The Myth Of JFK And The Beginning Of The Cult Of Personality

I’ve been thinking about JFK. It all began as a sidebar conversation with one of my favorite blog buddies Cujo359. He wondered if the present generation of Kennedy generation was living up to the standards set by the Jack, Joe Jr. , and Ted. This progressed, or perhaps degraded, into a conversation about the relative merits of John F. Kennedy vs. Lyndon Baines Johnson.

It is brutally hard to do an honest accounting of the charismatic and martyred JFK vs the man who succeeded him. LBJ had none of JFK’s charisma, was quite the brutal SOB, and had the extra large albatross of the Vietnam War hanging around his neck. There is not much love for LBJ. Johnson’s legacy is also shorted because he exploited the death, and image, of his predecessor to twist the arms of politicians, and others, into supporting a specific agenda that was all LBJ, all the time. LBJ was quite complacent in the construction of the myth of John F Kennedy, as were others. I’m going to try to put down my flame thrower and attempt to deconstruct that myth, and its very real, very political effects.

There is a reason that I have to proceed with caution. There is a small cottage industry with the only object of buffing up JFK’s image to a lustrous shine. Topmost is the Kennedy clan. JFK is very much their holy relic, their entre’e into politics, and their get-out-of-jail-free card.

But they are not the only people out there constructing the myth. The Media loves the image of JFK. They love pulling the heart strings of the ill and uninformed. They love diving into the warm, deep,waters of Kennedy bathos and nostalgia. It is a sure-fire way of getting high ratings.

Then you have all the retainers and hangers on that surround the Kennedy clan. The actual people who were attached to Jack’s presidency are fading and passing away, but their are plenty of people willing and able to pick up the dropped banners and carry on the cause. Each and every one of these professionals has good reason to keep the myth of JFK alive, and at the forefront of people’s mind.

So what is the cottage industry at? What are they constructing? What is the product they are selling? It’s an image, carefully crafted, expertly preserved, and mostly bunk. It is the image of a young, vital president, dashing, brilliant and progressive. It is an image of a man of political courage. It is an image of man who brought about massive political and social change. It is an image of a champion for Civil Rights, and a champion of the poor and dispossessed. Most of all it is an image of a great life cut short, brutally ended by murder most foul.

Like any good myth, there is a small grain of truth, a core to build on. Jack Kennedy was charming, handsome, dashing and photogenic. He was the first politician who really understood the then new media of television, and exploited it to the hilt. He really knew  how to use the image of his family, the image of him as young Pater Familias, to great effect. But like much of the JFK mystique, the image and the truth of the matter are very different. JFK did have the beautiful wife, and the large brood of children, but the family dynamics were a lot worse than advertised.

I am not going to go into the long, sordid tale of JFK’s numerous infidelities, it is subject that is far too long to relate. JFK followed one of the iron laws of history and biography: men with out-sized charisma, and out-sized egos, have out-sized sexual appetites. There was a pretense of happily married man and wife. This type of hypocrisy was tolerated in the 1960’s. Even today, the visual image of JFK as virile and dedicated family man still trumps the reality of JFK’s serial, and sometimes reckless, sexual affairs.

And since we are, in a way, discussing JFK’s image of virility, now is as good a time as any to drill down into the reality of JFK’s health. Be warned it is not a pretty picture. I really feel for the medical professionals that had to deal with JFK. I also really feel for the patient who those professionals attempted to treat.

If there was one true cross JFK did have to bear, it was his bad health. Where to begin? Do I begin with his war injuries? If so, how deeply do I go in to the symptoms of his ruined back? I’m not going to go too deeply because it is a truly awful thing to contemplate. We are dealing with unbelievable pain and suffering; chronic in nature, with no real end in site. The heavy duty meds Jack was given were only palliative, they temporary eased the pain, but never dealt with the underlying medical issue. There were other work-arounds, other palliative measures, a laundry list actually, but they were equally unsatisfactory. For Jack Kennedy, and many others who shared his type of traumatic back injury, you don’t look forward to a cure to the condition, because the only real cure is the grave.

