A former Marine sharpshooter and political malcontent shot a sitting president as he rode through a crowd in an open-topped convertible. Two days later, a local thug high on speed shot the assassin in the police office. Never attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by incompetence. -Napoleon I have come to the conclusion that whenever you see "conspiracy" you are getting a glimpse of large three-letter agencies attempting to hide the fact that they fucked up. I mean, cruising the president around in an f'n convertible seems like a great idea until someone takes a potshot and then it's inherited knowledge that it's the stupidest idea evar. How did Ruby get in? Because the Dallas PD sucked at security. How did Oswald take the shot? Really shitty site security. The Reagan mess was almost worse. The Secretary of State decided to play President because, well, nobody was sure what to do and because Al Hague was a megalomaniacal martinet. Look at the Tsarnievs: the Russian FSB literally told the FBI "this guy has been training at Chechen separatist camps, you ought to keep your eye on him" and they still blew up the Boston Marathon. Bin Laden Determined To Attack United States. Know the big hole at the middle of September 11? That thing that is the basis of Loose Change and god knows what else? The simple fact that we would have been abject dumbasses not to have had bin Laden on the payroll since '88 or so and the fact that we let someone we had on leash bite the hand that feeds. Ed Zwick made a dramatization about September 11, complete with interagency beefs, CIA bullshit, military overreach and the fundamental discovery that we grow our own terrorists. The impressive thing is he made it three years before it happened. There are vast swaths of Americans convinced a shadowy group of operatives assassinated President Kennedy because it is easier to believe that our overseers are competent and malevolent than it is to believe that they are fallible.
Absolutely chilling. Jackie is a testament to human resilience or denial or recovery or something -- whatever the difficulties of that marriage, having your husbands brains blown into your hands seems like a trauma one would never recover from. I understand her reflex to crawl over the back of the convertible - something she has no memory of doing.It's chilling to watch the exit wound of that second bullet.