November 19, 2013

NYT: Latina lesbian sheriff helps City of Hate atone for JFK assassination

Whereas the New York Times' previous hallucination about how rightwing Dallas murdered JFK was labeled "Opinion," this new one is supposed to be reporting. The main difference is that this "news story" eventually does get around to mentioning the name "Lee Harvey Oswald."
A Changed Dallas Grapples With Its Darkest Day 
By MANNY FERNANDEZ 
DALLAS — When President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade left the airport here shortly before noon on Nov. 22, 1963, the man seated in the lead car was the county sheriff, Bill Decker, 65, a storied Texas lawman who led the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde. Fifty years later, the badge belongs to Lupe Valdez, 66, the daughter of Mexican migrant farmworkers. She is the only sheriff in America who is an openly gay Hispanic woman. Voters re-elected Sheriff Valdez, a Democrat, to a third term last year. 
Dealey Plaza – where the darkest day in Dallas history unfolded 40 minutes after the motorcade began – looks eerily similar to what it was then, the sixth-floor corner window of the former Texas School Book Depository still cracked open slightly. But Dallas itself is almost as different as Bill Decker is from Lupe Valdez. 
And the tension between past and present has unleashed a wave of citywide self-reflection a half-century later in a distinctly American place that is part Dallas Cowboys, part Texas excess and part urban melting pot, where the public school students come from homes where 70 languages are spoken. Painful, embarrassing memories of the angry anti-Washington culture that flourished here 50 years ago – and now seems a permanent part of the national mood – have resurfaced, confronting Dallasites daily. 
Blocks from Dealey Plaza, the windows of restaurants and the lobbies of hotels are plastered with posters reading “Love” – a nonprofit group’s campaign, using artwork by schoolchildren and others, to counter the City of Hate label given Dallas after the assassination. As the city prepares for the biggest event it has ever held to mark the assassination on Friday – led by Mayor Michael S. Rawlings, a committee of civic leaders raised about $3 million in private donations for the ceremony – the focus has been on the city’s legacy as much as Kennedy’s. 
“I’ve learned a lot about my city through this,” Mr. Rawlings said. “The world is peering into Dallas and saying, What’s that place all about right now, 50 years later? We’ve grown a lot, and we’ve changed a lot. The main story about Dallas is it took that punch and turned that tragedy into motivation to go to the next level.” 
In the early 1960s, a small but vocal subset of the Dallas power structure turned the political climate toxic, inciting a right-wing hysteria that led to attacks on visiting public figures. In the years and months before Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson, his wife, Lady Bird, and Adlai E. Stevenson, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, were jostled and spat upon in Dallas by angry mobs. In sermons, rallies, newspapers and radio broadcasts, the city’s richest oil baron, a Republican congressman, a Baptist pastor and others, including the local John Birch Society, filled Dallas with an angry McCarthy-esque paranoia. 
The immediate reaction of many in Dallas to the news that Kennedy had been shot was not only shock but also a sickening sense of recognition. Moments after hearing about the shooting, the wife of the Methodist bishop told Tom J. Simmons, an editor at The Dallas Morning News, “You might have known it would be Dallas.” 
For months, a city that had long been proud of its image of wealth and success has been exploring this ugly past, a past it once sought to play down and even ignore. A letter co-signed by Mr. Rawlings inviting the public to a recent symposium bluntly asked, “Were we somehow to blame?” The Dallas Morning News – whose publisher in the 1960s, Ted Dealey, used to refer to the N.A.A.C.P. as the National Association for the Agitation of the Colored People – has not spared Mr. Dealey from its 50th anniversary coverage. Last month, it called Mr. Dealey’s face-to-face ridiculing of Kennedy, which came in 1961 at a White House luncheon, a “rude display.” 
Time has given Dallas enough distance – the majority of residents were either not born or were living elsewhere 50 years ago, and the white-hot figures have either died or moved away. But more important, Dallas has been comfortable publicly grappling with its past in part because what it was then is so different from what it is now. 
In 1963, Dallas was the 14th-largest city in the country, with a majority-white population of nearly 700,000, a provincial place whose mostly white, mostly male establishment set the agenda. In 2013, Dallas is the nation’s ninth-largest city, with a majority-minority population of 1.2 million. It is home to the first black district attorney in Texas and the largest urban arts district in the country. Most of the suburbs in the Dallas-Fort Worth region are solidly Republican and bastions of Tea Party conservatives, but Dallas itself leans Democratic. Though President Obama lost Texas in the 2012 election by nearly 1.3 million votes, he handily won Dallas County. 
“Dallas is like our country – we are a work in progress,” said Ron Kirk, who served as the city’s first black mayor from 1995 to 2002. “When you look back and reflect on some of the rhetoric that filled our city streets, you do realize that that can target us all, and the actions of a few have the ability to reflect back on all of us.” 
The extremism in Dallas in 1963 still thrives in Texas today, though less so in Dallas itself. Back then, commentators on the radio program sponsored by the oil baron H. L. Hunt said that under Kennedy, firearms would be outlawed so people would not “have the weapons with which to rise up against their oppressors.” 
This past February, in West Texas, the sheriff in Midland County, Gary Painter, said at a John Birch Society luncheon that he would refuse to confiscate people’s guns from their homes if ordered by the Obama administration and referred to the president’s State of the Union address as “propaganda.” 
Other Texas politicians in recent years have embraced or suggested support for increasingly radical views, including Texas secession, Mr. Obama’s impeachment and claims that the sovereignty of the United States will be handed over to the United Nations. And, of course, it is not just in Texas. 
“I recently met a retired autoworker in Detroit who told me that I could change my book title to ‘America 2013,’ and the story would be the same,” said Bill Minutaglio, a former Dallas reporter whose new book, “Dallas 1963,” written with Steven L. Davis, examines the far-right fringe in the city. He said “modern demonizing politics in America” in some ways took shape in Dallas in the 1960s. 
He added, “It is as if the lessons in Dallas have not been learned 50 years later.” 
Lee Harvey Oswald

