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The transformation of a murder by a marginal man into a killing by a sick culture began instantly — before Kennedy was buried. The afternoon of the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy’s “martyrdom” to “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American character,” noting especially “the violence of the extremists on the right.”

Never mind that adjacent to Reston’s article was a Times report on Oswald’s Communist convictions and associations. A Soviet spokesman, too, assigned “moral responsibility” for Kennedy’s death to “Barry Goldwater and other extremists on the right.”

Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling indictment: Kennedy was killed by America’s social climate, whose sickness required “punitive liberalism.” That phrase is from James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute, whose 2007 book “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism” is a profound meditation on the reverberations of the rifle shots in Dealey Plaza.

The bullets of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation’s trajectory less by killing a president than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America. Fittingly, the narrative was most injurious to the narrators. Their recasting of the tragedy in order to validate their curdled conception of the nation marked a ruinous turn for liberalism, beginning its decline from political dominance.

Punitive liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history of crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it murdered a president. To be a liberal would mean being a scold. Liberalism would become the doctrine of grievance groups owed redress for cumulative inherited injuries inflicted by the nation’s tawdry history, toxic present and ominous future.

dbackjon wrote:Stay off my lawn

Chizzang wrote:I really enjoy George Will
But that article is a HUGE stretch

Always:
No matter what, whoever the president is or whatever events happen that are powerful
There's always somebody there to "define them" for us
Doesn't matter if it's "Mission Accomplished"
or we'll be "greeted as Liberators"
right down to: We won the Vietnam War...
We have to pass it to know what's in it...
CHANGE...
We support a democratic Egypt...
Afghanistan is the right war...

mainejeff wrote:Liberals became scones?

GannonFan wrote:

mainejeff wrote:Liberals became scones?

Mmmmm, scones. They had some god scones up at that Jordan Pond House in Acadia National Park. I'm sure the scone oven has been cold for the past few days. Pity, those are good scones.

Cluck U wrote:

Chizzang wrote:I really enjoy George Will
But that article is a HUGE stretch

Always:
No matter what, whoever the president is or whatever events happen that are powerful
There's always somebody there to "define them" for us
Doesn't matter if it's "Mission Accomplished"
or we'll be "greeted as Liberators"
right down to: We won the Vietnam War...
We have to pass it to know what's in it...
CHANGE...
We support a democratic Egypt...
Afghanistan is the right war...

I think you forgot a few, so I added some for you.