Originally posted by: spacejamz
Were you home schooled or something??? Every historical reference I have seen you post here has been twisted sevens ways to Sunday to fit your point of view...
That's pretty funny. Predicting lack of facts to back up youru nonsense in 3... 2... 1...
(Here's a hint for you: when you are twisted, the truth sounds twisted).
I personally loved the one you did recently about the Brits showing restraint during the Battle Of Britain by not bombing German civilian populations. Had you done your homework, you would have known that Britain was not in position to mount such attacks, but when the tide changed, they firebombed the crap out several German cities, reducing them to rubble. Probably left that out of your post since it didn't fit your agenda though.
And if you had a clue, you would understand that you are misrepresenting what I said and the quote I posted from Churchill - and you might have a cluee how I have regularly discussed and condemned the excessive firebombing by allies in WWII, and how I've pointed out that Robert McNamara himself, who worked with Curtis LeMay on the US's firebombing, has said they knew it was a war crime they'd be hung for, fi they weren't exonerated by winning the war. Instead, we won and hung people for waterboarding.
(Edit: Oy, ya, now I remember the posts more clearly. I posted the quote from Churchill about how he opposed torture even during that bombing - which you then twist and misrepresent as being about a 'restraint' in *bombing* Germany in return. Your argument about his inability to bomb Germany has nothing to do with what I wrote, which was about his refusal to torture the hundreds of captured Germans he *did* have and could torture.
How very dishonest of you , no wonder I didnt recognize the reference at first.)
Your jacked up views here are no better...your JFK references are a total joke considering he stood his ground and didn't cave to the Soviets, even if it brought us to the brink of nuclear war.
In the interest of the public getting educated, I sometimes bother to inform the ignorant - while your post is impudent, it did not cross the line on incivility, so:
JFK was in relative terms a flaming peace-loving liberal on the Soviets. The cold war to that point had been a set of highly bellicose policies by the US - so bellicose that even Churchill had told us how wrong we were to be creating unnecessary and wrong tensions, and he was very disappointed in the US policies. Talk of 'detente' did not exist, really, before JFK; the 'liberal' policy was to surround them militarily (including the Jupiter missiles we were placing on their border in Turkey); the conservative position was a first strike.
As in, a first nuclear strike, which had many advocates up to senior military leaders. These people had a countdown for the window in which we should use our monopoly on nuclear weapons by havig a one-sided nuclear war against the Soviets before they got the bomb; but they had not given up by JFK's time.
What was the culture like? The same Curtis LeMay who had led the firebombing in WWII was now the head of the Air Force - and the keeper of the nuclear war plans. When JFK became president and appointed LeMay's former aide McNamra Secretary of Defense, no civilian in the Pentagon or government had ever seen the war plans, which LeMay viewed as his personal domain. McNamara, his boss as Secretary of Defense, told LeMay he wanted to see the plans. LeMay told him to get stuffed, they were none of his business. McNamra had to get a direct order from the President to LeMay to get access to look at the plans. JFK thought LeMay was insane. This was the culture of the time.
JFK had a public posture, in a time of cold war, based on 'strength', and he was indeed a real enemy of Soviet Communism, which he believed as I do to be an oppressive government. But JFK had a better understanding, and he liberalized our policy in everything from reversing his predecessor's virtually unconditional support for European colonization of the third world to supporting the independance of third-world nations; while the previous policy had been to reject 'neutral' leaders for right-wing tyrants who would align with us, he preferred the 'neutral leaders'; he pushed the first arms control treaty, the atmospheric test ban, over the sdtrong opposition of the military - which he considered his greatest policy; he constantly spoke of peace with the Soviets, and just as he softened our then very racist nation, following a century of racism after slavery ended, to its modern and changed view, he worked to soften our nation's then black and white hatred of the Soviets to one that called for understanding and peaceful co-existence, softening the nation to peace. He titled the compilationof his speeches while President 'The Strategy of Peace', showing as usual his combination of the politically 'strong' word strategy with his agenda of peace. He said te JCS were 'nuts' and worked arund them - creating the Defense Intelligence Agency to undermine their monopoly on military intelligence (an excellent history of this is in the book "House of War" by the son of the man who founded the agency), and creating the position for Maxwell Taylor as his personal military advisor.
