The Untold Truth about JFK and the Democrats

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  Any one of a certain age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they learned the news of the President's death.  It was one of those events like December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001 that in their aftermath we come to understand that we have left one era and entered another.

 

One of the most significant changes that the assassination engendered was the death of the Democratic Party as a national moderate party with regard to National Defense, Tax Cuts, the size and function of government, "American Exceptionalism", historic American values and a consensus on domestic policy with the exception of race.  After 11/22/63 the progressive segment of the liberal wing of the party became dominant in an aggressive fashion to the point that today we have  neo Marxists and proto Fascists in leadership positions both nationally and locally. 

 

John F. Kennedy was by almost every current definition a conservative who could not be elected as a Democrat today.  He was a "cold warrior" who believed in a strong defense (witness "Ich bin ein Berliner" and the Cuban Missile Crisis) .  He did not believe in a "nanny" state ("Ask not what your country can does for you...ask what you can do for your country").  He began the process of divorcing the Democrats from the southern segregationists which had a political hammerlock on the life of the national party.  Historic revision by progressives later redefined these racists as conservatives thereby continuing the process of distorting who Kennedy and his party really were.  He kick started the American space program into a race to the moon while stating "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard...".

 

Kennedy's "New Frontier" was a pragmatic vision of an America ascendant where the problems of the nation were to be solved and not merely managed.  JFK included tax cuts as a critical part of his policy to make the US as productive and economically strong as possible and history proved him right and his Democratic critics wrong.

GETTYSBURG, NOVEMBER 19, 1863

The idea for the National Cemetery was the brainchild of Theodore Dimon, Deputy State Agent for the Governor of New York, Horatio Seymour.  Dimon and his superior had been sent to the battlefield in the summer of 1863 to retrieve the New York dead which accounted for over 25% of all the Union casualties of the great battle in south central Pennsylvania.  Fearing the expense  of such an endeavor while concerned over the rapidly deteriorating condition of the corpses, Dimon took the idea to David Wills the State Agent to Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin who immediately saw the political and economic advantage of  a National Cemetery where people would come and mourn and spend money for years to come

Wills began the task of buying the land and securing the approval of the other 18 state Governors whose troops  fought and died there for the Union.  The battlefield had been a health and sanitary disaster after the guns had gone silent.  Corpses from both sides had been hurriedly buried in shallow trenches and pits and the humid summer heat had caused the bodies to swell and bloat until parts of the remains broke through the surface where it was recorded that in several incidences, the hogs took to rooting at the bodies.

The smell had been overpowering and the mostly Dutch inhabitants of Adams County took to sealing their windows and doors to escape the stench even if it meant suffocating in the oppressive heat.