It’s hard to believe but Frank Rich’s latest exercise in the fantasist’s art comparing JFK to Obama is a wonder to behold. It really is. One might think it satire if Rich had never been presented as a serious essayist by the New York intelligentsia. If this were to be his first public writing, one might think him the new Jonathan Swift for its central premise is simply amazing for its utter deviation from reality. Rich, it seems, thinks that Obama is just like John Kennedy because Kennedy was somehow killed by the “hate that ended his presidency,” or something.

The part that is so fantastic is that Rich devolves to a long ago discredited theory that Kennedy was killed that dark November day in 1963 somehow because of right-wing hate for him. What is so absurd about Rich’s fantastic claim is that he wholly discounts the fact that Kennedy’s killer was a communist. In fact, Rich never even mentions that Lee Harvey Oswald was an avowed communist. He hints at it obliquely but does so in a way that dismisses the ideology as in any way important.

It has been a long time since I’ve read a piece on a public figure that is one part hero worship, one part discounting of that same figure, one part pure fantasy, and one part baseless comparison to the life of a whole other public figure that is also worshiped as a hero without a legitimate reason. But Frank Rich has done it here in a way that brings to mind make J.R.R. Tolkein’s intricate and complicated plotting.

There’s so much wrong in this one piece that it’s hard to figure out where to start first, but Rich’s central premise is that JFK was killed because of a climate of “hate” engendered by the blindness of Kennedy’s detractors on the right. This, Rich seems to think, is somehow just like Obama. Well, except that Obama is still alive and no one has even made a single attempt to kill him, and all (God forbid).

Interestingly, Rich does seem to notice that John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s presidency did not live up to its hype. Rich notes that historians have basically rated JFK’s short tenure in the White House as a wash, neither good nor horribly bad. But even with that admission, Rich writes glowingly of Kennedy. It is still all “Camelots” and “brief shinning moments” with little justification for any other reason than mere hero worship. With that, though, Rich succumbs to the worship like so many starry-eyed members of his deluded generation.

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The inch deep analysis that we get from the illiterati in the left-media shows that they have agendas, sure, but no grasp of history, logic, or facts. No better example of the facile nature of the Old Media can be had than Christiane Amanpour and on ABC News she strutted her imbecilic excuse for historical analysis once again.

In a January 20 interview with the sister of John F. Kennedy, Amanpour attempted to equate the “political atmosphere” of today with that of 1963 when President Kennedy was murdered as well as 1968 when his brother Bobby was shot. But her empty attempt to analyze either era does not rise to the level of common sense much less a serious political discussion.

Over some video clips of JFK and Bobby Kennedy and the funerals for both, Amanpour sonorously tried to say that today is somehow “just like” the “political atmosphere” of those days decades ago. Simply put, nothing could be further from the truth.

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Nine years after her murder, the Chandra Levy trial started Monday in Washington, D.C., and although there may be justice for the victim, there’s little that can be done to even the scales for Gary Condit, the man who was falsely accused of killing her.

Condit, who was a California valley Congressman at the time, was suspected of having Chandra kidnapped and murdered when no evidence supported that claim.

Condit’s problem was that he had a brief relationship with Chandra while she was interning for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons back in 2001. Naturally, when she disappeared, the media assumed Condit had something to do with it.

Why?

Because thanks to Hollywood and the tabloid press, the American public has believed for decades there is a secret Washington underground network for powerful politicians and corporations that enables them to have “troublemakers” removed and “taken care of.” (more…)

Recently in the New York Times, JFK speechwriter and adviser Ted Sorensen commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy/Nixon debates: “When Kennedy Met Nixon: The Real Story,” reads the op-ed’s title.

Turns out, however, that the “real story” as “revealed” by Sorensen is identical to the one filtered through the MSM for the past fifty years:  Kennedy, we’re given to understand, trounced Nixon—and not just in style—mainly in substance. Sorensen also laments what “now passes for political debate in our increasingly commercialized, sound-biteTwitter-fied culture, in which extremist rhetoric requires presidents to respond to outrageous claims.”

Nothing of the sort, we’re given to understand, marred those heady and substantive debates of yore. Take Kennedy’s claim that President Eisenhower had fallen asleep (or gone golfing) during his command and allowed a perilous “missile gap” to grow between the U.S. and the Soviets. In fact a huge gap had grown (roughly six thousand for us, three hundred for the Soviets.)

Might this qualify as an “outrageous claim” by Kennedy?  Not if your source is Ted Sorensen and the New York Times. In fact, prior to the debates, CIA director Allen Dulles had briefed Kennedy on the genuine missile numbers. But rather than respond to this genuinely outrageous claim, Nixon bit his tongue. Disclosing the real number (that JFK knew perfectly well) in public would alert the Soviets to how we got their number, and jeopardize U.S. national security.  Which is to say, to blindside his Republican opponent Kennedy relied on that opponent’s patriotism. Let’s face it, Republicans are at a woeful disadvantage here. (more…)

Custer at the Little Bighorn, the Kennedy Assassination, the Titanic: some disasters linger in the mind and the memory, coloring the way we look at the world, but bringing the dead past back to vivid life.

