W.A. Criswell and the Kennedy Assassination

[Sandy]

I'll say this. You are always consistent, Sandy. Your answer is true to form. You would have been a great editor of Pravda back in the day.

Whatever that means, or applies to, it doesn't have anything to do with the discussion. It is the kind of remark typical of extremist right wingers who don't have any facts or evidence to support statements they simply let off like firecrackers. If you don't have a reasonable, sensible answer, you just resort to name calling, with "communist" or "Nazi" being the standard accusation. This is a firecracker of a statement, a loud pop, a slight smell and then it's gone into oblivion.

[ET]

It means, in this context, that you ignore the FACT that Oswald was a member of the political left, a Communist. I fail to see how that fact of history means I am resorting to name calling.

Then what do you do? I make a statement about how the early guys viewed Congress as the primary body of political leadership in this country and the President was really of lesser importance and left to deal with foreign affairs while Congress handled domestic duties. You spin that fact of history into "Extremist Right Wing Southerner's Interpretation of the Constitution".

I could provide you a number of quotes from dudes with last names of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and others to support my position, but it wouldn't do any good. You'd just ignore them and move on to editing the next editions of Pravda.

[Haruo]

I'll say this. You are always consistent, Sandy. Your answer is true to form. You would have been a great editor of Pravda back in the day.

Sandy replied to the effect that ET was calling him a Communist.

It means, in this context, that you ignore the FACT that Oswald was a member of the political left, a Communist.

I have to admit that it looked to me like ET was calling Sandy a Communist. The notion that Sandy, whom we all know to be an evangelical Christian, "would have been a great editor of Pravda" does not appear to hinge on anything concerning Lee Harvey Oswald.

[William Thornton]

No, referencing Pravda isn't the same as calling one a commie. ET can speak for himself but I take the ref. to indicate parroting a party line. Sandy is faithful in doing that and tossing "extremist right winger" indiscriminately as well.

This one's a tie.

ET is right on target on the assassination. One of the great media narratives created ex nihilo is the ' mean right wing Dallas killed Kennedy' one. That Oswald, a communist, Moscow, castrophile did it is irrelevant to bothe media and Fox. Go figure.

[Sandy]

I took it as name calling, and given that Pravda was a Soviet Communist publication, a backhanded attempt to call me a Communist. The equivalent would have been to say something to ET about Josef Goebbels being proud, or using the term Nazi. "Extremist right wing conservative" is a legitimate description of a particular political position, similar to the views that ET shares. I could just as easily have said "Tea Partier" but that is less definitive.

The Kennedy Assassination is one of the most substantial pieces of evidence demonstrating that being part of the political left in the US bears no resemblance to, and has little in common with, Marxist political philosophy, or Soviet-style Communism. Kennedy's brand of Democratic Party politics was the greatest threat to the spread of Communism at the time and he backed up his position with military action, which is probably what put the wheels in motion that led to his assassination.

From a philosophical perspective, Communism has no equivalent in partisan American politics. There are plenty of historians and political scientists who do a great job of pointing out the basic philosophical differences. So when right wingers start using it in application to their opponents on the left, I take that as a sign that they have no foundation or factual basis for their argument, and are admitting defeat.

[William Thornton]

"Extremist right wing conservative" is a legitimate description of a particular political position, similar to the views that ET shares. I could just as easily have said "Tea Partier" but that is less definitive.

Translation: "He's calling me names even if he didn't call me a name while I'm merely providing a perfectly legitimate and accurate description of him and calling him a name while doing it."

Got it. This is such a predictable place.

[ET]

I took it as name calling, and given that Pravda was a Soviet Communist publication, a backhanded attempt to call me a Communist.

No, I wasn't calling you a communist, only implying your ability to disseminate rhetoric would make you a good fit for editing Pravda, such as was displayed with your ""Extremist Right Wing Southerner's Interpretation of the Constitution and the Kennedy Assassination". For one, I don't even know what in the world is meant by a "extremist right wing southern's interpretation of the Kennedy Assassination". The thing I was taking issue with was the attempt to push off the Kennedy killing onto the political right when it was a guy associated with the political left that killed him. The political environment in Dallas was irrelevant to the fact that a commie killed Kennedy.

I do understand that all it takes to have an "extremist right wing southerner's interpretation of the constitution" is to not believe in a so-called "living" Constitution. Interestingly enough, there are a rather significant number of non-southerner's who don't accept as valid the idea of a "living" Constitution.

Extremist right wing conservative" is a legitimate description of a particular political position, similar to the views that ET shares. I could just as easily have said "Tea Partier" but that is less definitive.

Oh, really? I say that's a bunch of . You nor anyone else here has EVER been able to explain the difference between a "conservative", a "right wing conservative" and an "extreme right wing conservative". I have no faith you can produce a coherent, logical definition to define the positions an "extremist right wing conservative" holds versus those of a "plain ole conservative".

You claim the use of such a phrase is a "legitimate description of a particular political position". I challenge you to list those positions and explain why they are "extreme".....but I doubt you can or will. Your use of the adjective "extremist" is just an attempt to dismiss any positions with which you don't agree by implying that they are irrational and therefore not worthy of addressing the substance.

[Stephen Fox]

For the record I think Oswald was the Lone gunmen in distinction to several Allliance of Baptists folks I have had intense conversations with about this matter for the last couple weeks.