The back was only one of JFK’s problems. He also suffered from Addison’s disease. As this disease affects the bodies hormone balance, it causes a plethora of symptoms in the sufferer.  Unfortunately for JFK, he had to deal with this disease back in the days when the treatment options were just plain awful. Medicine has advanced since that time, and the management of Addison’s is quantum leaps better. In JFK’s time, the treatment for Addison’s had barely advanced from the stone knives and incantations stage. The health care professionals did the best they could with the tools provided, but JFK was often in ill health.

The contrast between the image of a young vital JFK, and the reality of chronically ill, and often debilitated man could not be more stark; yet we cling to the images of youthful vigor, while ignoring the medical reality. As with so much with JFK, image trumps reality.

Having dealt as best and sympathetically as I can with the actual man; let me attempt to deal with the politician as sympathetically as I can. Be warned though, in attempting any such consideration my default is, “results matter.” The one true light I will follow is what JFK achieved in his own lifetime; in his tragically truncated presidency. I am not going to deal with counterfactuals, with could-of, should-of, would-of. The only honest appraisal of any person, but especially a politician, is what they achieved during their time in office; not what was achieved after the fact.

By this measure I must be honest, it really does not look good for the home team. What JFK actually achieved while alive places him, for the most part, in the presidential category of “above average.” He was brilliant in the Cuban Missile Crisis, avoiding nuclear Armageddon, but domestically he was middling.

Granted I have the advantage of hindsight that JFK did not enjoy, but on the core moral issue of Civil Rights, both Jack an Bobby did not cover themselves in glory. They were an improvement over Ike, a step above, they did move the game forward, but not in the way that is now advertised.

Like Ike, the two brothers were mostly dragged into the Civil Rights struggle by other parties. Let us zero in on the Freedom Rides as a prime example. The brothers did everything in there power to make this issue just go away. In this regard they were not alone. Even Martian Luther King Jr. was initially opposed to the idea of the Freedom Rides. But the movement took a life of its own, and as it progressed the awful images of Freedom Riders being beaten, abused and harassed forced Jack and Bobby to do something. It became a matter of protecting US citizens right to life and limb. Jack and Bobby had to act in the face of Southern attempts to nullify Federal protections.

They did the absolute minimum. JFK and RFK negotiated a peaceful extraction of the first set of Freedom Riders from Louisiana and called it a day. But when the second set of Freedom Riders upped the political pressure, Jack and Bobby finally brought out the sledgehammer of Federal Power. This particular sledgehammer happened to be the ICC, but all the same it got the job done. The segregationists of the south howled in pain, but they were not about to challenge the brute application of Federal prerogatives.

JFK dedication to the advancement of Civil Rights is a fraught subject. He did make motions in that area. He did make incremental gains in Civil Rights during his time in office. Unfortunately, it gets really difficult to measure the real amount of political capital he invested, and was willing to invest, because LBJ muddied those waters so thoroughly after JFK was assassinated.

LBJ flogged the image of the holy, sainted, martyr for the last bit of political advantage possible. JFK might have set up the political chess board of Civil Rights, but LBJ and MLK pushed those pieces around to brutal effect. Both LBJ and MLK were grand masters of that political game. King provided the moral force and the outside agitation, wile Johnson provided the inside game of brow-beating and cajoling the Senate into action. Together they steamrolled the recalcitrant Dixiecrats in the Senate.

I just do not see the partnership of JFK and MLK working in the same way. Even if JFK did bring his A game to the effort, how does a second term of JFK match the first term of LBJ in effectiveness? LBJ had a deep knowledge of the Senate, he had a historic mandate after the1964 election, and he had the image of the martyred JFK to use as a holy talisman. Again, I just do not see either the Great Society, nor the Civil Rights happening as they did without that triple threat that LBJ brought to the political table. I sure do not see JFK racing ahead of MLK the way LBJ did.

I’m sorry this took so long. It has been a very long and twisted shaggy dog story; even for me. I’ll try to drive to end of this narrative as best as I can. History matters gentle reader, you can’t discuss were we are without setting up how we got here. I have spent an inordinate amount of time on the history and biography of JFK, on the chasm between that myth and that reality for a reason. I think that it is with Kennedy that our present toxic cult of personality in politics began. It is in the manipulation of image, the choice of surface over substance, that the John F. Kennedy myth began, that our present political woes find their source.

