26-03-2014, 10:52 PM
Greg Parker's goal may seem obvious from the name of his website, reopenkennedycase.org, but his posts here seem to do nothing but scold John Armstrong for, well, just about everything. While this obsession seems unlikely to reopen the Kennedy case, it has livened things up a bit here on ye olde JFK assassination board of DPF.
After inviting us all to play elsewhere, and being rejected, Parker soon became sure that I might be helping John Armstrong lead America to ruin because I put up the Hoover's memo suggesting an imposter might be using Oswald's birth certificate. In the sticky thread "Detailed discussion and analysis of the H&L evidence," Parker wrote:
I then quoted an excerpt from pages 294-295 of Harvey and Lee that discussed the very evidence Parker said "Armstrong is unaware of, or would rather his readers not know about." I wanted to keep the excerpted text under 500 words or so, and so I didn't even include all the background info provided about the memo in the book.
Parker does have a point, though. The background information on the Hoover imposter memo from the book is NOT on the website, and never was. Harvey and Lee the book is more than a thousand pages long, with a CD containing graphics that would fill the better part of another thousand pages. The website can't begin to cover everything in the book. Oddly enough, though, Parker seems to get all his information from the site, and will not answer the simple question, Does he own John Armstrong's book and has he read it?
Moving on....
Parker's alarm over the Scourge of H&Lism rose to DefCon 5 in his latest post so far, "The Magic Tonsillectomy or Armstrong's Voodoo Science?" Here, things start to get really strange. Quoting himself, Parker points out that Oswald's mother indicated on a 1945 life insurance form that her son had a tonsillectomy earlier that year. Since Oswald was later diagnosed with tonsilitis by Marine Corps medics, Parker's alarm becomes atomic.
Apparently believing the mother of a young child would have no clue to the difference between a real tonsillectomy and a faked procedure, Parker uses phrases like "faith healing," "the quack Philben," "Marguerite honestly believed the tonsils had been removed," and so on to claim it was all an illusion.
But we still haven't gotten to the strangest part, which requires a little background.
I began putting together the Harvey and Lee website in 1999, basing it on John's early speeches and some of his documents gathered together in printed booklets and soon CDs by an Indiana researcher named Jerry Robertson. John did help me directly fairly early with his analysis of the events of 11/22/63, but beyond that, I don't think he even read any of the other pages. He didn't ask for a single change other than his rewrite of the 11/22/63 write-up. By the time John published Harvey and Lee in 2003, the website was more or less complete, and I was soon overwhelmed by the vast amount of material in the book. Soon enough, Time Warner cable decided to dump all the "home pages" of its subscribers, many of whom, like me, were paying nearly two grand a year for its locally monopolized television and internet services.
Harvey and Lee didn't go back online until last year, when John and I were talking about the fiftieth anniversary of JFK's murder. Last year, for the first time, John took an interest in the entire site. He read most of the pages, and asked for, and got, wholesale changes, including many rewrites. Among those changes, he thought the "Magic Tonsillectomy" section was
was overstated, and so we gave it the kind of prominence it had in the book. I'd have to search for them now, but I'm pretty sure there are still references to the tonsil issue on the site. I think it is still a legitimate point, but what's weird is how Parker approached this. Rather than go to the source of all this research that upsets him so--the book--Parker even digs up old, discarded web pages so he can sound the alarm for what is no longer there.
Despite Parker's intense effort to make all this go away, the most likely reading of the surviving evidence is that the Official Oswald had a tonsillectomy as a child, and then had tonsillitis as a young soldier in the marines. If tonsils do, in fact, grow back, I'll bet its relatively rare. I certainly don't know this for sure, but my tonsils were removed before my first birthday, and to my knowledge I've never had tonsillitis. My brother has the same story.
One final note. Near the end of his initial post in the tonsillectomy thread, Parker asks, "Why did Armstrong accept an insurance form as proof of a tonsillectomy?" As if finding a nearly 70-year-old hospital record of a patient dead for half a century would be expected of any competent researcher. But this is what is demanded from a researcher who gives every indication that he has not even read the book he is trying to critique.
