New Inductee - Ron Capshaw

Writing for Andrew Breitbart is your first clue he's a full of shit liar that doesn't know anything about anything.

Ron Capshaw

Capshaw, like Alex von Tunzelmann, feels the need to review Oliver Stone's move JFK 20 years after its release.

Capshaw claims "Oswald was shown in documents released after the film by the Dallas Police that his fingerprints were on the trigger of his Manlicher Carcano."

Huh? Fingerprints? More than one fingerprint? On the trigger? I don't think so.  It's implied though not stated that the Dallas Police waited until after JFK, the movie, to show this important document.  Would that Capshaw could show the document.  I'd like to see it.

And he misspelled Mannlicher, it's Mannlicher Carcano.  Idiot.

And then there's this line, "Recreated shooting by world class snipers has shown that the head-shots did in fact come from the Sixth Floor Depository."

Well, there's several things wrong with that sentence.  What the hell is "recreated shooting?" Who are these "world class snipers?" Head-shots? Is this fool saying there was more than one head shot?

And again he gets a proper name wrong. The proper name of the building was the Texas School Book Depository, not the Sixth Floor Depository.  If you can't get the name of the building right, wow, are you stupid.

Capshaw believes a lot of Posner and Dale Meyers nonsense that computer animation analysis negates a grassy knoll sniper.  That's BS for several reasons.  First, it assumes only one grassy knoll sniper, two, the classic lie about the "Badgeman" sniper is to lie about his height based on lies about Mary Moorman's photo.

Capshaw thinks the American University speech is invalidated by the Ich Bin Ein Berliner speech.

And he believes the lie from Lamar Waldron that JFK was planning to invade Cuba in Dec of '63.  Everyone in the research community has debunked this total misunderstanding of this so called AM/WORLD story that Lamar peddles.  AM/WORLD is not what Lamar says it is.  JFK did not invade Cuba before, during or after the Bay of Pigs when there was a lot of pressure put upon him to do.  Nor did he do so before, during or after the Cuban Missile Crisis when thee was a hell of a lot more pressure put upon JFK to do.  Yet, JFK was going to do so in December, 1963 when there was no pressure to do so.  And McNamara didn't know anything about it?

Capshaw also believes Oswald tried to shoot Gen. Edwin Walker, which is another huge lie.  The Walker shooting was used after the fact to prove Oswald was capable of violence.  But, the police reports at the time of the shooting never thought Oswald was a suspect.  And steel jacketed slugs became copper jacketed ones after the fact.  Evidence was twisted around to force the conclusion that Oswald shot at Walker.  It's a lie.

But lies are what Breitbart peddles.  

New Inductees, for an old article still available online

We have three inductees with this article.  Kennedy, Vietnam, and Oliver Stone's Big Lie - John F Kennedy.  

1.) Bruce Loebs
2.) USA Today
3.) The Society for the Advancement of Education

It's the old classic, lying while accusing someone else of lying.  Is there a Hitler reference too? But, of course!  According to Loeb, Kennedy did not plan to remove U.S. troops from Vietnam.

Here Loeb is at his stupidest, okay, he's going to denounce the plan that he thinks Schlesinger made up whilest failing to grasp what an assassination actually is, ready?


"Schlesinger wants us to believe that Kennedy decided in 1962 or early 1963 to withdraw all U.S. forces, but continued to maintain troops in South Vietnam because he feared losing the 1964 election. The unavoidable conclusion from this tale is grotesque. If Schlesinger is right, the President willfully sacrificed American lives for political profit. During the Kennedy Administration, 108 Americans died and 486 were wounded in Vietnam, and these figures increased from the time of his assassination in November, 1963, until November, 1964, after the presidential election when Schlesinger maintains Kennedy would have begun to withdraw U.S. troops."


Did you catch this one?  According to Loeb, AFTER JFK is ASSASSINATED he's still supposed to be President of the United States and still in charge of U.S. foreign policy, especially in regards to Vietnam.


Loeb, like a schmuck, doesn't comprehend that the instant JFK died LBJ became president and LBJ was in charge of U.S. foreign policy, especially in regards to Vietnam.  


So, the reason why U.S. troops weren't coming out of Vietnam between November 1963 and November 1964 and more of them were going in is because Kennedy is dead, and his withdrawl plan died with him, you idiot! 