We have made this choice gentle reader, and we have doubled down on our preference for style over substance every time we, as a nation, have been offered the chance. We did it with Nixon, if barely, accepting a very complex and angry man as a moral defender of a mythical silent majority. We did it, in a way, with Jimmy Carter, thinking that somehow an “outsider” could cure all the ills of a post-Watergate USA. We really went in for myth when we voted for Don Renaldo; the sunny, affable cowboy who would make all things bright and shiny again. What Reagan actually did was a whole different matter, best left for a different discussion. With Pappy Bush, we took a bit of a breather before diving back into the calming waters of myth with the man from Hope. After Bill Clinton departed, we wildly gyrated from the faux cowboy presidency of Bush Jr. , who we could have a beer with, to the professorial Obama, who offered Hope and Change.

It is with Obama we have reached an apex of sorts. The myth of Obama, and the reality of his presidency have been at such odds, that to even contemplate such things brings on nose bleeds. As I would rather not bleed over my keyboard at the moment, I will let that discussion pass for now. I will also leave the epic cult of personality his supporters indulge themselves in for other times as well. Obama did not create the present cult of political personality, as much as he has both exploited it and enlarged it. The cult of personality is quite the 800 pound gorilla, is quite the dangerous, lumbering beast.

It is this tendency toward political cultism that I find so toxic. The willingness of voters to  cling to an image, while ignoring the reality beneath, is distressing. It becomes almost farcical when you look at the present election of 2012. The fluffing up of both WIllard “Mitt” Romney and Barack Obama by their partisans is disconcerting, to say the least. Both these men are ethically challenged empty suites, political operators and hacks. But to their supporters, they walk on water; and possess an overarching  competence that is sadly lacking in reality. It is all smoke and mirrors, and we are without Toto to provide the helpful parting of the curtain.

Sorry, to end on such a down note. Sorry, to end the discussion with such a flame-thrower of invective. Our nation is in a bad way, and our refusal to do the hard work of due diligence with our political class is a big part of why our nation is in such a lamentable state. What to do? What to do?

They Killed Kennedy.

It is late November and that means one of the more enduring cottage industries of the United States is  producing at full capacity. That would be the producers of books and articles proving that JFK was done in by a conspiracy. It is entirely appropriate that these notions come out at the same time with the turkeys.

If you are sensing a little irritation here, you are correct. Nothing sets your faithful reporters’ teeth on edge quicker than these tales of an all singing, all dancing,conspiracy with out end, and the “proofs” offered for their existence. Time to pour the ice cold water of reason on these matters.

Uffelman's Razor:
[Given Murphy's law, ...] One should not attribute to evil design any unfortunate result which can be attributed to error. A mistake (or series of mistakes) is the simpler and more likely explanation.
Conspiracy Corollary to Uffelman's Razor:
Nothing should be attributed to conspiracy that can be explained by error or a succession of errors.

Granted the “explanation” that JFK died because of an epic cock-up by National, State and Local security agencies is very cold comfort. It has the small saving grace of being true.

Let us lay the ground work gentle reader. Let us deal with the facts on the ground before JFK got shot.

Federal agencies were rusty and sub par.  The last successful assassination of a President was beyond the living memory of most citizens of the United States in 1963. William McKinley in 1901 was the previous president to fall to an assassin’s gun.  More to the point, an assassination via a lone gunman was more of a mental exercise for the Secret Service than a point of concern. The last attempt on the life of any President was against Harry Truman by a group of radical Puerto Rican Nationalists. Not to beat this particular drum too hard but, the organization memory of the Secret Service had large holes in it. There was far too much slop and slack in the organization by 1963.

If the Feds were not running their “A” game that day, what of the state of Texas? Specifically what about law enforcement in the city of Dallas? Dallas in the 60’s was still a raw, violent and corrupt cow town. Incompetence and corruption ran rife though the Dallas Police. The Dallas Department of Public Safety was barely up to the task of controlling the mean and violent streets of Dallas. Tasked with Protecting the life of JFK they failed miserable.

