See How They Robbed Us When They Murdered the Kennedys

(So Began Their Boiled-Frog Reduction of Our Lives to Wretchedness)

 

“TV commentator Chris Matthews’ book, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit, has been a best seller since it was released last October, but there’s a lot of important material that Matthews (deliberately) left out (to cover up Kennedy's progressive politics)...Martin Luther King was relying on Bobby to enter the race, and when he did, was overjoyed, saying he would make an outstanding president. RFK had King, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta on his side...Why does Matthews continually ignore these points? If one thinks, as his employers at MSNBC do, that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are the liberal ideal, then what Bobby Kennedy represented in 1968 was (genuinely) radical...(and must therefore be suppressed).”

 

The following comment is a revised and expanded version of the thank-you note I posted on the comment-thread of James DiEugenio's above-linked "Distorting the Life of Bobby Kennedy," courageously published by Consortium News to refute Matthews' lies of omission:

We should all be grateful to Mr. DiEugenio for his fine work, which accurately describes the real Robert Francis Kennedy: the U.S. attorney general who repeatedly intervened on behalf the Civil Rights Movement, whose mostly unpublicized interventions I learned of as a civil rights activist in East Tennessee; the refreshingly enlightened senator from my home state of New York, whose unprecedented activism I would have endorsed with my vote had I not, in 1964, still been registered to cast my ballots in Tennessee; the RFK whose policies I sometimes (triumphantly) covered as a confident young reporter and editor in New York City and adjacent urban New Jersey; the "Bobby" whose presidential candidacy reached across racial lines to mobilize a larger and more solidarity-minded majority of the 99 Percent than ever before or since; the martyr whose assassination ended forever any rational hope the United States might someday forcibly reform predatory Capitalism at least enough to enable what was allegedly "our" nation to live up to its claims of egalitarian and humanitarian ideals.
  

That is one of the many reasons I have such scorn and contempt for the Hillaryite Democratic (sic) Party; I have long been outraged by the Democrats' sneaky efforts to hide the  magnitude of their treachery by maliciously portraying Senator Kennedy as far less progressive than he actually was.

 

Indeed this alone is perhaps the most effective tactic employed by the Democrats to disguise their morally imbecilic Neoliberal savagery; they rewrite the past to portray the Kennedys as oppression-tolerant masqueraders, lending credence to breathtaking Big Lies  of "change we can believe in" while obscuring the ever-deepening  wretchedness to which they are actually betraying us. 

But even these examples of oppression by deception do not excuse our appalling ignorance of history: our willfully embraced Moron Nation anti-intellectualism as demonstrated yet again by how even the  U.S. Left -- Pseudo-left and Real Left alike -- accepts these Hillaryite slanders as unquestionable truth, as if our national slogan were "self-deception is self-protection" or some other equally damning variant of 1984's "ignorance is strength."

Though Robert Kennedy was certainly no Marxist, he was nevertheless -- as Mr. DiEugenio so aptly reminds us -- our last hope of retaining the partial Working Class empowerment we had achieved via the (contextually) revolutionary socialism of New Deal economics...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Radically Revised to Include This Weekend's Updates: How the Always Brutal, Often Murderous Past of Capitalist U.S. Governance Enables Its Ever-More-Evil JesuNazi Present

If We Are to Understand How We Became Our Planet's Apocalypse Nation, We Must All Fearlessly Admit Our Blood-Drenched History 

(Editor's Note: Never before have I rewritten a published blog post as thoroughly as I have rewritten this one, a challenging process that reveals by the delays it imposed on publication the extreme, mostly emotional difficulty I had in verbally focusing on my chosen material. I have therefore, in embarrassment so acute it borders on mortification,  deleted the original version,  an act of revisionism unprecedented in all my years of blogging. I have also expanded the text to include this weekend's updates, thereby avoiding back-to-back publication of two separate posts. While this version is unquestionably better than its predecessor -- attentive readers will recognize its improvements as motivated entirely by sharpened focus rather than correction or retraction --  such re-evaluation is probably never truly complete. That's why I have no doubt I will many times more revisit the subject -- how we (and myself in particular) reflexively wrapped our experiences of ever-intensifying USian malevolence in shrouds of complacency -- a sin of which we are all to some extent guilty regardless of how raised any one of us might have imagined our consciousness to be. Meanwhile I offer my heartfelt apology for the original text's premature expostulation./LB)

"Robert Kennedy’s death, like the President's, was mourned as an extension of senseless violence; events moved on, and the profound alterations that these deaths…brought in the equation of power in America was perceived as random…. What is odd is not that some people thought it was all random, but that so many intelligent people refused to believe that it might be anything else. Nothing can measure more graphically how limited was the general understanding of what is possible in America."

Comment: again, as in my two preceding posts, we begin with never-avenged atrocities that define "what is possible" in the homeland of the U.S. Empire; again, as before, I take this approach because I am convinced we cannot truly comprehend the terminal magnitude of the horrors the United States is inflicting on ourselves, our species and our planet without first acknowledging at least some of the preceding outrages that regardless of the vehemence and constancy of our opposition nevertheless define us as citizens of the most wantonly murderous empire in all human history.

But this time I also confess my own guilt in acts of self-censorship that make me a telling example of how for years we the people reflexively adjusted, like the proverbial frog, to the stealthily imposed JesuNazism and fascism in general that is now bursting terribly into boil as demonstrated by our suddenly accelerated reduction to credit-card serfdom and for-profit prison slavery.  
    
Here too is my own belated Memorial Day eulogy for some of our more politically revealing dead and wounded -- belated because (given how the warmongers have perverted Decoration Day's original post-Civil-War "memory and tears" into a grotesque celebration of the Empire's conquer-the-world agenda) -- I had originally planned to ignore the holiday entirely.

(To read the rest, go here.)