It only took the NYT 1,119 words to get around to mentioning the guy who actually killed Kennedy.
was a Marxist and not a product of right-wing Dallas. But because the anti-Kennedy tenor came not so much from radical outcasts but from parts of mainstream Dallas, some say the anger seemed to come with the city’s informal blessing. 
“It was, I think, a city that was tolerant of hate and hate language,” said John A. Hill, 71, who in 1963 was student-body president of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “There were people who spoke out against that, but in general city leaders were indifferent to that toxic atmosphere.” 
In the 1970s, there was a strong push to tear down the shuttered Texas School Book Depository. A handful of leaders, including Wes Wise, then the mayor, succeeded in preserving the redbrick building, which the county bought in 1977. The top two floors were later turned into a museum. Now, more than 320,000 people each year stand next to Oswald’s sniper’s perch on the sixth floor and peer out the windows at Dealey Plaza below. 
“When you think about an effort to tear down the building in the ′70s, you can really get a sense of how far Dallas has come in accepting and internalizing this deep tragedy,” said Stephen Fagin, associate curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which opened in 1989. “This is the journey Dallas has taken, from assassination to commemoration, moving from memory to history.” 
Now its first five floors are occupied by county offices. One who often has county business there is Sheriff Valdez. 
After becoming sheriff in 2005, she struggled in her first three or four years to change the culture of the department, some members of which were hostile to the notion of a Latina lesbian sheriff. “It depends on who you asked,” she said, when asked of the initial reaction. “If you asked some of the good old boys, I can’t repeat the phrases that were said.” 
But the department has changed tremendously since 2005, she said. Just as Dallas has changed since 1963. “That was 50 years ago,” Sheriff Valdez said. “My goodness. I hope we’ve changed some.”

Never again can we allow a vast conspiracy of white men to assassinate a liberal President, as the White Male Power Structure of Dallas murdered JFK. The government must continue to elect a new people less dangerous to the government than the old.

50 comments:

Yikies said...

"She is the only sheriff in America who is an openly gay Hispanic woman."