If you follow any kind of history, the history of nations, the history of peoples, the history of government, the history of organizations, you will see that they all have high and low points. Often you will see a nadir, or a low point in the history.  At these low points, incompetence and idiocy rule the roost. Common sense precautions and proceedings fall by the wayside. Sloth and slovenly behavior are the order of the day. Things fall apart. Things do not get done. Common sense proscriptions and preventative measures get ignored because no one wants to put in the effort to do them.

The security apparatus tasked with protecting JFK was thing of patches and shreds. There were gaping institutional holes in the system. It would take the assassination of JFK, RFK, and George Wallace for the Secret Service to spool up to the present policies and procedures. Even after significantly beefing up security for the president, the Secret Service still nearly lost Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s. Only John Hinckley’s poor mental state and even worse aim saved the Gipper’s life.

The mind reels that the death of a man like JFK could be cut down so randomly, and so easily, by a marginal schlub. It rebels at the notion that a cipher, a complete nonentity like Lee Harvey Oswald, could cut down the most powerful man in the world. But it happened in just such a manner. All it took was Oswald’s desire to make something of himself, a literal window of opportunity and easy access to small arms.

Incompetence and sloppy planing delivered a clear shot to Oswald. His Marine Corps training provided a competence in rifle fire. The U.S. Mail provided the actual weapon. It was that simple.

Even today, with all the tragedy that has occurred via easy access to fire arms, those weapons are still ridiculously easy to acquire. One could waltz into most gun shows with a huge thin foil hat on one’s head and a sock puppet on the hand, and still walk out with Semi-Automatic rifle. Just bring cash.

Unfortunately none of these arguments will hold much water with the CT true believers. They will continue to spin their confections, and people will continue to purchase those intellectual empty calories. The route through Daily Plaza was a set up? And how was that achieved? Do any of the proponents of that notion understand how many people would have to be in on the conspiracy to make that work? Far too many for success.

Real conspiracies are small and focused. Think Cheney’s WHIG and the staffing of that effort. It was Dead-Eye Dick and a handful of others, Conspiracies are always small because each new member brought into the conspiracy multiplies the risk of exposure.

One more thing about conspiracies, at least conspiracies in governance, they are short-lived. Because they are focused on a discernible goal, they end within a short period of time. They end because their goal has been reached; or because of some internal failure. Either way their secrecy ends in discreet amount of time. Secret conspiracies that stretch over decades of time are the product of over-active imaginations. They are as thick on the ground as unicorns. Conspiracies that hire a cast of thousands, which is about every JFK CT out there, are equally mythical.

It is almost certain that this newest JFK CT theory to hit the silver screen will play well. Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner did well with their movie based on the facts-free efforts of  epically corrupt Jim Garrison in New Orleans. Don’t get your faithful corespondent started on what a soup sandwich that prosecution was.

Despite the gross receipts DiCaprio and company pull in, no one should confuse their success at the box office with any kind of final truth telling about JFK.   As pointed out by Gerald Posner in "Case Closed", the final answer is still that Oswald was the shooter, and that he acted alone. If Posner is too flawed a vessel for you, "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" by Vincent Bugliosi covers the same ground and reaches the same conclusion. Nothing offered by Hartmann and his collaborator is going to change that conclusion.

It is beyond reason to believe that a Justice Department run by RFK would not follow the possibility that JFK was done in by the mob. If there was a single shred of actionable evidence that supported that possibility, RFK, one of the most ruthless of Federal Prosecutors ever to be US AG, would not go after the mobster(s) that killed his brother? In what parallel universe did this happen? No, even if the AG was not kith and kin, the Feds would rip the Mobster(s) to shreds if they had evidence to link them with the murder of the president.

This is the simple institutional facts on the ground. The Federal Government cannot let gagsters shoot up its chief executive officer on a whim. The Federal Government cannot tolerate such goings on for any reason whatsoever. The Feds would find a way to put an epic hurt on the Mafiosi by legal or extra-legal means. As they say in the Godfather, it would not be personal; it would just be business.

As goes that conspiracy theory, so go the rest. Pull back from the vortex of the illogic hole, and every Kennedy CT falls apart. They fall apart because they fail Occam's razor. They drag one into a bizarre parallel universe where needless complexity runs rampant.