So far, the biggest surprise has to do with how spread out the debris was. Gallo said he expected to see one or two well-defined debris trails, but “the breakup was a little more complicated than that.” Unlike the largely intact (and iconic) bow section, the back section of the ship was “absolutely mangled by its trip to the bottom,” he said.

“It’s almost like you cracked it open and spilled everything out,” Gallo said. “You see pieces of the engine, boilers … where we thought there might be one or two big things, we found five. … When we start to piece together how Titanic actually made its way to the bottom, those pieces will be key.”

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Your tax dollars at work: hoop dreams, 2010:

Even Dana Milbank of the in-the-tank, corrupt Washington Post — Ground Zero of the JournoList — can’t take it any more:

While President Obama’s wife and younger daughter were conducting international relations in Majorca on Sunday with Spain’s King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, the commander in chief was at home hosting a fantasy camp for himself. He and his buddies had a birthday weekend barbecue and basketball game with LeBron James, Alonzo Mourning, Magic Johnson and other legends of the sport.

The day before, it was a four-hour golf outing for Obama and the boys. On Monday, he hosted the Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints at the White House and talked about his own exploits on the gridiron last year with Saints quarterback Drew Brees. “He tossed me a nice tight spiral that I then lateraled to a kid on [Dallas Cowboys linebacker] DeMarcus Ware’s shoulders,” the president recalled. “I also want to point out I beat [Pittsburgh Steelers safety] Troy Polamalu over the middle on that throw.” Obama turned to Brees. “You remember?”

Boys will be boys — even if they’re presidents…

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President John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

President Ronald Wilson Reagan:

President Barack Hussein Obama: (more…)

Any one else feeling a little sorry for Donny Deutsch lately? I mean, this guy just can’t catch a break. Truth be told, the cards were stacked against the ad mogul from day one. According to Wikipedia, Deutsch was born November 22, 1957, six years to the day before JFK was assassinated. Try having your birthday co-opted by a national day of mourning right after you leave kindergarten and see how lucky you feel.

I used to like watching Deutsch’s The Big Idea program on CNBC. That was back in the good old days—two years ago—when America still watched non-political television once in a while. After The Big Idea was canceled in December 2008, our Man of Marketing resurfaced on the money network’s midday show, Power Lunch. That is, until one day in February 2009 when he and Charlie “Blood on the Street” Gasparino mixed it up pretty good. Guess who got “powered” off the show. (In an interesting twist, about two months ago Gasparino fled to Fox, where he now dishes the Street with his paisano, Neal Cavuto.)

The cable-TV Furies, however, hadn’t quite finished with Donny Deutsch. In July of last year, while he co-anchored an MSNBC daytime slot, the station decided to ambush Deutsch by showing an embarrassing photo of him in his salad days wearing a Speedo.  The painfully awkward on-air exchange between Deutsch and his female co-host gives a whole new meaning to the slogan “THE Place for Politics.” (more…)

Claude Brodesser-Akner has a column in New York Magazine’s new culture blog (Vulture) recently in which he sounds a warning, in hushed conspiratorial tones, about an effort underway by Hollywood to use Evangelical/Christian organizations to spread the word of their faith-based films to Christian audiences.

Dear God, say it ain’t so!!!!

Full disclosure, I am not an Evangelical… I haven’t even been inside a church for any reason other than to attend a wedding or funeral in some 20 years… but I’m just not sure what the big scoop is here. Brodesser-Akner seems to have discovered a vast conspiracy to… well let’s take the case of The Passion of the Christ. (more…)

As anyone who’s ever lived in our nation’s capital knows, Washington D.C.  – which, as JFK famously remarked, combines northern hospitality with southern efficiency — is abysmal at snow removal.  And with two major blizzards within a week, the city brought its fabled problem-solving ability to bear on what in Buffalo or Rochester is at best a minor inconvenience delaying you in getting to the bowling alley or the pizza parlor.

Besides the fact that the federal government apparently is now completely incapable of dealing with anything — do we really want to entrust our health care to this collection of circus clowns? — what did several feet of snow in the District of Columbia prove?

Why, if you’re the New York Times and MSNBC — indisputable proof of global warming!

Skeptics of global warming are using the record-setting snows to mock those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change — this looks more like global cooling, they taunt.

Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce mores frequent and more intense weather events.

You have to love that “most climate scientists” line, as if the Times actually canvassed them all before issuing its ex cathedra statement. Meanwhile, over at MSNBC, it seems that talking points went out in force on Wednesday, as the usual suspects — Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, et al. — all hopped on the AGW bandwagon and sneered at Sen. Jim DeMint’s tweeted wisecrack that it was “going to keep snowing in D.C. until Al Gore cries uncle.”

But leave it to the Cable Network Nobody Watches’ loopy Contessa Brewer, the pride of Syracuse, to tear into the subject with her usual fetching combination of intellectual confusion, dogged belligerence and invincible ignorance: (more…)