Originally published at: How Butler Assassination Attempt Conspiracy Theories Became the New Dallas 1963 - TPM – Talking Points Memo
In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. The conspiracy theories about the shooting started almost as soon as the shooting itself. Just days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November…
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It’s cathartic for us in the mainstream - I refuse to call us the Left, in the American case - to use the tools of the Right back at them once in a while. To deny, dilute and divert the reality of what happened by making up a fictitious narrative which cheapens and muddies the feelings ‘they’ have, and makes ‘their’ outrage seem performative and overwrought.
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So was Ted Cruz’s father or Ted Cruz himself involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Some people are saying that…
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I don’t know anything about new assassination attempts, There is more about the Kennedy stuff. I’ll die believing that.
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The House Select Committee agreed, back in '79. (Years later I was mentored by an attorney who had served one the House Select Committee. Yup.)
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In a sort of lame effort to equate the two events, the article glosses over way too many details and bizarre coincidences from Oswald’s life that, at a bare minimum, drive much more understandable speculation about conspiracies even if those things are merely circumstantial. An openly Marxist US Marine, working radar for at the time super secret U2 spyplanes, gives up his US citizenship to go to the USSR at the height of the Cold War…and is allowed to return a few years later with apparently no problem. Of course, that will drive conspiracy theories when the same guy kills JFK a few years later.
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I guess I’d push back on some of the givens in the article.
Perhaps I missed it, but was an actually doctor’s report ever publicly issued (not one of his “there-has-never-been-a-specimen-so-physically-fit-as-180lb-Trump hacks)? If not, can we say definitively he was shot vs being shot at? I don’t dispute the latter; I do dispute the former. A trauma nurse/surgeon – which I am not – could speak to it better, but if there were any damage to the ear from a gunshot, would it ever heal so magically. Now if he bumped up against a secret service gun or whatever – that seem plausible. Much, much more plausible than only infinitesimally getting shot.
Likewise, the actions of the secret service. Clearly, they were bad at their job. Real bad. Before, during, and after the shooting. Yet the lead guy on his detail, Sean Curran, did not get penalized, he got a promotion to Director of the Service.
We then have Trump and his endless grievances. He wore the head diaper for his flesh wound. So there was that bit of martyrdom, but … that’s it? Perhaps it was because Crooks seems to lean MAGA, but a man who whines so incessantly about everyone and everything and yet Trump didn’t broadcast the kid’s name far and wide is out of character to put it plainly.
Yes, it’s a conspiracy theory to believe this wasn’t real. But every so often a conspiracy theory is conspiracy fact. This one at least rests on unsettled. Do I feel like a loon typing this as I go? Sure. But that also summarizes the last 10 years of the tragicomedy we’ve been living through.
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Oswald was a weirdo communist loser who fancied himself as a revolutionary, who bore a particular grudge against Kennedy over Cuba and wanted to impress Castro so he’d let him into the country.
Crooks was a weirdo loser who went down the familiar mass-shooter rabbit hole and found himself with a target of opportunity when trump came to town.
Their motives are not particularly mysterious.
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Occam’s razor says he was shot, with the bullet barely clipping the top of his right ear. There is photographic proof of the bullet traveling right behind his head, and he immediately winced and grabbed his ear. If he hadn’t turned his head to the right just as Crooks began to fire, he’d most likely be dead.
I for one want to know why unpredictable things keep happening to a politician who won’t take advisement from anyone and who often changes his mind at the last minute!
… both the FBI and Congress investigated the incident. They found serious errors by the Secret Service at every level. But serious errors are not evidence of a conspiracy or a cover-up.
Does this statement apply to the fact that after 1/6/2021, 100% of Secret Service call phones were erased before Congress had a chance to investigate?
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I was in the second grade when President Kennedy was assassinated. Just over twenty years later, as a reserve police officer with the Dallas Police Department, I had many occasions to walk across the basement driveway where Oswald was shot by Ruby and take the jail elevator that Oswald rode down to his death. I personally hold the firm belief that Oswald murdered the president, left the scene on a Dallas Transit System bus, just as a short time later he also murdered Officer J.D. Tippit, Badge #848 a few feet from Oswald’s rented room and minutes later attempted to shoot Officer M. N. McDonald, Badge #1178 as McDonald and other officers approached Oswald in the Texas Theater. There was no conspiracy.
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I spoke with Mitch McConnell for 20 minutes earlier today, and he let it slip that he was on the grassy knoll that day in 1963.