Even the explanation offered for “them,” “they,” killing JFK becomes needlessly Byzantine. When your CT can’t offer a believable motive, you’re in deep trouble. Gentle reader, your faithful correspondent has yet to read or hear an “explanation” from JFK C.T. enthusiasts that makes any sense. The risk to benefit ratio Is totally out of whack. Its rational only exists in the minds of the CT faithful, not in the cold light of reason.

The Conspiracy to assassinate JFK is not now, nor ever been a part of History, even alternate history. It is not science. It is not art. It is religion. It is a confession of faith. It is  in the same league as belief in the Trinity or the Virgin Birth. This belief is a thing of shadow and mist. It is a combination of myth and wishful thinking. In a very real way it corrupts and degenerates the very tragedy of JFK’s death.
That tragedy is that a systemic failure of governance, and a culture that fetishizes guns, allowed the most marginal of its citizens to cut down JFK like a rabid yellow dog. The other tragedy is we would rather grasp on to fantastical stories of grand conspiracies than to deal with that awful truth.

More Drivel From The Likud Senator

Democrats and Our Enemies

By JOSEPH LIEBERMAN
May 21, 2008; Page A19

How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?

Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful.

AP

Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, 1961.

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

This was the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who pledged that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

And this was the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, who promised in his inaugural address that the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of freedom."

This worldview began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party. Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor – a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and "inordinate fear of communism" represented the real threat to world peace.

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America's fault.

Of course that leftward lurch by the Democrats did not go unchallenged. Democratic Cold Warriors like Scoop Jackson fought against the tide. But despite their principled efforts, the Democratic Party through the 1970s and 1980s became prisoner to a foreign policy philosophy that was, in most respects, the antithesis of what Democrats had stood for under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy.

Then, beginning in the 1980s, a new effort began on the part of some of us in the Democratic Party to reverse these developments, and reclaim our party's lost tradition of principle and strength in the world. Our band of so-called New Democrats was successful sooner than we imagined possible when, in 1992, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were elected. In the Balkans, for example, as President Clinton and his advisers slowly but surely came to recognize that American intervention, and only American intervention, could stop Slobodan Milosevic and his campaign of ethnic slaughter, Democratic attitudes about the use of military force in pursuit of our values and our security began to change.

This happy development continued into the 2000 campaign, when the Democratic candidate – Vice President Gore – championed a freedom-focused foreign policy, confident of America's moral responsibilities in the world, and unafraid to use our military power. He pledged to increase the defense budget by $50 billion more than his Republican opponent – and, to the dismay of the Democratic left, made sure that the party's platform endorsed a national missile defense.

By contrast, in 2000, Gov. George W. Bush promised a "humble foreign policy" and criticized our peacekeeping operations in the Balkans.

Today, less than a decade later, the parties have completely switched positions. The reversal began, like so much else in our time, on September 11, 2001. The attack on America by Islamist terrorists shook President Bush from the foreign policy course he was on. He saw September 11 for what it was: a direct ideological and military attack on us and our way of life. If the Democratic Party had stayed where it was in 2000, America could have confronted the terrorists with unity and strength in the years after 9/11.

Instead a debate soon began within the Democratic Party about how to respond to Mr. Bush. I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework the president had advanced for the war on terror as our own, because it was our own. But that was not the choice most Democratic leaders made. When total victory did not come quickly in Iraq, the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price saw an opportunity to reassert themselves. By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy – not bin Laden, but Mr. Bush – activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party further to the left than it has been at any point in the last 20 years.

Far too many Democratic leaders have kowtowed to these opinions rather than challenging them. That unfortunately includes Barack Obama, who, contrary to his rhetorical invocations of bipartisan change, has not been willing to stand up to his party's left wing on a single significant national security or international economic issue in this campaign.

In this, Sen. Obama stands in stark contrast to John McCain, who has shown the political courage throughout his career to do what he thinks is right – regardless of its popularity in his party or outside it.

John also understands something else that too many Democrats seem to have become confused about lately – the difference between America's friends and America's enemies.

There are of course times when it makes sense to engage in tough diplomacy with hostile governments. Yet what Mr. Obama has proposed is not selective engagement, but a blanket policy of meeting personally as president, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American regimes on the planet.

