Tuesday, July 01, 2008
JFK revisited
My neighborhood association had a get-together this evening. After business had been conducted, and after a bunch o' hot dogs had been eaten, folks started talking about politics.
During the fifteen-minute, fifteen-person impromptu political roundtable, a guy who admitted earlier in the evening that he is "39-year-old" opined that John F. Kennedy was the "greatest" president of his lifetime. I wanted to tell him, "JFK died about five years before you were ****in' born!" But I held my tongue.
Now, as for JFK being a "great" president, Joseph Epstein set the record straight in the Wall Street Journal last July. Check this out:
"Here was a president who initiated no impressive programs, was less than notably courageous in coming to the aid of civil rights workers in the South, got the nation enmeshed in one of the most unpopular wars in our history (Vietnam), and brought it to the edge of nuclear war in a probably unnecessary war of nerves with Nikita Khrushchev over the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In short, John F. Kennedy was a president who, based on the decisions he made or didn't have the courage to make while in office, deserves to go down as one of the resoundingly mediocre figures in American presidential history."
Unfortunately, John F. Kennedy is routinely judged not by what he accomplished, but by what his presidency represented, i.e., Camelot, youth, vigor, and all that crap. Methinks all those folks who keep sayin' that a President B. Hussein Obama would be "another JFK" need to look at their history books a little more closely.
If B. Hussein is elected (God help us), we can only hope that he is not another JFK. Indeed.
During the fifteen-minute, fifteen-person impromptu political roundtable, a guy who admitted earlier in the evening that he is "39-year-old" opined that John F. Kennedy was the "greatest" president of his lifetime. I wanted to tell him, "JFK died about five years before you were ****in' born!" But I held my tongue.
Now, as for JFK being a "great" president, Joseph Epstein set the record straight in the Wall Street Journal last July. Check this out:
"Here was a president who initiated no impressive programs, was less than notably courageous in coming to the aid of civil rights workers in the South, got the nation enmeshed in one of the most unpopular wars in our history (Vietnam), and brought it to the edge of nuclear war in a probably unnecessary war of nerves with Nikita Khrushchev over the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In short, John F. Kennedy was a president who, based on the decisions he made or didn't have the courage to make while in office, deserves to go down as one of the resoundingly mediocre figures in American presidential history."
Unfortunately, John F. Kennedy is routinely judged not by what he accomplished, but by what his presidency represented, i.e., Camelot, youth, vigor, and all that crap. Methinks all those folks who keep sayin' that a President B. Hussein Obama would be "another JFK" need to look at their history books a little more closely.
If B. Hussein is elected (God help us), we can only hope that he is not another JFK. Indeed.
# posted by Joltin' Django @ Tuesday, July 01, 2008 
