WP Tea party has roots in the Dallas of 1963. Note hatred of Kennedy by fringe groups.
Last edited Thu Nov 21, 2013, 06:27 PM - Edit history (1)
This is an interesting essay in today's Washington Post. It compares the political atmosphere in 1963 Dallas to today's.
The author:
Bill Minutaglio is a University of Texas journalism professor and the author of “First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty.” He and Steven L. Davis are the authors of “Dallas 1963” (2013, Twelve Books), from which this article is adapted.
Essay. Tea party has roots in the Dallas of 1963
To find the very roots of the tea party of 2013, just go back to downtown Dallas in 1963, back to the months and weeks leading to the Kennedy assassination. It was where and when a deeply angry political polarization, driven by a band of zealots, burst wide open in America.
It was fueled then, as now, by billionaires opposed to federal oversight, rabid media, Bible-thumping preachers and extremist lawmakers who had moved far from their political peers. In 1963, that strident minority hijacked the civic dialogue and brewed the boiling, toxic environment waiting for Kennedy the day he died.
...Not far away in downtown Dallas, oil billionaire H.L. Hunt was pouring millions into a ceaseless anti-Kennedy radio campaign; it was the dawn of extremist radio in the nation. Hunt’s program, “Life Line,” reached 10 million listeners a day with its scorching attacks against “the mistaken,” the term Hunt’s announcers used to describe the president’s supporters.
When Kennedy proposed Medicare to provide health care for the elderly, Hunt’s shows warned that government death panels would follow: “a package which would literally make the president of the United States a medical czar with potential life-or-death power over every man, woman and child in the country.”
Dallas Morning News publisher Ted Dealey particularly hated Kennedy. Ironically Dealey Plaza is having a special memorial for JFK tomorrow.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thanks. 
That's a good way to shut up any speculation.
I read this article from the Dallas News the other day, and it chilled my bones. Read how Adlai Stevenson was attacked about a month before the assassination by these rabid Birchers.
It's a very interesting and informative article, and as far as I know, the Dallas News is a mainstream newspaper; so it's not as if it's CT.
For me, I'm not so much interested in Oswald, or the magic bullet, or whatever - I want to know why all these years I never heard/knew about the Bircher politics down there, and how rabid they were toward President Kennedy.
And now today, we have the tea party who, whether the followers know it or not, are really the Birchers - a la Koch Brothers.
Edited to complete my thought process. 
old enough to remember Pearl Harbor vividly: it has been an ugly cancer on our society that has metastasized wildly. 
