lot of people, I've observed; it requires too much reading (and reading, that's for geeks!) and most people find it intensely boring (depends on the teacher hahahaha). Most people prefer recent events to history - in and out, flash in the (brain)pan; yet do not consider that our present becomes history. The ones that DO realize it are the ones who think "hmmm, better act a bit smarter, I don't want future generations laughing at me because I was a raging idiot."
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I find the latter half of your comment sadly true. History can be so amazing -- more fascinating that any novel ever written -- yet when it's taught it's usually done in such a dull fashion that the students couldn;t care less.
I still wonder if it's a pity that I probably learned more about history (and several other subjects) from my own reading after leaving school than I ever did as an actual student.
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