He resisted the constant demand for war in Vietnam by the military, which his own aides were sympathetic to, with great effort - and planned for the option of withdrawal by 1965, laying the groundwork with his symbolic withdrawal, reversig the buildup, of 1,000 of the 16,000 'military advisors' in 1963.
He made a historic speech on the relationship with the USSR in 1963, at American University, which many consider his finest speech - and one of its most rominent fans was the Chairmann of the USSR, Kruschev, who had been so bellicose and pushing war policies Kennedy's first year - the man who instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis - who camew to see kennedy as someone who he could work with on peace instead. While the normal policy was to block the publication of US speeches in the USSR, he ordered Kenneyd's speech to be aired nationally unedited and called it the greatest speech by an American President in decades. The speech was a call for an entirely new view of relations with the Socie Union, to replace the war culture with one for tolerance and peace and finding common interests. It was revolutionary in terms of the cold war.
Indeed, Kennedy's top aide and speechwriter, who had worked with him on that speech like all his important addresses since his first year as a Senator, was a liberal conscientous objector, Ted Sorenson - who also saw the Soviets as a tyranny, but saw the beenfits of peace as well.
As Sorenson summarizes, JFK never had the US military drop one bomb on an enemy or deployed one combat troop.
Even if you look at the most prominent crisis for JFK's suppsed right-wing bona fides, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the story is that he was the anti-war liberal. The unanimous reaction of the US military leadership was to invade Cuba - and nearly all of Kennedy's own aides said the same. It was Kennedy who held them off, who instead chose the less military policy of the blockade - and who, knowing that people like you needed to be sold on a warlike message, made a secret deal with the Soviets that we would, if the deal were kept secret, remove the missiles from Turkey the Soviets objected to. It was he who used back channels to write with enemies like Kruschev so his own government did not see thier discussions about how they both had pro-war consituencies and militaries pressuring them and conspiring with each other against their own militaries.
It was learned decades later that the Soviets in Cuba had tactical nuclear weapons and the authorization to use them against a US invasion- JFK likely prevented nuclear war but not realize that. JFK *did* have one 'cold war' policy the right can agree with - he supported the US having a strong arsenal as a 'tool of peace'. Under his leadership, it would be used as such. Unfortunately, not so much under others - including his direct successor's, as LBJ, who had long been far more pro-Diem than Kenedy, once absurdly calling him "the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia", reversed kennedy's Vietnam policy and started a war.
JFK was a flamiing liberal by the cold war's standards, his policies constantly pushing for peace and liberalization of policies and reversal of right-wing policies. When Chavez of Venezuela was attacked for his 'radical left-wing land reforms', he was able to say he was merely implementing the rrefors JFK hadd called for in Venezuela.
It was JFK who said things to defend the liberalization of policy such as that "those who refuse to allow peaceful revolution make violent revolution inevitable", and 'if we cannot help the many who are poor, we cannot save the few who ar rich'. He paid great political costs with our allies for these policies.
One last note on his relations with our military, this great right-wing leader you claim - he believed he was one step from the risk of a coup by the military against him, the relations were so cold (you can read more on their mutual disrespect based on the released secret recordings of his meetings with them and some things they'd say behind his back - they were inappropriately disrespectful, not knowing they were on tape). He thiought the coup scenario in the novel "Seven Days in May" was plausible against him, and he got the novel made into a movie to send a warning to the military and the nation.
Need I go on to his firing of the previous leadership of the CIA, his famous quote he'd like to cut the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind?
Finally, I'll add a note that JFK was a 'strong' leader; he was contemtuous of some 'liberals' of his day. He did not have ahigh opinion of, for example, Adlai Stevenson; he was known to say that no one in the State Department had balls, but no one in the Pentagon had a brain. But his being a strong leader does not mean a right-wing leader. As I said, his policies were largely 'radically liberal' for the times, in the context of the huge threats and pressures our nation faced.
I suggest you both read and listen to his American University speech, to understand hs views.
Here is a link.
You apparently have missed when I've mentioned that JFK is a hobby, and I have a 'JFK liberary' of hundreds of books with his history. You, I suspect, have not spent decades reviewing his presidency as I have, as you post that you assume your ill-informed opinions are right - while you fail to investigate or verify the facts in my posts before you post statements.