Parker is a hard worker, though. Wow, is he working hard here! If he worked one quarter as hard at reopening the Kennedy case as he does at scolding John Armstrong, he might actually accomplish something.
After inviting us all to play elsewhere, and being rejected, Parker soon became sure that I might be helping John Armstrong lead America to ruin because I put up the Hoover's memo suggesting an imposter might be using Oswald's birth certificate. In the sticky thread "Detailed discussion and analysis of the H&L evidence," Parker wrote:
Quote:The Hoover Memo has been taken way out of context. There is background to this which apparently Armstrong is unaware of, or would rather his readers did not know about.
I then quoted an excerpt from pages 294-295 of Harvey and Lee that discussed the very evidence Parker said "Armstrong is unaware of, or would rather his readers not know about." I wanted to keep the excerpted text under 500 words or so, and so I didn't even include all the background info provided about the memo in the book.
Parker does have a point, though. The background information on the Hoover imposter memo from the book is NOT on the website, and never was. Harvey and Lee the book is more than a thousand pages long, with a CD containing graphics that would fill the better part of another thousand pages. The website can't begin to cover everything in the book. Oddly enough, though, Parker seems to get all his information from the site, and will not answer the simple question, Does he own John Armstrong's book and has he read it?
Moving on....
Parker's alarm over the Scourge of H&Lism rose to DefCon 5 in his latest post so far, "The Magic Tonsillectomy or Armstrong's Voodoo Science?" Here, things start to get really strange. Quoting himself, Parker points out that Oswald's mother indicated on a 1945 life insurance form that her son had a tonsillectomy earlier that year. Since Oswald was later diagnosed with tonsilitis by Marine Corps medics, Parker's alarm becomes atomic.
Apparently believing the mother of a young child would have no clue to the difference between a real tonsillectomy and a faked procedure, Parker uses phrases like "faith healing," "the quack Philben," "Marguerite honestly believed the tonsils had been removed," and so on to claim it was all an illusion.
But we still haven't gotten to the strangest part, which requires a little background.
I began putting together the Harvey and Lee website in 1999, basing it on John's early speeches and some of his documents gathered together in printed booklets and soon CDs by an Indiana researcher named Jerry Robertson. John did help me directly fairly early with his analysis of the events of 11/22/63, but beyond that, I don't think he even read any of the other pages. He didn't ask for a single change other than his rewrite of the 11/22/63 write-up. By the time John published Harvey and Lee in 2003, the website was more or less complete, and I was soon overwhelmed by the vast amount of material in the book. Soon enough, Time Warner cable decided to dump all the "home pages" of its subscribers, many of whom, like me, were paying nearly two grand a year for its locally monopolized television and internet services.
Harvey and Lee didn't go back online until last year, when John and I were talking about the fiftieth anniversary of JFK's murder. Last year, for the first time, John took an interest in the entire site. He read most of the pages, and asked for, and got, wholesale changes, including many rewrites. Among those changes, he thought the "Magic Tonsillectomy" section was
was overstated, and so we gave it the kind of prominence it had in the book. I'd have to search for them now, but I'm pretty sure there are still references to the tonsil issue on the site. I think it is still a legitimate point, but what's weird is how Parker approached this. Rather than go to the source of all this research that upsets him so--the book--Parker even digs up old, discarded web pages so he can sound the alarm for what is no longer there.
Despite Parker's intense effort to make all this go away, the most likely reading of the surviving evidence is that the Official Oswald had a tonsillectomy as a child, and then had tonsillitis as a young soldier in the marines. If tonsils do, in fact, grow back, I'll bet its relatively rare. I certainly don't know this for sure, but my tonsils were removed before my first birthday, and to my knowledge I've never had tonsillitis. My brother has the same story.
One final note. Near the end of his initial post in the tonsillectomy thread, Parker asks, "Why did Armstrong accept an insurance form as proof of a tonsillectomy?" As if finding a nearly 70-year-old hospital record of a patient dead for half a century would be expected of any competent researcher. But this is what is demanded from a researcher who gives every indication that he has not even read the book he is trying to critique.
Parker is a hard worker, though. Wow, is he working hard here! If he worked one quarter as hard at reopening the Kennedy case as he does at scolding John Armstrong, he might actually accomplish something.