Citing a related-ish piece of mine last week over at Salon, Paul H. Rosenberg attempted to slay yet another Zombie Myth that just won’t die over the weekend: The myth that JFK “stole” the 1960 election from Richard Nixon, and that Nixon was just too much of a gracious statesman to challenge the results.
It is, of course, all bullshit, as Rosenberg is forced to detail once again. Nonetheless, the enduring myth remains part and parcel — and, often, False Exhibit #1 — of the very same scam that Republicans still use to this very day in attempting to deligitimize their Democratic opponents through phony claims of “voter fraud”.
My Republican parents have used the “Kennedy stole the election” myth to justify everything crooked thing the Rethuglicans have done for the last 50 years. Or, it’s “they all do it”, whenever I bring up Watergate and Nixon’s criminality. No, they don’t all do it, but the institutional Democratic Party’s hands are not completely clean either. They do their own things to suppress true democracy in this country, or else we’d have a viable multiparty system, which we desperately need.
Whenever you bring up election fraud by Republicans the first – and, usually, ONLY – response you get is that Kennedy did it too. You cannot pull the rug out from under this lie at the right speed to make it fall down.
It will always be there.