My challenge to William and Sandy is to read Davis and Minutaglio's recent book Dallas 1963. It rightfully scorches WA Criswell.

Click on the link I provided above to the stout conversation on www.drshow.org last Thursday.

Criswell was a demagogue to match George Wallace in the 60s, no way to make it pretty.

Thornton, have you seen 12 Yrs a Slave yet? No excuses and then read Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams.

[Stephen Fox]

Caner and the trustees of his new school continue the demagoguery of Criswell's 56 SC Legislature sermon and Criswell's Nov 24 63 sermon

http://abpnews.com/ministry/people/item ... qIixmznaM8

[Stephen Fox]

http://www.npr.org/2013/12/18/255185942 ... t=1&f=1013

Couple weeks ago Robert Parham did a brief expose at ed.com about the SBC takeover crowd affinity for the apartheid government of South Africa. This thread has links to Criswell's hardwiring to racists, Jesse Helms. Adrian Rogers man in the shadows was Ed McAteer, not exactly a friend of Martin Luther King, Jr nor Nelson Mandela.

Likewise it seems Jerry Vines flourished best in the Birch Society and Daugthers of the Confederacy vicinity with his pastorates at West Rome, Georgia and Jacksonville, Florida. Listen online to the link above.

[Stephen Fox]

Interesting report on the Pope and Mussolini by a Brown Proff Monday on NPR Fresh Air. Easy google. Criswell was wrong about almost everything and an insult to the Baptist tradition in the 20th Century, but given his reservations about President Kennedy were only 30 years after Pope Pius working with Mussolini to abort church state separation in Italy, lot of cause for concern; not so much as Criswell expressed himself about JFK, but Catholic tradition in general. In some ways the Anti abortion Catholics in America are a bastard child of the Pius collusion with Il Duce but that may be a stretch.

[Stephen Fox]

Who Was JFK?

Frank Rich


The right’s current polemicists prefer a selective reading of history: we should remember that Oswald was a Marxist who had defected to the Soviet Union but we should forget that Adlai Stevenson, the pre-Kennedy Democratic standard bearer, was spat upon and slapped with a picket sign during his own visit to Dallas, as United Nations ambassador, in 1963. Trying to consign such inconvenient history to the dust bin in the pages of The Wall Street Journal,2 James Piereson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and president of the William E. Simon Foundation, expressed incredulity that “a respected publishing house” (Twelve, an imprint of Hachette) could even be a party to the book Dallas 1963, in which two authoritative Texas writers, the journalist Bill Minutaglio and the cultural historian Steven L. Davis, revisit the oil baron H.L. Hunt, the crackpot former general Edwin A. Walker, the far-right Dallas Morning News publisher Ted Dealey (appropriately memorialized by Dealey Plaza), and all the other foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics, secular and religious, who held sway over the city at the time.

The “city of hate” recreated in both King’s novel and Dallas 1963 has all too many correspondences to the rabid, Obama-hating extremists of the current American right, whether Tea Party adherents, Texans, or not. The conservative effort to decouple today’s haters from their forebears is of a piece with another of its persistent revisionist missions during the Obama era: the effort to whitewash the mass migration of racist southern Democrats like Strom Thurmond to the Republican Party in the 1960s by recasting it as a matter of principled constitutional fealty to “states’ rights” rather than resistance to court-ordered school desegregation and congressional civil rights legislation.3

[William Thornton]

I still say that Oswald the Marxist killed JFK not cries well and certainly not some artificially constructed city of hate.

Toss this criswell/Kennedy bs in with the JFK assassination conspiracies, 911 truthers, and other nonsense.

[Sandy]

Toss this criswell/Kennedy bs in with the JFK assassination conspiracies, 911 truthers, and other nonsense.

Bringing in Criswell is quite a stretch. He was a wheeler-dealer no doubt, and took full advantage of the big money in his church, through a self-designed system that allowed him to become wealthy in business ventures and partnerships, and left the door open for big projects in the church that more or less bypassed the church accountability. But in 1963, the involvement of religious right wingers in politics was minimal, the Republican Party operated under quite a different culture than being dragged to the right by its extremists, and Texas politics were dominated by the Democratic Party. Criswell was a minor player at best, if at all.

I'd include with the other "nonsense" the Obama birthers, the Benghazi conspiracies, and global warming denialists. All in the same category of nonsense.

[Stephen Fox]

apparently, have read this book. Minutaglio and Stevens do not put Criswell in a conspiracy; but in the vein of Dallas loaded the gun and Oswald pulled the trigger. This book as I have said throughout this thread deserves resding. It is distinct from a Birther, Truther mentality. Criswell was a punk, a demagogue, and cannot be dismissed simply as a product of his times no more than history dismisses the Lutherans who were complicit with Hitler, the ones Bonhoeffer resisted.

In tandem with the 100 pages Chandler Davidson devotes to Criswell in Race and Class in Texas Politics the godfathter of fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist Convention doesn't come across very well.

This book deserves to be read by Thornton and Saunders as well as Adrian Rogers son and www.ginnybrant.com and staff at FBC Spartanburg South Carolina.

[Stephen Fox]

Dallas FBC not much better with Jeffress, but the city as a whole has made great leap forward with the likes of Sam Hodges, Brent McDougal and George Mason's voice in town. And on this day July 12 proud of George W Bush who has adopted the city

http://foxofbama.blogspot.com/2016/07/n ... atter.html