Drat those heteronormative racist sexist white males! If it weren't for them every city in America would have an openly-gay Hispanic woman sheriff!

jody said...

wow. what a load of total bullshit.

also, didn't realize the sheriff was a homosexual mexican woman. but that makes sense when a city falls to the democrat machine.

recall only 2 months ago when aaron alexis killed 12 people at a naval yard, and the gaggle of 'authority' figures who stood in front of the camera in washington DC every few hours to give us updates on the situation. there was not one heterosexual european man.

Baloo said...

This is why National Lampoon wouldn't be possible today. The Lesbian Latina is just the sort of thing they made up back then, but now it's satire-proof reality. Linked and riffed on a bit here:
Hatin' on Hate

countenance said...

Inconvenient truth:

Texas voted for Kennedy in 1960.

Anonymous said...

Bush II and McCain would rather side with the Lupe Valdezes of the world than with all them white 'racists', for whom the GOP establishment is still atoning.

Shouting Thomas said...

An astonishing campaign of hatred directed against a state that is cleaning New York's clock in terms of financial competition and population growth.

Dave Pinsen said...

Inconvenient question: objectively speaking, how far apart were JFK and George W. Bush politically?

The Anti-Gnostic said...

I really did miss the memo on Kennedy being promoted into the first rank of leftist Saints. When did this happen? How? Why?

SGOTI said...

Yes, but is she a wise Latina lesbian?

Hacienda said...

New York vs. Texas

in this game the only winner can be ...Florida?


Harry Baldwin said...

Was the Climate of Hate in Memphis to blame for the assassination of Martin L. King? Was the Climate of Hate in Los Angeles to blame for the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy? Was the Climate of Hate in New York City to blame for the assassination of Malcolm X? Is the idea of a Climate of Hate reserved for Dallas alone? It reminds me of that fairy-tale-ish notion of a "Decade of Greed" applied to the 1980s. A spin the Left can put on something when it wants to.

C. Van Carter said...

Read how LBJ and the angry "mob" and Adlai Stevenson and the spitter were reported on at the time.

Shouting Thomas said...

The "gays are our saviors" bit from the American Pravda should be a warning.

When reading Pravda, it is always a good idea to turn everything on its head. You come closer to the truth.

Anonymous said...

And the tension between past and present has unleashed a wave of citywide self-reflection a half-century later in a distinctly American place that is part Dallas Cowboys, part Texas excess and part urban melting pot, where the public school students come from homes where 70 languages are spoken. Painful, embarrassing memories of the angry anti-Washington culture that flourished here 50 years ago – and now seems a permanent part of the national mood – have resurfaced, confronting Dallasites daily.


This means that not only the liberals are responsible for Texas current messed but the Republicans love those different language groups for buying consumer goods and cheap labor.

Anonymous said...

Of course, the American ruling class has no problem with other types of "hate:"

Black supremacist calling for mass murder of whites still employed by Homeland Security
http://rt.com/usa/ayo-kimathi-wald-dhs-982/

2Degrees said...

Climate of hate.

Trying moving to England and mentioning the words Mrs T to a PCer.

Bert said...

I remember Ron Kirk. He was actually leading in the 2002 Senate race until he made a rant in which he claimed the Iraq war was some kind of conspiracy to send black men off to die. Well done Ron.

Anonymous said...

An astonishing campaign of hatred directed against a state that is cleaning New York's clock in terms of financial competition and population growth.

Yeah, but read about Hilgado Texas the fastest growing in the state and its not the white suburbs like you think. New York still has lower poverty even if cost of living is included. It just the New York City area that is really high. Northern New York kicks the cloak out of Hilagdo Texas and El Paso. Texas is not kicking the cloak out of New York, right wing conservatives are being deceived, Texas its headed in the other direction a Mexican low wage place with some nice white suburbs.

Anonymous said...

Reading the "controversies" listed on le wik reads like the third world. Its already here people.

Shouting Thomas said...

@Anonymous

I don't buy that.

Northern NY is an economic wasteland and has been since GE departed. Northern NY lives off NYC and has no jobs, no industry, nothing but government and high end professional jobs. Everybody else is a low wage servant.

