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Poor taste pundits | page 1, 2
"I think it is disingenuous of the media to portray this in a way that it
didn't happen. It was a photo op. Jackie had the presence of mind to
understand it. Way back then it was spin, no less and no more, it was a photo
op, no less and no more. The fact that the young man had no idea what he was
doing doesn't get pointed out ... My friends, you are being shown a bunch of
mythology on the media and ... you are being portrayed mythologically
yourselves." That last remark seems particularly emblematic of Limbaugh's mind-set. To
him, the nation's sorrow at the passing of his own ideological
adversaries -- or even of a young Kennedy who avoided ideology -- must be
mythical, not real. Why would any real American mourn for a dynasty of
liberals? Egregiously offensive as Limbaugh was and is, his infantile outbursts were
outdone by Podhoretz, the editorial page editor of the New York Post who also
writes a bylined column for the reactionary tabloid. Under the headline "A
Conversation in Hell," Podhoretz imagined Satan gloating over his supposed
guest for eternity, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. All the triumphs and all the tragedies were the devil's
work, products of a Faustian bargain struck
by the family patriarch. Joe Conason Joe Conason's column appears in Salon News every other Tuesday.
"Every time you think your family is on its way back to glory, I just have to do something. Like I did this weekend, with your grandson John." So vile was this column that the publisher of the Post, upon seeing it in the first edition, ordered it stripped from subsequent editions. And Podhoretz, possibly worrying that his job might be endangered, acknowledged that he had gone too far. Are Limbaugh and Podhoretz, despite their powerful influence over right-wing opinion, merely two creepy oddballs spinning out of control? Or do they stand for a more widespread impulse, dating back to the JFK-hating pamphlets that littered the streets of Dallas in the days before Nov. 22, 1963? That same ugliness was all too persistent during the orgy of Clinton-hating
that swept over the American right in recent years. The great majority of
decent conservatives ought to ask themselves whether such hideous behavior is
worthy of their cause.
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