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.
What Mr. Minutaglio miraculously fails to mention is that the man who killed Kennedy – Lee Harvey Oswald – was not religious, conservative, or an ancestor to the Tea Party by any stretch of the imagination. Oswald lived in the Soviet Union for a number of years, married a Soviet citizen, and it would be hard to make a case that he wasn’t, for all intents and purposes, a communist. Kennedy was killed by a sniper’s bullet passing uninvited through his cranium – not by conservative ethos of Dallas, Texas, or American conservatives as a whole. Mr. Minutaglio’s article isn’t history. It isn’t journalism. It’s spin. But, of course, nobody cares.
Extremists in Dallas created volatile atmosphere before JFK’s 1963 visit. This isn't unique to Kennedy or Obama (or Dallas or the South). Reactionaries believed Thomas Jefferson was out to destroy religion and private property. And every "liberal" president since then has had to cope with vitriol and weird conspiracy theories. It's an unfortunate part of the American political climate.