John Kenneth Galbraith: A Hero in our Time

[Phil Dagosto]

OMG. In this day and age? That is just crazy.

This is what I mean, the damage done by professional leftists like Cockburn, Chomsky and Paul Street. Who will never admit they are wrong, no matter how much evidence you produce.

Because its not about evidence. Its about status and ideology.

Reminds me of Cockburn trotting out Wesley Liebeler in order to revivify the Single Bullet Fantasy.

Counterpunch is at it again:

Some select quotes

"According to Ellsberg, the American plan for nuclear annihilation was presented to John F. Kennedy when he was President. Evidence elsewhere suggests that Mr. Kennedy came close to implementing it twice during his shortened time in office once during the Berlin crisis' of 1961 and also during the Cuban Missile Crisis. American historical accounts of the latter have until recently been near complete fantasy."

Note how he uses Ellsberg as a source in juxtaposition to "Evidence elsewhere", without citing a source. Casual readers will likely recall that Ellsberg said that Kennedy came "close to implementing" a nuclear first strike. I don't think Ellsberg said anything like that and the claim is provably untrue to begin with since Kennedy was one of the few voices of sanity in the upper levels of the power structure who found the idea total lunacy.

"Kennedy initiated the Cuban Missile Crisis when the Soviets delivered nuclear missiles to Cuba in response to the CIA's invasion of the Bay of Pigs and the U.S. deployment of nuclear missiles to Italy and Turkey. The crisis' was an American provocation followed by domestic political concerns that balanced nuclear annihilation against a politics that conflated an unwillingness to end the world with weakness."

Did his spell-correct somehow transform "Khrushchev" to "Kennedy"?

"Astonishingly, or not, Kennedy appeared to have been unaware that he had approved the deployment of first-strike nuclear weapons to Italy and Turkey when the missile crisis began. The U.S. had vastly more nuclear capacity than the Soviets. And Kennedy had already been presented with the U.S. plan to launch a nuclear first strike against Russia that included annihilating the civilian population of China to save the trouble of doing so later."

Weren't those missiles placed in Turkey and Italy as a result of decisions made in the Eisenhower administration? How many times did Kennedy try to have them removed before the Missile Crisis?