Mr. Obama has said that in proposing this, he is following in the footsteps of Reagan and JFK. But Kennedy never met with Castro, and Reagan never met with Khomeini. And can anyone imagine Presidents Kennedy or Reagan sitting down unconditionally with Ahmadinejad or Chavez? I certainly cannot.

If a president ever embraced our worst enemies in this way, he would strengthen them and undermine our most steadfast allies.

A great Democratic secretary of state, Dean Acheson, once warned "no people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies." This is a lesson that today's Democratic Party leaders need to relearn.

Mr. Lieberman is an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut. This article is adapted from a speech he gave May 18 at a dinner hosted by Commentary magazine.

From the pages of the Wall Street Journal

Snip

If this does not prove that Holy Joe is a Republican in "Independent Democrat" clothing what does? So many lies, smears, distortions, and fabrications; where do we start?

Let us begin at the beginning shall we? Let us start with the very first straw man argument. No Democrat in any position of power ever argued that the Soviet Union was all sweetness and light. There were some student radicals and University Professors who may have argued that the U.S. was solely responsible for the cold war but these were people on the outside looking in.

Responsible people did argue that the Soviet threat was much less than it appeared. They argued that the Warsaw pact was more of a defensive arrangement than a tool for aggression. They argued that our belligerence was counterproductive. They argued that our Anti-Communist foreign policy did more harm than good. The pointed to our entanglement in Vietnam as an example of us blundering into commitments that had no real benefit to our national security. There was some disagreement in how to fight global communism and how to spread democracy but there was never a serious disagreement on whether to scrap these two goals. Lieberman once again drags up the old McCarthyite Smears. He drags out the rotten, vile corpse of Tail Gunner Joe for yet another dance around the political stage. Anyone who disagrees with him is part of a left-wing America hating cabal who wants us to surrender to the enemy. Any one who wants to negotiate ,or even just talk is a coward and appeaser. He flips the Churchillian logic to “better war, war than jaw, jaw.”

Even Richard Milhous Nixon, red-bater and anti-communist extraordinaire talked; even he stat down with the Soviets. Even he finally had to trim his sails viz the Russians. The man opened up trade with them; he negotiated START and ignored human rights issues. Jimmy Carter, not the name that falls off the lips of Scoop Jacksonian Democrats, was much tougher with the Soviets than Nixon. No one in their right minds equates his National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski with a tree-hugging, Latte sipping, Sandal-wearing, peace-love-and-granola type. By the way Ronald Regan did talk to Mikhail Gorbachev and Reagan’s minions even did the arms for hostages deal with Iran. Good Ol’ Ronny was knee deep in Iran Contra, remember? Ronny and his crew was knee deep in Iranian appeasement and double dealing. Ronny and his crew rewarded Iranian misbehavior. By the way Lieberman’s bestest buddy in the world, George W Bush, has overseen numerous contacts with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran provided yeoman assistance with our Afghan mission; they hate the Taliban even more than we do.

Lieberman is correct in one respect, Ronald Reagan would never talk to someone like Ahmadinejad, why bother with the court jester? Chavez on the other hand is a direct result of Regan's mindless anti-communism south of the border. Chavez is the direct result of Regan’s contra-insurgent strategy. The concept is called blow-back; something that has slipped the Senator’s thought processes.

JFK never did talk to Castro this much is also true; but he did talk to Khrushchev and had he lived he might have found a way to live with Fidel in his second term. JFK was much more of a pragmatist than advertised. He was a cold war warrior through and through, but he knew where to cut his losses. If we could have an embassy in Moscow we can certainly have an embassy in Havana the reasoning could have gone.

Carter too talked with our opponents. Carter had the misfortune to inherit a badly damaged military. The toll of our misadventure in the jungles of Southeast Asia played out in the desert of Iran. Our foolish interference in 1950's Iran, covered by anti-Communist dogma, blew back in the form of the Islamic Revolution. All combined into the hostage crisis. Please note that Carter managed to return all the hostages alive, the only loss of life coming in the botched Dessert One mission. Reagan on the other hand got 300+ Marines needlessly slaughtered in Lebanon on a fools mission that did major damage to our reputation in the Middle East. Odd, Carter gets slagged for extracting us out of the Iran crisis with minimal loss of life while Regan gets praised when he slinks away from Islamic radicals. Somehow the first incident emboldened the "Islamofascists" while the second struck fear in their hearts.