Friends have been departing NY/NJ in large numbers over the past 10 years and heading straight for TX. They love it. Most of them are in the medical professions. Wages are not much lower, but taxes are much much much lower.

A decent house in suburban NY/NJ on a postage stamp lot costs $500,000. Add on $12,000 in real estate taxes. A decent house in TX on a big lot costs $250,000. I'd bet real estate taxes are 1/4 of NY/NJ.

Everybody I know who has made the move to TX is very happy. Particularly with the warm weather.

carol said...

Texas voted for Kennedy in 1960.

LBJ and his ballot box-stuffing minions in south Tejas were good for something after all, eh?

Gubbler said...

Since 9/11 took place in NY, when will NYers ever face up to their responsibility for what happened?
Never mind Jihadists did it. It happened IN New York, and there were many radical NYers who had spewed hatred against America for a long time. It was, after all, the home of leftwing radical Jewish politics that had once even apologized for Stalin, Mao, and other communist movements(and their allies here such as the Black Panthers).

So, it doesn't matter than radical Muslims did it, or that the Mossad may have known what was up but didn't share the info with US intelligence.

What matters is it happened IN New York, and that means New Yorkers must face up to their responsibility for what happened. New York has long been a city of hate. Hatred toward Christianity, rural America, white conservatives, patriotism, the American South, Republicans, and etc. During the 2004 convention, 100,000s of NYers marched spewing hatred and carrying placards that called Bush II 'Bushitler'.
And of course, as the global center of Zionist finance and power, it was also the center of hatred against the Muslim/Arab world.

So, when will NYers finally wake up and face up to their responsibility for what happened on 9/11? NY must stop being the city of hate.

jody said...

new york is depopulating and there is nothing going on there at all outside of new york city. i lived in new york for 4 years. buffalo is even under threat of losing ownership of it's NFL team to canada.

between 2000 and 2010 the population of new york increased only 2%. this is from immigrants moving into new york city. the rest of the people in the state are leaving. many places in new york are slowly becoming reclaimed wilderness similar to michigan.

without immigrants moving into new york city, new york would have negative population growth. the cities and towns in the rest of the state are emptying out.

Anonymous said...

"Loving Us to Death: How America’s Embrace is Imperiling American Jewry"

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/10/25/loving-us-to-death-how-americas-embrace-is-imperiling-american-jewry/

Anonymous said...

"...county sheriff, Bill Decker, 65, a storied Texas lawman who led the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde. Fifty years later, the badge belongs to Lupe Valdez, 66,...who is an openly gay Hispanic woman."
That pretty much sums it all up. America used to be led by men who gained fame and glory through manly deeds. Now ...
This isn't the big media's only smear job against a Texas town. Remember when Jasper was called "the town that shamed Texas" because some drifters from out of state murdered Jasper resident James Byrd?

ben tillman said...

She is the only sheriff in America who is an openly gay Hispanic woman.

Liar. No one could possibly know such a thing.

Painful, embarrassing memories of the angry anti-Washington culture that flourished here 50 years ago – and now seems a permanent part of the national mood – have resurfaced, confronting Dallasites daily.

Lies. No one remembers such a culture, if it ever existed, and no one is embarrassed. Nor has this dubious culture resurfaced.

Blocks from Dealey Plaza, the windows of restaurants and the lobbies of hotels are plastered with posters reading “Love” – a nonprofit group’s campaign, using artwork by schoolchildren and others, to counter the City of Hate label given Dallas after the assassination.

Impossible. There is no such label to "counter". If such a label ever stuck to Dallas, it has long since worn off.

ben tillman said...

In sermons, rallies, newspapers and radio broadcasts, the city’s richest oil baron, a Republican congressman, a Baptist pastor and others, including the local John Birch Society, filled Dallas with an angry McCarthy-esque paranoia.

This sentence is a linguistic atrocity. Once again, we see that the NYT can no longer afford to pay editors.

ben tillman said...

Time has given Dallas enough distance – the majority of residents were either not born or were living elsewhere 50 years ago.

