Here we go again.

In the wake of the shooting at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado Springs, liberals jumped to blame conservatives and pro-lifers. Here’s PP’s president Cecile Richards, as reported by Politico: 

Following last Friday’s shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, the organization’s president on Monday denounced those who put heated political rhetoric ahead of women’s health care.

“This kind of violence just can’t keep happening,” Cecile Richards said in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep that aired on “Morning Edition,” adding that the group and many Americans are concerned about the “increased sort of hateful rhetoric and intimidation of both doctors and women who are both providing health care and getting health care in America. It’s really un-American. It’s been hard to see the kind of dehumanization of both health-care providers and of course, women who are simply looking for health care.” 

Let’s put aside the belief of millions of Americans that Planned Parenthood itself has been engaged in the most horrific acts of “dehumanization” as documented by those famous video tapes. Let’s focus on a liberal reflex that hasn’t changed a whit in 52 years.

It was 52 years ago this past November 22nd that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through downtown Dallas, Texas. In a blink the charge was out there that his murder was the result of the 1963 equivalent of “hateful rhetoric” directed towards JFK. 

Two years ago, in a fifty-year retrospective on the Kennedy assassination, the Dallas Morning News ran a long piece about the political atmosphere leading up to the assassination. The Morning News itself was at the center of the 1963 controversy thanks to the conservative views of its publisher, E.M. “Ted” Dealey. Dealey had been at the White House two years earlier for a lunch with Texas publishers and had stood up in the question period to address JFK directly with a statement that said in part:

“The general opinion of the grassroots thinking in this country is that you and your administration are weak sisters.[…]

“We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”

Ouch. 

But there was more. Dallas had elected a conservative — read “right-wing” to the liberal media of the day — congressman named Bruce Alger. In 1960, Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson — JFK’s running mate — had visited Dallas during the fall campaign. A group of Nixon supporters gathered by Congressman Alger surrounded LBJ and wife Lady Bird and yelled and spat at them. 

As it happened, retired Army General Edwin Walker, a decided right-winger and anti-Kennedy activist had moved to Dallas, where he was celebrated as a hero of sorts. When it became known that UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, a liberal icon of the day, would visit Dallas in October of 1963, Walker organized a counter speech. After Stevenson delivered his speech and left the meeting where he had been speaking, a group surrounded him waving anti-Adlai signs, one of which smacked him on the head. There was outrage in editorial circles, and the Morning News saw fit to apologize. Among other things, Ted Dealey’s paper said:

The President of the United States will be here in November. We trust he will be welcomed and accorded the respect and dignity that go with the office he represents.

In fact, although there was a flyer distributed in the style of a “Wanted” poster with JFK’s full front and profile over the words “Wanted for Treason” — the people of Dallas did turn out in force to applaud and cheer their president.

Sadly, there was the business of murder. And so the cry went up. It was all those hateful conservatives who killed the President. They said all those mean things, banged Adlai over the head with a sign, jostled Lyndon and Lady Bird and now JFK was dead. Oh, and don’t forget those shadowy Texas oil men either.

But there was just the tiniest problem with this.

The assassin (sorry conspirators) turned out to be the pro-Communist Lee Harvey Oswald. And interestingly, it turned out that JFK wasn’t Oswald’s first target. Months earlier, General Walker had been relaxing in his Dallas home when a bullet shattered a window and narrowly missed killing him. After the Kennedy assassination, it turned out that the evidence showed that the bullet had come from Oswald’s gun. In other words?

In other words, it was a man of the Left who was loose with the gun. It was a man of the Left who killed the liberal president of the United States. It was a man of the Left who almost killed General Walker. All of what liberals would now call “hateful rhetoric” from conservatives had nothing — zero — to do with JFK’s murder.

Did the facts matter? Of course not. Then as now the move was on to blame conservatives for the president’s murder. Only three years ago, as seen here at the far left Daily Kos, conservatives are still being targeted as somehow being responsible for “extreme language” like that which supposedly killed JFK. The Daily Kos, but of course, tries to transpose all of that 1960s paranoia about conservative speech to today’s world, writing:

Today, the tea-partying political descendants of early-’60s Birchers are spinning similar conspiracy theories and using practically the same extreme language about a young, non-WASP Democratic President, and played an important role in electing scores of like-minded neo-Birchers to office earlier this month.

Got that? Not only did that “extreme language” from the Right back in the ’60s inspire leftist Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK, the political descendants of those Dallas haters are today’s tea partiers. And this time the “extreme language” is all about Obama.

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this kind of paranoia. But laugh or cry, this is still the Left’s MO, as is seen again in the case of the shooting in Colorado. Here we have a man who is repeatedly described as having mental illness problems and before our eyes he’s being re-made into some sort of pro-life activist. This defies the obvious — that pro-lifers are, well, pro-life and hardly in to murdering anybody. But hey, pay no attention to the obvious.

We believe in the First Amendment here. The Planned Parenthood apparatchiks have the constitutional right to say anything they want. Just like all those long ago liberals who, defying the fact of Lee Harvey Oswald’s pro-Communist beliefs, sought to blame the Right for the death of a president.

But the rest of us have the right to realize just how ridiculous what they are saying really is. And dangerous, too.