Loeb is one of many that believe LBJ was following JFK's plans.  No.  LBJ reversed JFK's plans in Vietnam.  LBJ reversed it with 48 hours of JFK's death. The reversal is in NSAM 273.  


Loeb makes no mention of the huge black hole in the Pentagon Papers during the Fall of '63 when Kennedy and his advisors were meeting nearly everyday.


Loeb makes no mention of the Foreign Relation of the United States (FRUS) volumes released in the 1990's.


Loeb makes no reference to what was called The Thanksgiving Day Massacre where Kennedy fired people at the State Dept. and CIA who were not on board with his Vietnam policy.  Never again did anyone try to pressure Kennedy to send in combat troops into Vietnam.  


Loeb does what all extreme Right-wing losers do on this issue, they haul out Dean Rusk and Rusk's quote, "I had hundreds of talks with President Kennedy about Vietnam and on no single occasion did he ever express to me any ideas on that line." He adds that "Kennedy never said anything like that to me, and we discussed Vietnam--oh, I'd say hundreds of times. He never said it, never suggested it, never hinted at it, and I simply do not believe it."


If you will look at NSAM 263 you will find that the very first person it goes to,  before the Secretary of Defense, or any of the Joint Chiefs is... Dean Rusk.  So, Dean Rusk was lying.   


Loeb does not mention that JFK fired Walt Rostow, that Rostow was sent out to pasture for a year, and after Kennedy was assassinated LBJ brought him back in.  

Can someone introduce Thomas Ricks to George W. Bush?

Thomas Ricks wonders:
 Was John F. Kennedy the flat-out absolute worst U.S. president of the 20th century?
Is he kidding?  
Would JFK ignore a Presidential Daily Brief entitled "Osama Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the U.S." 
Would JFK wave hello to Stevie Wonder? 
Did JFK utter these gems? 

"I'm telling you there's an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is. That's the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best."

"You know, I'm the President during this period of time, but I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived in President, during I arrived in President."

"And they have no disregard for human life." --George W. Bush, on the brutality of Afghan fighters, Washington, D.C., July 15, 2008

"Amigo! Amigo!" --George W. Bush, calling out to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Spanish at the G-8 Summit, Rusutsu, Japan, July 10, 2008

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”

"I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."

New Inductee - Ion Mihai Pacepa

Welcome to The Liar's Club General Ion Mihai Pacepa, for your book  "Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination."  

Pacepa was the former head of Romania's secret security agency.  

The book is endorsed by Michael Leeden, one of the craziest Right-wing nutcases alive.

"A new book from General Ion Mihai Pacepa is cause for celebration....No novelist could have written a more exciting story, made all the more compelling because of Pacepa's first-hand involvement." -- Michael Ledeen, HumanEvents.com  

This is nothing more than Right-wing pornography.  

New Inductee - Dr. Neville Thomas Jones, Ph.D.

Why this guy?  Because he thinks Jackie killed JFK

Today's New Idiot - Frederick Kempe

Here we go again.

EVERY time a Right-wing nut has an allegedly scholarly article, essay, book, film, whatever, examination of President John F. Kennedy it ALWAYS boils down to "if only JFK wasn't such a fucking pussy about the Commies."

For the Right-wing nuts who know nothing of history, learn nothing from history, know nothing of context and what else was going on at the same time as whatever example of JFK being a fucking pussy about those god damn Commies they want to talk about it's always easy, and simple. You just smash the Commies and you win.  Game over. Nothing to worry about. No consequences. What's next? I'm surprised they haven't created The John Cleese "Commies, I hate 'em! " think tank.

And we got another goose stepping moron playing this game.  His name is Frederick Kempe.

And he's got a new little book out on JFK and Berlin: 1961

The book gets a positive review by previous Liars Club inductee Alex von Tunzelmann here -  FrederickKempe’s “Berlin 1961”. She gives it a positive review despite noticing that Kempe doesn't know the difference between The Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose, that Kempe doesn't think Castro was a "Socialist," by June of 1961, and that Kempe thinks the Berlin crisis of 1961 somehow leads to the Cuban Missile Crises of 1962!  

The book is so bad even The New York Times bothers to notice.  Jacob Heilbrunn writes that despite Kempe's criticism of Kennedy, that he "was not focused on rolling back Communism in Europe,” points out that no American president ever was, not before JFK, or after.  "No American president ever seriously challenged Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. Not Eisenhower when revolts took place in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956. Not Lyndon B. Johnson during the Prague Spring in 1968. Not Ronald Reagan when martial law was declared in Poland in 1981."

