If today’s extremist rhetoric sounds familiar, that’s because it is eerily, poignantly similar to the vitriol aimed squarely at John F. Kennedy during his presidency.
And just like today, Texans were leading what some of them saw as a moral crusade.
To find the very roots of the tea party of 2013, just go back to downtown Dallas in 1963, back to the months and weeks leading to the Kennedy assassination. It was where and when a deeply angry political polarization, driven by a band of zealots, burst wide open in America.
This is a perfectly valid train of thought if you ignore the facts. Oswald was a commie and Texas a Democrat stronghold in the early 1960s.
What’s most irritating, however, is the notion that harsh political rhetoric is a relatively new thing in the United States. Those who believe this to be true might want to read up on the Jackson/Adams election of 1828 or check out some of what detractors used to say about Abraham Lincoln.
And rhetoric doesn’t kill presidents. Leftists who don’t like people with differing opinions do.
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