Nothing has changed in the 46 years since JFK was assassinated. The hate mongering, the demonizing, and the incitement to violence existed then. The 4th graders who cheered Kennedy's death are now the grown-ups with racial and nazi signs at tea parties. The era of Regan, Delay and Gringrich, along with the inflammatory rhetoric of talk radio and Fox News has emboldened these lunatic. The Republican party has cowered under pressure from these extreme right wing groups.
And this is just plain scary:
CNN's Rick Sanchez in a startling video reports threats against President Obama are up 400 percent.
http://www.rbguy.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/9/12/780953/-CNNs-Rick-Sanchez-in-a-startling-video-reports-threats-against-President-Obama-are-up-400-percent.When will the moderate Republicans find a backbone, do what is right and condemn these groups.
As I read the article about William Manchester writing the 1967 best seller "The Death of a President", and got to the part about the political climate at the time, I couldn't stop drawing parallels and shudder.
Following is an excerpt from the article.
He also discovered that Kennedy had been warned not to make the trip. “Evangelist Billy Graham had attempted to reach Kennedy … about his own foreboding. The Dallas mood was no secret,” he wrote. And Senator William Fulbright, the liberal senator from Arkansas, had pleaded with Kennedy: “Dallas is a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.”
<snip>
Manchester also discovered that Dallas “had become the Mecca for medicine-show evangelists … the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry Societies, and the headquarters of
H. L. Hunt and his activities.”
“In that third year of the Kennedy presidency,” Manchester wrote, “a kind of fever lay over Dallas country. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed, ‘Impeach Earl Warren.’ Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas.…Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; corporate junior executives were required to attend radical seminars.” A retired major general ran the American flag upside down, deriding it as “the Democrat flag.” A wanted poster with J.F.K.’s face on it was circulated, announcing “this man is Wanted” for—among other things—“turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations” and appointing “anti-Christians … aliens and known Communists” to federal offices. And a full-page advertisement had appeared the day of the assassination in The Dallas Morning News accusing Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party; when it was shown to the president, he was appalled. He turned to Jacqueline, who was visibly upset, and said, “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today.”
Manchester discovered that in a wealthy Dallas suburb, when told that President Kennedy had been murdered in their city, the students in a fourth-grade class burst into applause.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/10/death-of-a-president200910?currentPage=1
This is a holy war for them, they will never stop.