But perhaps the best refutation of Kempe’s book comes from Richard J. Tofel who reviews the book at The Daily Beast - A new account of the 1961 Berlin crisis argues that Kennedy missed a chance to bring down the Soviet Union, but Richard J. Tofel says that misunderstands Khrushchev and Kennedy’s diplomacy.

Tofel writes that Kempe’s conclusions are “fundamentally wrong.” Also, “Kempe’s essential argument is that had Kennedy been tougher at his Vienna summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and/or more aggressive in response to Khrushchev’s subsequent bullying on Berlin, the wall erected in August 1961 would not have been built, East Germany might have soon collapsed, and the fall of the Soviet empire might have been accelerated by as much as three decades.”

Do you see the mantra? If only JFK wasn’t such a fucking pussy, blah, blah, and blah.

But there is no evidence for the Right-wing, “if only JFK was tougher, then this would have happened,” ideology. Even Tofel points this out. “Kempe’s own strong reporting indicates how little support there is for the first of this set of posited dominoes.

“As the book points out in stark terms, the East German state was on the verge of disintegration as a result of its open borders with the West—and in the face of the West German economic miracle—with as many as 2,000 of its people fleeing each day.

“As Kennedy clearly saw, and as Kempe repeatedly notes but cannot fully recognize, Khrushchev could not permit the collapse of Walter Ulbricht’s German Democratic Republic. First, and most basically in the life of a politician, Khrushchev could not do so and remain in power. Had he tried, he would almost certainly have been removed—as he was in the aftermath of his later humiliations, notably the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“And Khrushchev could not have permitted an East German collapse for precisely the reason that Kempe finds such a scenario so appealing: because Khrushchev and his colleagues at the time knew that if East Germany fell into the arms of the West, Hungary and Poland and Czechoslovakia and the rest would likely follow.”

And writing as someone who does understand history he adds, “The central point of difference between 1961 and 1989, and the reason why Kempe’s argument is unconvincing, is because Khrushchev and his generation were simply not made of the same stuff as Mikhail Gorbachev and his generation. Khrushchev (and Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin, and others around him) had lived as adults through the Second World War and had thrived, more or less, under Stalin. The death of scores of millions of their countrymen for a cause was something within their contemplation—indeed, within their experience. Moreover, these men, perhaps naively and in different ways to be sure, were committed heirs of the Bolsheviks, devoted children of the Revolution. (Khrushchev was 23 in 1917, Kosygin 13, Brezhnev 11.) In their lives, the Terror notwithstanding, Soviet communism had defeated Nazism and seemed to improve the lives of average Russian citizens. In their minds, communism was making progress. When Khrushchev said that the Soviets would soon “bury” capitalism, he knew he was exaggerating and blustering, but he almost surely believed that events were tending in that direction.

“To conclude that such men, like Gorbachev and his colleagues later, would have surrendered their hard-won empire without a fight is simply unsupported by the historical record. That is the lesson of their use of force in crushing uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.”

Tofel instead of chastizing Kennedy for not having this childish “HULK SMASH!” approach to the Communist world praises Kennedy, “in terms of what he did after the Bay of Pigs, rather than what he said, Kennedy deserves far less criticism. He did not take Khrushchev’s bait and start a shooting war or blunder into one.”

Tofel concludes, “All of this matters today, for reasons Kempe knows well and states clearly in his book’s final words, where he casts the Berlin Wall as “the iconic image of what unfree systems can impose when free leaders fail to resist.” Before we see the wall that way, and guide ourselves accordingly in some future crisis, we need to appreciate the catastrophic cost such resistance would likely have entailed.”

But, wait a minute, let’s go back to the idea that if JFK was tougher he couild have ended The Cold War sooner. JFK did want to end the Cold War, but he wanted to do it without waging a war.  

This turn towards peace is exquisitely detailed in “JFK and the Unspeakable” by Jim Douglass.    

This methodology to end The Cold War without waging war against the Commies was seen as treason and that’s why JFK was killed.   

Part Two of DiEugenio's examination of Halberstam's book now online

Part II of Jim DiEugenio's examination of David Halbestam and his book "The Best and the Brightest," is now available.

David Halberstam and The Second Biggest Lie Ever Told: A Look Back at The Best and the Brightest