Did the ideals of The New Frontier die with Jack Kennedy? It's an interesting explanation of how many Democrats seem to have become Oswalds, rather than Kennedys, and why JFK would probably be unable to get the presidential nomination of the party today.

Also, some interesting related thoughts by a commenter at Dr. Sanity's place. The totalitarian impulse of the communists didn't die--it just became subsumed into the Democrat Party.

So, most Democrats are assassins with totalitarian impulses? I guess that makes them Evil, huh?

Ummmm...no.

That's an amusing straw man, though. I'll assume that you couldn't be bothered to actually follow the links.

No, the Democrats are apparatchiks with totalitarian impulses.

And it doesn't necessarily make them evil; it does, however, make them a danger to liberty.

Piereson's piece is excellent. I wonder if we could get Oliver Stone to read it? There was a quote many years ago from a General, I can't remember his name, that went something like; Communists are like cockroaches. Shine a light on them and they run for cover. Must have something to do with bankrupt ideologies.

Not sure when it happened, but we are now living in the age of, "Go ahead and ask what your country can do for you, and we'll see if there's pork left over. We know you are unable to do it on your own. Just vote our way and we'll help you."

Jack's message evidently took one to the melon from the grassy knoll.

Mark Furman has a new book out on the JFK shooting. His conclusion is that the shooter was white, but that the motivating charge was black powder.

Interesting that Dr. Sanity claims the infiltration into the Democrat Party began in 1984. I've held the opinion that that political party lost its way in 1983, when "Scoop" Jackson died.

I read Piereson's article and think it really good. The comments in reply to Dr. Sanity's comment about it makes it clear that both Piereson and Dr. Sanity are quite correct.

Is it really so us vs them in the USA?

According to recent research done by a british professor, people are less likely to rise from poor to rich in the US or UK when compared to the nordic countries. I guess it's a "stay on top and keep the others down" mentality. With all the expensive education, fenced living areas for the rich and such.

In reading a draft of a biography of Robert Heinlein (3000 pages in ms), Heinlein extensively noted during the mid-1930s the gross infiltration of Communists into the Democratic Party (Heinlein was a social democrat active in the Democratic Party of California at the time). In fact, this is one of the main reasons he stopped participating in Democrat party activities. Communists joining the Dems pre-dates the 1980s by decades.

An orthogonal point: Oswald saved Project Apollo. This conclusion is left as an excercise for the student.

Oswald saved Project Apollo.

If so, a side effect almost certainly unintended.

And if so, should we thank him, or curse him?

I think the JFK killing wounded the classical liberal dominance of the Democratic party. The RFK & MLK killings and the Chicago convention debacle, leading to Humphrey's loss to Nixon, finished it off.

mz,
who is the implied "they" who are keeping anyone down? This bogeyman is at the heart of every, “I can’t get put of the trailer park / ghetto” story I’ve ever heard. When I worked with guys who were in prison, it was always someone else’s fault that they were incarcerated.

Just because someone grows up middle or upper middle class or rich doesn't mean they work at keeping others down. Most people are working to hard getting themselves ahead in life, to go to the Let’s Keep the Poor Down Meetings.

What keeps most people down is ignorance. By ignorant I mean people who would rather watch Survivor or NASCAR or yo yo yo, go to da club all night, aight, than read a book. They'd rather keep carping about their present life situation than change and go to school. They work meaningless jobs, live 4 minutes from where they grew up and refuse to learn anything new. They do just enough to get by every month and no more. When layoffs or promotions come it's always some one elses fault they're in the wrong line. I've fired people for not doinmg their job, who told me they knew it was coming for months. I can tell you they may have known, but never worked harder, nor came in on time to forestall the axe dropping.

Before anyone climbs on me, I love both Survivor and NASCAR, but also watch the History Channel and Discovery etc. I no longer do clubs, but I once did. I am a high school drop out; I left home at 17 and was literally homeless for a while. I have been fired from jobs for being a slacker, when 19 or 20. I worked a ton of dead end jobs, but went to school and absorbed every piece of information about those jobs, so I could move up. I worked almost full time and went to college full time, in my 30's with 2 kids to support. But the hard work paid off. Most people's hard work does payoff.

In almost 52 years I have never found anyone trying to keep me in my place from inside some gated community. A few have tried to stifle me due to their own prejudices, but because of my imposing size or because of my long hair and beard, not because I was once poor or homeless. I side stepped these fools and kept moving forward.

If you talk to anyone who considers himself or herself to be successful, they will never say someone kept them down. While almost everyone I ever met who considers himself or herself a failure had the old bogeyman "they" to pin it on.

Well, vote for cheaper and better education and bigger minimum wages at first, or something. At expense to the taxpayers. If the education keeps becoming more and more expensive, you soon have a class society. That's "keeping the poor people down". Voting and lobbying I guess.

To demonstrate the idea to its full extent with a thought experiment, maybe don't even teach the poor to read? So you can keep them as slaves, as they don't know what they agree to in contracts, or can't read newspapers or blogs or organize.

You say the american people who stay poor are lazy or easily distracted and exploited, why isn't the case as bad in the nordic countries then? I'd bet there's some systematic difference to that. Maybe it's not the education system here, maybe it's less commercialism or something. I don't know. Maybe it's some flaw in the study.

