Political violence and connections

By James H. Fetzer and J.R. Dunn

Just to provide some perspective on the frantic stampede to find some kind -- any kind -- of evidence that Jared Lee Loughner had even the vaguest connection with a right-of-center group (the latest claim is that he was "influenced" by some previously unknown white supremacist outfit), here's an item that not only dropped down the memory hole, but evidently never got out:

Lee Harvey Oswald was a member of the ACLU.

That's the word from Gerald Posner, author of the magisterial Case Closed. Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, perhaps the most well-researched, intelligently written, and convincing book dealing with the Kennedy assassination.

Oswald joined the ACLU only weeks before shooting JFK. He apparently believed that membership constituted a kind of get-out-jail-free card. But as our honorable media has taught us, motivation is beside the point in these cases. According to the leftist interpretation, a single glance at a KKK billboard or the Westboro Baptist Church stains you eternally, wrecks your life and, in the aftermath, deposits you in a new circle of Hell designed for you personally by Dante himself.

We need not ask how it can be that such a startling and revealing connection has gone unremarked for nearly fifty years. If Oswald had been involved with a right-of-center organization, the American left would have carved that fact into a monument readable from the moon. As it is, Oswald simply acted as prototype for such twisted left-leaning figures as Joseph Stack, Amy Bishop, James Jay Lee, and Clay Duke, who committed their outrages and effectively vanished from the record, so as to leave the left's reputation for high-minded civic engagement undamaged.

Yet more evidence that we live in Philip K. Dick universe. I wonder if Jim Jones was an ACLU member? Does anyone know where I could check?

See also: The Left, Not the Right, Owns Political Violence