Wow - a grammatical nightmare. Either the first "were" needs to be placed after the "either", or the second "were" needs to be deleted. We get this from the NYT?

ben tillman said...

Never again can we allow a vast conspiracy of white men to assassinate a liberal President, as the White Male Power Structure of Dallas murdered JFK. The government must continue to elect a new people less dangerous to the government than the old.

Yes, that's a fair interpretation of the story. In fact, I think you got it exactly right.

Harry Baldwin said...

This past February, in West Texas, the sheriff in Midland County, Gary Painter, said at a John Birch Society luncheon that he would refuse to confiscate people’s guns from their homes if ordered by the Obama administration and referred to the president’s State of the Union address as “propaganda.”

Sorry NYT, I wish there were more sheriffs like Gary Painter. (I've never heard a State of the Union speech I would describe as anything other than propaganda.)

Anonymous said...

I was trying to explain to out-of-state friends, who were visiting Dallas, what the difference was between Sheriff and Constable.

My friend, the Constable, walks up and my friends quickly ditch me for the real thing.

"What's the difference between you and the Sheriff?" they asked him.

"Well, for one, the Sheriff is a bald lesbian."

And that, my friends, is how you get people to vote for you.

Mr. Anon said...

"Harry Baldwin said...

Was the Climate of Hate in Memphis to blame for the assassination of Martin L. King? Was the Climate of Hate in Los Angeles to blame for the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy? Was the Climate of Hate in New York City to blame for the assassination of Malcolm X? Is the idea of a Climate of Hate reserved for Dallas alone? It reminds me of that fairy-tale-ish notion of a "Decade of Greed" applied to the 1980s. A spin the Left can put on something when it wants to."

Very good point. I have to assume that it was the crushing climate of hate in New York that killed John Lennon. And San Franciso - that notoriously hateful and homophobic cauldron of, well, of hate - killed Harvey Milk.

Hunsdon said...

The Times gawped: Last month,(The Dallas Morning News) called Mr. Dealey’s face-to-face ridiculing of Kennedy, which came in 1961 at a White House luncheon, a “rude display.”

Hunsdon observes: In 1962, the President was still a human being and not Pharaoh.

Irv said...

There's a slave, enslaved by his own arrogance and incompetence, who wasn't emancipated by Lincoln - but he does live in a big house that Lincoln lived in !

Auntie Analogue said...


"Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist and not a product of right-wing Dallas. But...."

Why is that every time liberals attempt to make a point, they dragoon into their service the Almighty "But"? You never hear the "But" from sensible, grounded individuals; yet you hear the Almighty "But" from liberals as if it were the World's Supervening Dispensation to their historically discredited notions and costly, abysmally ineffectual, poisonous, destructive programs.

The editorial continues, "[B]ecause the anti-Kennedy tenor came not so much from radical outcasts but from parts of mainstream Dallas, some say the anger seemed to come with the city’s informal blessing."

So it was "anger" that murdered John F. Kennedy! Anger! Not the Communist Oswald - no! - it was "anger"! Just as "terrorism" murders all the victims of Islam's jihadists! Just as "workplace violence" murdered fourteen souls at Fort Hood! Just as "alienation" murdered & maimed Americans at the Boston Marathon! All of this bullsh_t is, of course, why the Left is hell-bent on outlawing "hate" and "offense," and "racism" and "extremism" - except, of course for the hate and offense, racism and extremism the Left itself cherishes and uses to flay those whom its groupthink stooges finger as their enemies.

When you stop and think, you realize that Oswald won: today's Left is nothing like its putative hero JFK and is very much like Lee Harvey Oswald, fluent in Oswald's brand of evasion & well-rehearsed doubletalk.



ysv_rao said...

Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist and not a product of right-wing Dallas. But because the anti-Kennedy tenor came not so much from radical outcasts but from parts of mainstream Dallas, some say the anger seemed to come with the city’s informal blessing. "

After addressing the uncomfortable fact of LHOs affiliation as Steve rightly pointed out hidden somewhere in the middle of the column(the equivalent on burying an important story on page 12), we immediately get a lame caveat "some say" talking very vague "parts" of mainstream Dallas

Note the entire argument of the column hinges on this "some say" qualifier.
Utterly sloppy thinking and as another commenter noted sloppy writing/copy editing

Easy to see how one can lead to another

eah said...

