Posted 5:00 PM by Gene

When we think of it -- and we try not to -- JFK's assassination gives us pause because so much bad came after it, and it will not ameliorate the discomfort to call it the "demise of liberalism", for a selfish bastard dwarf offspring has run it ever since -- but before we blame the assassin we should remember who ran our country into the ground thereafter. Lincoln's death was followed by ciphers while the country was blithely ruled by despots of the dollar, and America was still on the upswing. Hence Henry Adams could talk of our national amnesia of it and the two assassinations that followed. We weren't as lucky in the sixties; leadership would have deprived our national crisis of its oxygen, but instead of leadership we got two textbook examples of craven borderline-psychotic paranoia. We should not think the disaster that followed 11/22/1963 was unique; the Brits found a way to run the Subcontinent into the ground in a stroke that made those twin blowhard failures microscopic in their incompetence by comparison. But then the whole 20th century was a disaster, starting with that damfool murder of some archduke and for all practical purposes ending with 9/11, an obscenity that visits the failures of the last on ours.