Is it possible for Americans to commemorate the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death without the media taking potshots at the Right?
Consider former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw who while on MSNBC’s The Cycle Friday recounting where he was when Kennedy was shot decided he needed to make the case that people in conservative states wanted the president killed (video follows with transcript and commentary):
TOM BROKAW: I was a reporter in Omaha. I was the morning news editor. I did the cut-ins for the Today show on the noon news, and it was kind of an exhausting schedule, about nine hours. And I was in the newsroom kind of cleaning up, and the bells on the wire machines went off. AP and UPI was how we got the news in those days. Not a tweet or anything online. And it meant there was a bulletin of some kind. And I went over and Merriman Smith - who really became legendary for dictating on the run, the UPI reporter – had dictated that shots were fired at the presidential motorcade, the president perhaps fatally wounded. That was the first thing that we saw. And then of course it rolled out there in Parkland and then the announcement of his death.
We didn't have the network up at KMTV because NBC would give back a local station one hour of midday programming. I ran down, there was a garden show on the air. So I put it on over the garden show and then did that a couple of times. And this was unusual but it was not unheard of. As I came running out of the announce booth the chief engineer - with whom I didn't get along very well. A really curmudgeonly guy, old, kind of a gnarly guy – and he said, “What happened?” And I said, “Kennedy was shot.” And he said , “About time somebody shot that S.O.B.” That was heard in other places, mostly in the conservative states. But he was, that was reflecting his real feeling, and they had to peel me away from him. I then ran back up and continued to work.
How can a former newsman make such a claim knowing full-well that Kennedy was shot by a communist?
Do these people listen to the nonsense that comes out of their mouths, or are they so driven by ideology that they don't recognize when they're appearing totally ignorant?
(HT Mediaite)