And a small price to pay it is too. As a bonus, maybe Dallas will soon host the annual get-together of the National Alliance of Latina Lesbian Sheriffs. (If said organization does not yet exist, no doubt it soon will.)

Anonymous said...

Manny must have worked with the SPLC previously.

Anonymous said...

A closer look at who were the power brokers in 1963 Dallas is called for.

Pat Boyle said...

I was working in downtown San Francisco on the day that a woman tried to shoot President Ford. I was literally a block away. When I went out to get lunch there were all these police around.

Another woman tried to shoot him in Sacramento shortly thereafter (or was it shortly before?).

Yet there don't seem to have been any articles or editorials about California 'The State of Hate'.

Reagan was shot about a block from my apartment in Washington DC. Again there was no geographical condemnation of the city.

The Dallas meme somehow got started and now weak minded media people can't resist trotting it out again every couple years.

Albertosaurus

countenance said...

Kennedy beat Nixon in Texas by a 2% margin or 46k votes. Too wide of a margin for fraud really to be an issue. Texas voting Kennedy in '60 was a function of the South being solid Democrat, or at least the tail end of that era.

Dallas County did vote Nixon very heavily, though.

Anonymous said...

The 50th anniversary of JFK assasination has brought out the bile of Kennedy worshipping liberals. The liberal media's morbid worship of JFK at this time of year is disgusting.

Marc B said...

"Was the Climate of Hate in Memphis to blame for the assassination of Martin L. King?"

According to nearly all of the national political commentators waxing poetic every 1/15 and 4/4, it was. They also mention the sense of dread hanging over the city that locals seem unaware of as they go about their daily lives. They project their own feelings onto a city whose people never really think about the event or feel any shame over it.

Anonymous said...

http://gothamist.com/2013/11/20/blacks_are_25_times_more_likely_to.php

Unlike bad ole Dallas, New York is a wonderful city of progress where everyone is equal.

It's love all around.

Anonymous said...

Jewish record execs raked in billions of dollars by peddling violent rap music.

Will they take responsibility for something like this?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/364322/very-dangerous-game-thomas-sowell

Anonymous said...

Yes, but is she a wise Latina lesbian?

Is there any other kind?

Anonymous said...

This is absolutely appalling.

I am confused about one thing, though. When the liberals have such undisguised contempt for a people and their culture, and when the left applauds the displacement of those people as a desirable and fitting outcome, why don't more people get mad.

The NYT is absurdly using the deed of a communist assassin to denigrate Texans and their heritage. So why aren't there more Gary Painters down there pushing back against the left? There ought to be.

P.S. Is it just me, or is there an echo of Reconstruction here? I.e., the alliance of the (northern) national power centers with empowered local minorities (such as the sheriff) against the old order. One could throw in the willingness of some business types to go along for the sake of making a buck, too.

Anonymous said...

Other Texas politicians in recent years have embraced or suggested support for increasingly radical views, including Texas secession

This guy just got done crowing about the ethnic cleansing of Dallas, and he's wondering why the cleansees might resent their DC-NY overlords?

Anonymous said...

In the 1970s, there was a strong push to tear down the shuttered Texas School Book Depository. A handful of leaders, including Wes Wise, then the mayor, succeeded in preserving the redbrick building, which the county bought in 1977. The top two floors were later turned into a museum. Now, more than 320,000 people each year stand next to Oswald’s sniper’s perch on the sixth floor and peer out the windows at Dealey Plaza below.

Because turning the place into a tourist attraction where people can recreate the morbid frisson of a notorious murder is the highest form of solemn commemoration.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

P.S. Is it just me, or is there an echo of Reconstruction here? I.e., the alliance of the (northern) national power centers with empowered local minorities (such as the sheriff) against the old order."

There is an element of that. In the sherriff's case, it brings a whole new meaning to the term "carpet bagger".