Sunday, August 18, 2013

A Reporter Dares to Challenge the Orthodoxy of Conspiracy


AS a veteran newspaper reporter, I’ve heard some things. I once sat in a Friendly’s restaurant in Connecticut with an earnest nun who, between sips of her Fribble, confided that an evil man who looked like Pope Paul VI — but who was not Pope Paul VI — had seized control of the Vatican in the 1960s. A papal double, she explained. And she had photographs to prove it.

I knocked back a double Fribble and asked for the check.

Journalists will entertain conspiracy theories because conspiracies, in fact, do take place, and at our best we seek out the stories behind the stories. But we also pay a price if we don’t buy into every one. If you write that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in the summer of 1969, some reader somewhere is guaranteed to call you a government dupe. Hey, Jimmy Olsen! Everyone knows that Armstrong took one giant leap on a secured movie lot. Sap.

Though I am not unfamiliar with being called a patsy, I still respect and admire those who challenge the conventional wisdom; this is how I was raised, as you will see. Even so, I was still cold-cocked by the response to a recent This Land column of mine that touched on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Holy Zapruder...
Read the rest here.

As a recovering JFK conspiracy theorist I feel for the guy. But at the risk of saying 60% of the American people are wrong, well... they are wrong. Oswald killed Kennedy and he did it alone. There has never been any credible evidence to the contrary. Read Bugliosi's book. He doesn't just knock down the conspiracy theories, he incinerates them in an irrefutable nuclear fireball of facts and logic. Or just watch this rare and honest examination of the case.

On the other hand, the Pope Paul VI double theory... that could explain a lot of things.

4 comments:

bob said...

Nothing about conspiracy, but did you know Archbishop Dimitri (then Fr.) got in the Warren Report? Innocently. He baptized someone's baby, and the father went and became infamous.

http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh23/pdf/WH23_CE_1957.pdf

garasanin said...

Ad Orientem previously wrote:

"Feel free to offer any evidence you think indicates a conspiracy. My mind isn't closed. But I have been researching this for decades and no one has offered any that holds water."

ok...how about this:

http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/world/australian-re-examines-jfk-killing/story-e6frfkui-1226687355847

Your biggest objection to a conspiracy seems to be around the overwhelming evidence that Oswald was the shooter. These guys agree that Oswald did shoot JFK (twice) but that that there was also an accidental third shot from a secret service agent. The subsequent cover-up wasn't there to hide a conspiracy...it was there to hide a tragic mistake. Plausible?

John (Ad Orientem) said...

plausible?

No. The ballistics don't match and the film footage from all the different angles has been computer synched in recent years so you know exactly what everyone was doing at exactly the same time. The Secret Service agent with the AR-15 did not bring the gun up until after the fatal shot.

And you are still left with all the people who would have seen it. Way too many for someone not to have talked.

Rakovsky said...

The Comedian Bill Hicks had a skit where he joked about the official story and the theories.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0bIRkv29xk

He talked about how in the Zapruder film Kennedy's head kicks back and to the left with the headshot, showing that it came from the front and the right.