Joe

Laurent Guyénot eight days ago put out a piece on Old Joe K. His title is a twist on Christ's beatitude.

Joseph Patrick Kennedy was in the Peace Party in the 1930s. Guyénot would, I think, trace his own lineage from this faction, by way of AJP Taylor; he agrees with McMeekin these days. There has been a charge that these guys hate the Jews, which animus Guyénot tries to lift from his subject Kennedy. I have heard charges that Kennedy hated the English - which Guyénot doesn't look at, I think rightly, because Kennedy had no problem with Englishmen with whom he agreed, like Neville Chamberlain.

Kennedy however also didn't love Jews, instead asking the British Tories to find space for us in African colonies. South Africa, mostly, I'd imagine; that's our climate. North Africa was out of the question pace Achcar.

I am unsure how far Guyénot has relieved Joseph Kennedy of his headstone, [UPDATE as 11/7] "American Fascist". Guyénot may or may not care about the label; but he should care that Kennedy was wrong: wrong about democracy's resilience against foreign fascism and communism, and wrong about his own role as Roosevelt's man in London (here skating the edge of treason). We shall meet this man again - at the end of his life - in the movie Chappaquiddick, one final time protecting his legacy.

This article does open a curtain on John Podhoretz, the epitome of the Beltway stooge; in a piece J-Pud had published before the neocons amongst us knew he was a stooge, which I'd set around the Weinerama over Memorial Day Weekend 2011. But... that was over a decade after the offending piece, and some years before the Ace Of Spades commentariat was yet ready to hear it.

Guyénot also might illustrate where, during the John Kennedy murder 1963, the media's initial focus on Dallas "city of hate" comes from. To the extent there remained a Joseph Kennedy faction in the Democrat Party, this was a Catholic faction, hostile to American Jewry. Someone was out there holding a Chamberlainesque umbrella to heckle the Kennedys (again, Joe wasn't yet dead).

This the Bagestan's stance is Bugliosi's. Note, he's another peacemonger and he really hated George Dubya. Perhaps despite himself, in 2007 Bugsy had to conclude in Reclaiming History that, yeah, someone wholly uninvolved in the Kennedy past had done the deed. Not Nazis, not THE JOOS; not even Goldwater Republicans. Just a standard commie, Lee Oswald. (Someone else did Case Closed - four years earlier, apparently unsuccessfully given Bugsy's need to do it again.)

Overall, let's not pin 1963 on the Elders of Zion. Anymore than we should pin it on Dallas Hate.