Now that spring break is over, I’ve got some time to get caught up with the [checks feedback tab] two pieces of non-spam letters that are in the mailbag. Tonight I’ll tackle the lighter of the two.

“Paranoid Lunatic” (name changed to protect identity) asks, “What do you think about the JFK assassination files?”

A long time ago I had a coworker who was a little too interested in the JFK assassination. Not “too interested” as in “I reported him to the feds and got his house bugged because he was too close to the truth,” but rather in the sense that his interest seemed to make him unnecessarily frustrated with the world. Like Jim Garrison if he’d never managed to sell his story and show up in a blockbuster hagiography about himself.

One day I asked him, and I hope he took it to heart, if George W. Bush [President at the time and son of one of the hundreds of alleged conspirators] gave you all the info the government had on the JFK assassination, right now, would you trust that he told you everything and that it was true?

He said he wouldn’t.

I asked if there was anything our government could do at this point, 40-some years after the assassination, to make him believe that they were telling him everything?

He said probably not.

And then I said, “You’ve basically acknowledged that you’ll never be content with any files the government gives you, because they’ve had so long to destroy and redact and tamper with them. And they’ve been so untrustworthy over so many things for so long, before and after JFK died, that even if they told the truth, you’d think they were crying wolf. So why worry so much about it, except to drive yourself nuts?”

All of that is to say, “I don’t care about the JFK files because they’ve had so long to destroy and redact and tamper with them. I’ll drive myself nuts over other stuff.”

With that out of the way, here are my two JFK conspiracy theories.

1. Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone. This made many people in our government look incompetent and stupid. The people who should have been following more leads on Oswald, or scouting the parade route a lot better, or overriding Kennedy’s decision to leave the top down were actually doing other stuff and wanted to cover that up. The “other stuff” may have been legitimate or not. It could have been getting info on Castro or Vietnam, or it could have been getting liquored up and gambling away expense accounts during “investigations” into family-owned casinos. Whatever it was, it wasn’t “keeping some communist loser from blowing JFK’s brains out.” People want to keep their jobs, thus the coverups and the appearance of conspiracy.
2. Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone. He did it because he was a communist and JFK was an anticommunist. But our government realized very early on that if they put too much emphasis on the actual reason Oswald did it, then the American people would start blaming Khrushchev or Castro, and the war drums soon would sound. Everybody remembered the Cuban Missile Crisis, nobody was in the mood for another run at nuclear Armageddon, so there was a semi-concerted effort to downplay the communist angle and allow people to let their imaginations run wild. Could the Cubans or Soviets have done it? Sure. But so could the mob. Or the Freemasons. Or the Klan. Or the Cigarette-Smoking Man. Or the limo driver. Or the aliens. Or Mysterious Organization X. Or just the city of Dallas in general, given its reputation as a “city of hate.” Or some bizarre alliance between LBJ, Nixon, and Bush 41 (Yale grad), who were all in Dallas that day. Does it matter that none of these angles pan out? No. It matters that nobody’s calling for a retaliatory nuclear war against the Soviets.

TL/DR: it looks like there was a conspiracy because everyone went into CYA mode and because the government didn’t want a nuclear war.

…

Very tired. Will edit later and address the rest of the mailbag.

Today was a great and glorious day, capping the most successful season da Bears have had in 6 years. Despite the excessive reversing, the near kneel-down on their own one-yard line, the kicking an extra point after a half-the-distance penalty, the stupidly calling sideline plays when they needed the clock to keep running, and the fumbling on one of those sidelines plays, the Bears won.

True, they lost 10 in a row, and suffered through heartbreaks and meltdowns, and gave up a record-breaking number of sacks, and found no answers on the offensive line, and so on, but… Chicago beat Green Bay for the first time since 2018.

It is axiomatic that a two-win season is a success if both wins are against the Packers. At 5-12, the Bears had half a successful season.

And it happened in no small part because I gave up on the C-shirt and instead wore my Bears hoodie on gameday for the first time in ages. My Bears hoodie. Mine. The season ends on a winning streak, which I’ll attempt to keep going this fall.

…

Caleb Williams is already Chicago’s best passer since Cutler, and I’m hoping he’ll be Chicago’s first winner at QB since McMahon, but whoever the new coach is needs to figure out how to keep him alive first. Those sacks need to be cut at least in half. I wish Coach Johnson or Vrabel or Carroll or Whoever-It’s-Going-To-Be good luck.

If Chicago played better, I could change the card more substantially. In the meantime:

Merry Christmas and Happy First Night of Hanukkah! Here’s to peace on Earth, and good will toward men!

So the experiment I mused on here did not quite go as some folks might’ve hoped. “They” decided that Vice President Harris should inherit the nomination instead of having a contested convention. Since defeat is an orphan, we may never know if “They” were Democratic Party leaders and donors writ large or if “They” were Kamala and her team, maneuvering as quickly as possible to get Biden’s support and be handed the nomination. If I had to bet, I’d bet that it was both in real life, but we’ll all pretend it was the latter so that any machine bigwigs not named “Kamala” can save face.

Right now I think the best explanation for Trump’s victory is that over 60% of voters think we’re on the wrong track. When you’re on the wrong track, you change things up. Maybe further analysis, after more data’s been processed and the passions have cooled, will reveal otherwise.

The Democrats’ biggest mistake, both politically and in terms of governing the country (which is sort of the point of presidential elections), was not invoking the 25th Amendment ages ago. I’m not sure what their war-gaming said about leaving Biden in the White House while having Harris run. But absurdly pretending that the guy who obviously couldn’t handle a campaign was somehow still capable of running the federal government didn’t help. It made them look [Note: The editors and sponsors intervened and forced me to replace my original litany of invective with the following] bad. We’ll never know whether it was the least bad plan, but it just plain didn’t work.

Now, if they had 25th-Amendment-ed him, we would have been spared that particular absurdity. By the way, I’m still on board, like I was back in June, with Kamala replacing Joe right now. It might look gimmicky at this point, it might look like they’re doing it for the novelty, but I don’t care– it has the virtue of being the responsible and sane thing to do.

I am now done ranting about that, and I’ve run out of italics anyways. Back to the experiment part.

I still think taking longer to decide your nominee might work. Having later campaigns and caucuses and primaries might pay off. The relative lateness of Harris becoming the nominee was not the problem (but a lot more people should be a lot angrier about not yanking Joe a lot sooner). I don’t think the Harris campaign suffered from “not having enough time to introduce her to the voting public.” Money certainly wasn’t the problem, even if the campaign ended up in a little bit of debt.

Nothing in this election cycle convinced me that pushing campaigns, primaries, conventions, etc. closer to Election Day would hurt either side. So I dare the Ds and Rs to do so. No primaries until, say, May of 2028. Have the conventions back-to-back in the two weeks leading up to Labor Day. Two-month sprint, then election, then done.

Very tired. More later.