{"id":23059,"date":"2013-11-22T17:28:36","date_gmt":"2013-11-22T22:28:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23059"},"modified":"2023-04-09T11:46:43","modified_gmt":"2023-04-09T15:46:43","slug":"you-wonder-why-it-took-so-long-for-somebody-to-shoot-the-swinish-bastard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/11\/22\/you-wonder-why-it-took-so-long-for-somebody-to-shoot-the-swinish-bastard\/","title":{"rendered":"“…you wonder why it took so long for somebody to shoot the swinish bastard”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colby Cosh<\/a> makes no friends among the over-60 Kennedy worshipping community:<\/p>\n

The myth of Kennedy as a uniquely admirable knight-errant has finally, I think, been wiped out by the accumulation of ugly details about his sexual conduct and family life. For a while it was still possible to regard JFK\u2019s tomcatting as the inevitable concomitant of super-masculine greatness. By now it is pretty clear that he was just an abusive, spoiled creep. There are scenes in White House intern Mimi Alford\u2019s 2012 memoir that make you wonder why it took so long for somebody to shoot the swinish bastard.<\/p>\n

As for the assassination itself, the experience of seeing conspiracy theories bloom like a toxic meadow after 9\/11 has hardened us all against the nonsense that was still popular in the 1990s. Most adults, I think, now understand that Oliver Stone\u2019s JFK<\/em> was a buffet of tripe. It is no coincidence that Stephen King\u2019s 2011 time-travel book about JFK\u2019s slaying, written after decades of fairly deep research, stuck close to the orthodox Warren commission narrative.<\/p>\n

The new favourite themes in the 50th anniversary coverage dispense with grassy-knoll phantoms and disappearing-reappearing Oswalds. One new documentary has revived Howard Donahue\u2019s idea that the final bullet that blasted Kennedy\u2019s skull apart might have been fired accidentally by a Secret Service agent in one of the trailing cars. This would help explain the oddity of the Zapruder footage, and might also account for some awkwardly disappearing evidence \u2014 notably JFK\u2019s brain \u2014 without requiring us to believe anything obviously outrageous.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

In the early \u201970s Lyndon Johnson made a cryptic remark about JFK possibly being killed because his administration had been \u201crunning a damn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.\u201d This offhand remark turned out to be quite specific; rumours of multiple CIA assassination attempts against Castro were true, as were wilder tales of literal Mafia involvement (confirmed when the CIA \u201cFamily Jewels\u201d were declassified in 2007). Oswald would not exactly have been anyone\u2019s first choice as an intelligence asset, and probably had no state sponsor. But notice that it\u2019s 2013 and we still have to say \u201cprobably.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colby Cosh makes no friends among the over-60 Kennedy worshipping community: The myth of Kennedy as a uniquely admirable knight-errant has finally, I think, been wiped out by the accumulation of ugly details about his sexual conduct and family life. For a while it was still possible to regard JFK\u2019s tomcatting as the inevitable concomitant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,13],"tags":[311,173,1511,127,225],"class_list":["post-23059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-usa","tag-1960s","tag-assassin","tag-caribbean","tag-conspiracytheories","tag-jfk"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5ZV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23059"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81326,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23059\/revisions\/81326"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}