Ideological anti-Communism caused harm elsewhere. Most of South and Central America is still trying to recover from despotic military rule supported by Washington. Most of Africa lies waist due to Kleptocratic rulers supported because they were "our son of a bitch" in the fight against Communism. Critics pointed this out to the Scoop Jackson Democrats. Even though there is ample documentation to the folly of ideological monomania, of the us-vs.-them mindset, Holy Joe is just itching to repeat the follies of Cold War mental rigidity. This time it the global war on Terror. This time it is the "fight against radical Islam." The need for some grand ideological struggle is even more felt.

Lieberman and his ilk so desperately need this struggle of ideas; they need an existential struggle to justify their views. Never mind that like the Pope, Al Qaeda is woefully short of divisions. Never mind that our pointless misadventures in the land of Mesopotamia are adding fuel to the jihadist fire. Never mind that being stateless actors they have no way to attack the U.S.; that there is no way they will be able to fight us on our home front. Never mind there is no way to wage war on a tactic (terror.) OBL and his scruffy, rag-tag bunch of ne'er-do-wells is equivalent of the Old Soviet Union. OBL / Al Qaeda are the equivalent of the massed divisions of the Warsaw pact, the equivalent of the 30,000 nuclear device holding Russian menace. OBL/ Al Qaeda in their little mountain hide-out have the intelligence capability of the old KGB/MGB. OBL/ Al Qaeda have the billions of dollar of resources and the vast human capital of the old Bolshevik Empire. Really? Then what, pray tell, are they doing hiding out in the tribal badlands of the Pakistan / Afghanistan border regions? The comparison is ridiculous. The best Al Qaeda has managed so far is to fly some passenger planes into a landmark building. The Soviet Union fought and defeated one of the greatest military machines ever assembled- Nazi Germany.

The views of the NeoCons are bankrupt. They suffer from a rigidity of thought and deed. They latch on to Military might as the sole means of power projection. This brute strength ideology is an insult to the Democratic fore bearers that Lieberman holds up for justification. FDR, Harry Truman, JFK were never this tone deaf. JFK would never confuse a flea for an elephant.

Even if you think that the US has a right to use project its power wherever and whenever it wants to (a dicey proposition to be sure), military muscle is last tool to reach for not the first. There is an old saying that you can get a lot more flies with honey than you can with vinegar. It is called soft power, a concept totally foreign to NeoCons like Lieberman. Of course soft power works best with some hard power resting behind it. That is not the argument. The argument is that words are better than bombs. The argument is that all countries have interests and it is the best policy to see if there is way to way to trade off interests. Diplomacy is not necessarily a zero sum game. Iran's gain does not necessarily mean our loss. Both the US and Iran can gain from a stabilization of the Middle East; even Israel can gain from an Iran that is engaged in negotiation instead of trouble making.

This is not to say that the US is in a poor position viz. Iran in the Middle East, we are. We are in this position because of Senator Lieberman's other obsession in the region-Iraq. There was no bigger cheer-leader for the Iraq invasion than Holy Joe. Lieberman was for regime change before 9/11 and before George W. Bush got into office. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was his fondest wish. He and his Likud buddies thought that taking Iraq out of the equation would be a benefit to Israel and stabilize the region. A democratic, free-market, libertarian Iraq would be a beacon to the region. Iraq would set off the dominoes in the Middle East and all those bad Arab actors would see the light and join the Club For Growth. What really happened? The NeoCons and their Likudnick allies screwed the pooch so badly in Iraq that the poor mutt died. Iraq is now a hollow shell. Every day brings more news of a Hobbesian struggle of the all against the all. What is the good Senator solution to rise of Iran brought about by our Iraqi catastrophe? Why he proposes that we engage in a naval blockade or better yet an attack. Good idea Joe! Let us add even more chaos to a region that has a surplus of that item. Let us see if we can get oil up to $500.00 or better yet $1,000.00 a barrel. That should be a real boon to limping American economy; that and $10.00 a gallon gasoline. JFK would be ecstatic with that prospect. Truman would be doing cartwheels over that kind of result. Yes, this exactly the type of foreign policy Scoop Jackson would support.