Denial on display: George Will downplays importance of JFK’s assassination

Among the many ludicrous JFK theories offered by under-informed writers, George Will’s stands out. In yesterday’s Washington Post, the conservative pundit writes:

“The bullets of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation’s trajectory less by killing a president than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America.”

Will wants you to believe that the murder of a liberal president under circumstances that the government has never explained to the satisfaction of the majority of its citizens is less important than the fact some liberals criticized the right-wing extremists who used hateful rhetoric toward the slain president.

This is a strange claim: Killing the president didn’t change the country as much as the rhetorical transgressions of New York Times editorial writers.

As a species of JFK denialism, this is rich.

JFK denialism is the phenomenon in which a person displays a refusal or inability to acknowledge some or all of the evidence of JFK’s assassination.

In historian Robert Dallek, JFK denialism manifests itself when, in contravention of his long career of distinguished scholarship, he oddly decided to do no original research on the circumstances in which JFK died.

For Will, JFK’s denialism is manifested in the bizarre claim that JFK’s assassination was relatively unimportant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7 thoughts on “Denial on display: George Will downplays importance of JFK’s assassination”

  1. In order to see a little clearer on the JFK assassination, I think you need to look at how he got elected. Who helped him get elected and why? And what role did his Father play? What promises were made? And what promises were kept, and broken. Who wanted him gone and why? And how it overlapped, like a perfect storm.

  2. Gee, it’s those on the right it seems to me who have, since Seymour Hersh’s “The Dark Side of Camelot,” who have been making the case that JFK was an awful person, a worse president and likely deserved to die for the past 25 years! So, I’m hardly surprised Will would parrot the same line!

  3. Wow…this character would fit right in with the clowns that caused our government to shut down with no remedy in sight.

    The Washington Post appears to believe what Allen Dulles said about the Warren Report, “nobody reads”. Both are dead wrong.

    1. It’s worrisome that this is more than denial on display; on the surface, it appears to be a perpetuation of the cover-up that ensued in the hours and days following the assassination. Can or will George Will elaborate on the level of investigation into the assassination that he considered when formulating these/his most recent opinions?

  4. “For Will, JFK’s denialism is manifested in the bizarre claim that JFK’s assassination was relatively unimportant.”

    Noam Chomsky should be ashamed of the kind of company he finds himself in.

      1. “I mean, who knows? And who cares? I mean plenty of people get killed all the time. Why does it matter that one of them happened to be John F Kennedy?”

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