I appreciate your hard work and doing well, do you think it's possible or likely for for a young guy who is like you were 30 years ago to succeed? Is it easier or harder?

mz
I would say the primary difference is a 70% taxation rate, free health care, free college, free child care etc.

WAIT!! It's not free, it's paid for off of the 70% tax rate!!

I do not now, nor have I, nor will I say I believe in a systematic, insidious attack on the poor to keep them down. The minimum wage is a joke. Companies that pay low wages have a constant turn over of employees added to their cost of doing business. Companies that pay higher get and keep better employees. And raising the minimum wage has never solved the trailer park / ghetto problems.

Even the wrongheaded education system we have is better than being a dropuot. If even one person can drag themselves out of the trailer park / ghetto then it is absolutely possible. The people who do get out of those places work hard and get an education. Instead of piciking up a b-ball or joining a gang or buying bigger "mud tars" for that ol' 4x4 truck, they should INSTEAD take advantage of what education that is available. It's almost easier to get into college here now if you're poor than if you are rich. grants and loans for school get awarded BY NEED.

I would really like to see your proof of this problem. Show me someone who has hacked into the servers of Let’s Keep the Poor Down. Bring forward someone who has infiltrated their meetings, show me the proof.

All you have to prove institutionally managed poverty so far is the fact that the Scandinavian poor have access to more government money to get started on than American poor have. Taking 70% of everyones pay is forcing the current wage earners to pay for helping people that may fall into the Scandinavian equivilant of the trailer park / ghetto mind set classes.

Isn't that institutional management toward making everyone poorer?

Sigh, the amount of strawmen in your argument is staggering. I already said cheaper education is at the expense of the taxpayers and all that. I also didn't claim there was any conspiracy.

"Taking 70% of everyones pay is forcing the current wage earners to pay for helping people that may fall into the Scandinavian equivilant of the trailer park / ghetto mind set classes."

I'm not sure what you mean by this? Do you mean that "if you have high taxes on the rich, that is forcing, and the money is then used to help poor"? If you mean that, it is true, it is transferring money from the rich to the poor. 70% taxes? I don't know what you assume exactly, but sounds exaggerated.

Well, if there are some people that are doing bad, it seems the leftists want to help them (with some costs to the people who are doing well) and the right wing people don't. And the help seems to work (or then there's some other reason), since more people move up from the lowest social class in the more leftist nordic countries than in the more right-wing usa or uk. And they then earn more money. Hey, they can be educated in the university and work at some expert job, paying big taxes themselves! The nation can transform from bulk manufacturing into IT.

If there's supposed to be this american dream or that you can succeed more easily there, rags to riches, rise from the bottom, that kind of stuff, more than for example in the "socialist" nordic countries, it seems to be somehow false, at least nowadays. I don't know, maybe it's just lack of information, ambition and bad culture like you say, but I don't exactly believe in that being all. I believe one reason is the high price university education. Oh, maybe the poor people can go to the army too to get a scholarship. About 90% of men go to the army in my country anyway, not looking at income.

Sorry, it's offtopic, I can't link this discussion to Kennedy and the communists and all that. :)

Good lord, mz, now you are being deliberately stupid. Steve just pointed out that it's easier than ever for the poor to go to college -- that scholarships and grants and loans are given based on NEED. That's MONETARY need. So you're zombielike ejaculations about the schools being "more expensive" than ever, maybe the poor can go into the army for an education, are meaningless. Jesus Christ, may layabout, barely-graduated-highschool, hasn't-worked-in-years, cadges-off-her-boyrfriend sister found out, at my urging, that she could get into the local community college basically for free, because she has zero income. But she won't go, because that would mean change and she'd rather sit on her arse complaining. And people like YOU, who pass on wilfull lies about how the poor "can't make it" aren't helping.

Oh why am I bothering? You'll just keep on believing what you believe, in the face of easily-researched evidence. (Try www.salliemae.com for a start.)

Ugh.. I mean "your zombielike ejaculations". Arguing with stupid people causes stupidity.

Poor people aren't the only ones who go into the military so they can go to school. Both our sons did just that, and we are not poor.

As to the 70% tax rate, that is several years old and was an example from the DNC. They were claiming that INCREASING taxes even to that level doesn't hamper anyones ability to live well.

In the DNC's opinion maybe. Tax Ted Kennedy or Nancy Pelosi or Screaming Howie Dean 70%, see if that doesn't send them over the edge.

That pig has someting in his eye again.

Ted Kennedy settled his mother's estate in Florida to avoid the estate taxes in Massachusetts. The claim was that her primary residence was in Florida, even though she spent most of her life in Massachusetts.

To leftists like Ted, taxes are for other people.

He was responible for the murder of a police officer

The reason the Dems changed can be summed up in one word: Vietnam -- which JFK's Cabinet persuaded LBJ to get stuck in (despite his own initial doubts, as we now know from the released records of his Jan. 1964 phone conversations). Any party would feel seriously burned after an experience like that.

JFK himself, had he lived, might have had sense enough to defy his own Cabinet and pull us out of Vietnam early -- just as he avoided a stupendously bigger worldwide disaster by defying the advice of almost his entire Cabinet and blockading Cuba rather than bombing the Soviet missile sites there. That is, he was (shudder) a bit of a peacenik, albeit of the sensible kind. (Certainly he was more of a peacenik than Scoop Jackson, who voted against JFK's Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on what can only be called harebrained grounds.)