Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

I'm back on Duncan MacRae's JFK assassination forum. Don't know how much I'll do with it. But, I do like that there is no moderating. You write something, and it posts instantly. John McAdams has to moderate every post on his forum, and I can't imagine why. It certainly is not to block rude comments. 

But, while I was there, I saw this banner ad.

What struck me about this was that JFK wasn't included in that short list. And then I dwelt on the term "conservative" and that must be the reason. JFK was considered liberal. 

But then again, it includes FDR, who is considered the most liberal President of all time. So again, I ask: why isn't JFK on the list?

And let's look at who they have there. Washington? Yeah, he was good overall, if you just overlook the part about him owning black people, Hundreds of black people. 

Teddy Roosvelt? He was a eugenicist, which is to say, a racist. He was in favor of forced sterilization. And 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized on his watch. He fought in the Spanish-American War, which, like the War with Mexico, was an utter land grab: Cuba, other Caribbean islands, Guam, the Philippines. Experts today are in 100% agreement that the explosion on the Maine was a spontaneous event, and Spain had nothing to do with it. TR also did the land grab for the Panama Canal. At the time, there was no country of Panama; it was part of Columbia. And he went to Columbia and tried to get what became the Canal Zone. But, the Columbians weren't interested. So, he foisted a Panamanian revolution, and after it succeeded, he dealt with them to get his canal. Also, we now know that TR was involved in the murder of Jane Stanford, and he was President at the time. The greatest President? Is there anyone alive who thinks that?

Abraham Lincoln? Oh, God. Don't get me started. He did not think blacks were fit to live among whites. He sought to have free blacks return to Africa or find a home in the Caribbean. He offered southern states a constitutional amendment which would make slavery permanent- in the south. It would have forever banned the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states which already had it. Abraham Lincoln arrested and imprisoned newspapermen who published articles opposing his war. And he denied their habeus corpus rights, to a speedy trial, etc. When Chief Justice Roger Tanney objected and said it was unConstitutional, Lincoln ordered that Tanney be arrested. However, he couldn't find a US Marshall who was willing to execute the order. It was Lincoln who ordered the terror on civilians in the South, such as Sherman's terror march through Georgia. He sent the, battle-hardened from Gettysburg, Army of the Potomac into New York City to fight draft resistors in the streets. And in the midst of fighting the Civil War, Lincoln also made war on Native Americans like no other President before or since. Lincoln killed more Native Americans than any other President. Lincoln, the greatest President? Yeah, if fascism is your goal. 

Reagan? I know he has a lot of fans, but the greatest President? He had Alzheimer's his whole second term. Look at all the corrupt stuff they did in Latin America during his watch. Reagan's team actually negotiated with the Iranians NOT to release the US hostages until after the election. Reagan was supposed to be a fiscal conservative, but it was on his watch that the national debt first passed $1 trillion. Seems like chicken feed today, but remember, it took this country from 1776 to 1980 to reach a trillion in debt. The second trillion was reached before Reagan left office. Greatest President? I don't think so. 

FDR? We broke the Japanese codes. FDR knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, but he left it unprotected. He wanted catastrophic losses there in order to change the minds of the American public about going to war. FDR? He sidled up to Stalin. At Yalta, he gave Stalin Eastern Europe. Go ahead; take it. FDR gave us Social Security and set it up so that money collected for retirement that wasn't immediately needed to support retirees could be spent by the government for any other purpose whatsoever, with IOUs left behind. In other words, they took the money for retirement, but they didn't save a penny of it for retirement. There was never any nest egg. Today, it's just a Ponzi scheme. FDR didn't live long enough to nuke Japan, but I'm quite sure he would have done it. He ordered the development of the atomic bomb. And during its development, the fear was that the war might end before they got a chance to use it. The greatest President? You're kidding, right?

I don't know who the greatest President was, but I dare say that John F. Kennedy should have made the short list of contenders, but not any of these.