2016 Postmortem

Reagan was image, no substance and no intellect.

Kennedy had innate intelligence, but also an inquisitive mind. As David McCullough said last Friday: he was a student of history... he read history, he wrote history. Reagan studied cue cards!

Kennedy had charm, charisma, class, wit and made for TV good looks. No one can light a candle to his press conferences and I remember them in real time not from YouTube!

Kennedy served his country in WWII; Reagan made TV ads about the war effort.

Kennedy was the real and complete deal. Reagan was an actor.

Kennedy stood up to (and against) the generals during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he distrusted them after they led him astray with the Bay of Pigs*, he planned to change the policy on Vietnam (which had been inherited from the Eisenhower administration) after the '64 election and he outlined a foreign policy in his commencement speech at American University just months before his murder that was antithetical to US imperialism which is why I am convinced that the MIC/CIA took him out and Oswald was a patsy. By contrast, Reagan did what the puppet masters who put him in office told him to do.

* Kennedy took full responsibility and didn't whine or complain... recall: "Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan. ... I am the responsible officer of the government"

Finally, Kennedy was liberal and unabashedly so, for as he said: I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, this faith in our fellow citizens as individuals, as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith; for liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of the mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow man the amount of justice, and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

For one brief shining moment, we had a great man like President Kennedy. For far too long we've suffered the consequences of a fraud like Reagan!